I confess I have not read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, only excerpts and several astute reviews. Those reviews (Annie Murphy Paul in Time, Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker) suggested that American readers' heated responses to Amy Chua's parenting polemics are not merely another volley in the mommy wars. They are also emblematic of increasing fears about China, about the threats to U.S. power that Chinese economic and military strength may presage. Intertwined in Americans' intense reactions to Chua are our feelings about American political might, about mothering, and about the Middle Kingdom. If, say, a Scandinavian American had written the same book she might not have received death threats.

This is not the first time that Westerners have conflated arguments about gender, anxiety about international trade, and fantasies about Chinese culture. An ingenious new monograph by David Porter, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Michigan, explores the significance of Chinese decorative arts in 18th-century England. It turns out that the English conducted many serious social and political debates in the idiom of Chinese porcelain.

Ming and early Qing porcelain (and, eventually, English knockoffs thereof) was wildly popular in 18th-century England. Queen Mary had inaugurated the craze in the 1690s, filling her rooms at Hampton Court with blue and white vases and plates. Élite and middling Englishwomen followed her lead. By the mid-1700s, no mantle was complete without a Chinese jar, a laughing Buddha.

As these Englishwomen (and, crucially for Porter, it was largely women) snapped up Ming pots, critics picked up the pen to denounce the chinaware. One mid-century commentator derided Chinese porcelain as "monstrous offspring of wild imagination, undirected by nature and truth." A "mean taste runs through" Chinese art, wrote Hogarth. It was garish; too colorful; not truly beautiful, but merely sensuous.

Part of porcelain's appeal, Porter argues, was tactile and sensory. Compared to the somber wooden and pewter vessels English men and women were accustomed to using, porcelain was "astonishingly smooth, bright, colorful, and translucent." Porcelain vessels were also resistant to heat, and relatively easy to clean.

But the lure of Ming and Qing porcelain went beyond those formal properties. Uncovering teaware's cultural significance requires consideration of the trade practices that brought Chinese goods to English shops. Porter reminds us that "China in the early eighteenth century was no British colony, nor was it in any plausible sense in the process of becoming one. The foreign trade in Canton was conducted entirely on Chinese terms, under conditions that the British found deeply humiliating but were in no position to change." Because the Chinese weren't interested in English goods, the East India Company financed its purchase of tea and porcelain not with crates of woolens, but with silver bullion; many contemporaries thought this was advantageous to the Chinese. (Sound familiar?) So when an English tea-drinker picked up a porcelain cup, he didn't feel the satisfactions of empire. If anything, he might have felt ill-at-ease, since the cup from which he sipped was a synecdoche of a worrying economic arrangement.

Porter finds the meaning of Chinese porcelain not only in the context of international trade patterns but also in relation to changing social mores in 18th-century England, a period during which ancestry, which had long dictated English social arrangements, was being eclipsed by new money. In the Elizabethan era, when an upwardly mobile family had to wait five generations before gaining admission into the ranks of the nobility, English men and women prized old goods—they wanted silver with patina, portraits that announced pedigree. But in the 1700s, men and women increasingly valued "luxurious novelty." Chinese goods became popular just at the moment when a modish French bibelot might—or might not—have more cultural prestige than an heirloom. A piece of Ming porcelain, Porter suggests, was able to satisfy both the longing for antiquity and the cravings for newness: certainly, to the English eye, blue and white porcelain was novel, but it was "novelty with a four-thousand-year-old lineage." Thus a "sinophilic antiquarianism" began to shape English taste and English domestic space. That Ming vase seemed at once reassuringly establishment, and cunningly recherché.

For want of sources, many scholars would have abandoned the inquiry into the cultural meanings of the China craze mid-course—as Porter notes, the British Library doesn't own a cache of diaries in which 18th-century English consumers ruminate at length about just why they love porcelain cups. But Porter is stubborn, and imaginative, and does not let the dearth of chatty diaries deter him. Instead, he juxtaposes written texts and material artifacts, and he inventively reads anti-porcelain diatribes for the clues they might contain about what drew purchasers to porcelain. For example, he notes that in a satirical newspaper article, Joseph Addison takes aim at the "great Jars of China," "Tea Dishes of all Shapes Colours and Sizes," and "thousand … odd Figures in China Ware" that he ostensibly encountered in a rich widow's library. While sneering about the porcelain, Addison also dismisses the French romances that lined the widow's library shelves.

Porter proposes that the connection that Addison drew between the French romances and the porcelain is worth paying attention to—perhaps the novels that porcelain-buying women read might illumine those women's love of porcelain.

In the 18th century, Porter reminds us, norms of appropriate behavior for women became increasingly conservative. Women's access to commerce and politics was declining. Publishers churned out courtesy manuals that taught women how to live submissively in the private preserve. In this context, the "feminine" and the "Chinese" mutually constructed each other.

Porter investigates the relationship of femininity and Chinese decorative arts from many angles: literary narratives variously depicting women as porcelain-shoppers in the public square and tea-pourers at the hearth; the visual links English engravers created between teapots and breasts; the resonance between Chinese garden rocks and the practice of gossip. Underpinning all of these inquiries is his reading of a central figurative trope in Ming porcelain.

He begins, again, with the objects themselves, noting one of the crucial differences between Ming porcelain and contemporaneous European art. In European art, "the roles accorded to women … are generally rather limited." Women are absent or objectified, seduced or disheveled, pierced, as it were, by the male gaze. So far, feminist art history 101. Then Porter makes a strikingly simple observation: women figure quite differently in 18th-century Chinese art. They are ubiquitous; they are not nude; and they are not in the middle of being ravished or raped. Chinese women wander serenely through porcelain, fully clad, in the company of other women, in restful, pastoral settings. The only males who appear are the occasional little boy or sage old man. What these vases offer is a picture of female friendship, female space, and to some extent female autonomy—a picture, Porter supposes, that might have appealed to English women, who were reading, and writing, fiction and poetry that offered similar depictions of "utopian space[s] of female dignity." (As Porter notes, the actual status of women in China, as opposed to their depiction on these vases, is another subject entirely.)

Some of his readings, Porter concedes, are speculative. There were moments when, encountering a provocative claim at the beginning of a chapter, I raised an eyebrow, cleared my throat, and prepared to doubt. Yet every one of his arguments is compelling—and it is a testimony to his patience, carefulness, and creativity that most are persuasive.

I am at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I am looking at a porcelain dish, white, painted with peonies. It seems like so much ephemera: a teacup, a plate. This very ephemerality was part of what 18th-century critics derided. And this ephemerality is part of what has kept scholars' attention, by and large, turned from porcelain to matters of more obvious importance. But Porter suggests that porcelain had cultural power not despite but through its ephemerality: women could purchase a vase depicting a scene of female friendship and dignity, and no one really noticed. It was, after all, just a vase.

Of course, there is no "just a vase." As Porter concludes, "certain kinds of objects can … play an unexpectedly significant role in the evolution of sensibilities." And in the working out of politics, international and domestic, too.

Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School. For the academic year 2010-11, she is a visiting fellow at Yale's Institute for Sacred Music. She is the author most recently of A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Yale Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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