Porcelain, Melancholy, and Women in Eighteenth-Century England

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25370309
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Literature in English
• Research Institution: Teikyo University
• Principal Investigator: ONO MASAKO 帝京大学, 外国語学部, 教授 (80233229)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 18世紀 / 陶磁器 / 女性 / 女性蔑視 / 消費文化

Outline of Final Research Achievements

As the eighteenth-century English infatuation with porcelain comes to be translated as that of English women, the Biblical metaphor of “weaker vessel,” which served to objectify women as the frail sex is attuned to define women as the seeker of the vessel. As a result, the fragile china which is endeared by women comes to be identified as the women who endears it. The feminization of porcelain is what occurs when sexuality and commodification are conjoined in constructing the self-reflexive relationship between the desiring subject and the desired object in the male imagination of eighteenth-century England. Although women as the desiring subject might be figured as a statement of the increasing autonomy and independence in the consumer society, I argue that the agency of the gaze which brings the female subjectivity into being is male. Women as the desiring subject, as well as women as the desired object, is a construct created by the patriarchal fantasy of the age.

Free Research Field

英文学