Women and Skin: The Connotations of Porcelain in the Conception of Eighteenth Century West
Abstract
Porcelain is the best type of ceramic because it is hard, non-porous and semi-transparent. Since the time Europe first imported Chinese porcelain in the thirteenth century, it has been regarded as an outstanding object. Europeans admired it and wanted to solve its mystery. While more and more porcelain came to the continent through the sea trade with the Far East that began in the sixteenth century, with its growing exotic-mystery and increasing admiration, porcelain was ascribed several meanings and connotations. These meanings clustered around ideas of the feminine in the beginning of the eighteenth century. Especially in Britain, this took place in a busy context that included the Enlightenment’s efforts to define womanhood, the consumer revolu-tion, the chinoiserie movement and tea drinking rituals. By the middle of the century, porcelain became a metaphor for women due to its elegance, transparency and especially its fragility. This feminine voice of porcelain, although it had been fairly turned down inside the global economy’s world of generic and genderless commodities, can still be heard in today’s art and literature.
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Kaynakça
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