“Fashioning Bluestocking Conversation: Elizabeth Montagu’s Chinese Room”

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Fashioning Bluestocking Conversation: Elizabeth Montagu’s Chinese Room

Stacey Sloboda

In 1749, Elizabeth Robinson Montagu wrote to her sister, Sarah Scott, of the new fashions among the bon ton at the popular spa town of Tunbridge Wells, where she spent her summers.

Thus has it happened in furniture: sick of the Grecian elegance and symmetry, or Gothic grandeur and magnificence, we must all seek the barbarous gaudy goût of the Chinese. … You will wonder I should condemn the taste I have complied with, but in trifles I shall always conform to the fashion.1

Though the rage for chinoiserie, or fantastic European parodies of Chinese art and design, would not peak for another decade, by the late 1740s the style was already as reviled as it was revered. English chinoiserie interiors, like their Continental counterparts, were characterized by riotous color and exuberant forms that raised both spirits and eyebrows in equal measure. Objects made of exotic and luxurious materials such as porcelain, lacquer, and chintz, and European imitations of the same, vied with one another for attention in rooms that were largely associated with feminine activities. Imitation, artifice, and ostentation were the overriding aesthetic principles of the chinoiserie interior, principles that drew the style into fierce debates on the nature of taste, commerce, and gender in eighteenth-century England. Montagu’s comment reveals the split opinion of chinoiserie: popular and fashionable, yet at the same time barbarous and trifling. While self-consciously aware of the feminized and derogatory implications of patronizing chinoiserie, Montagu nevertheless undertook a major decorative scheme to transform the dressing room of her London house into what she called a ‘Chinese room.’ The project was begun in 1748 and completed in 1752.

Montagu’s brother William Robinson, a captain in the East India Company, provided the initial means for the decoration. Robinson made trips to China

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in 1748 and 1752 and supplied Montagu with various pieces of Chinese furniture, lanterns, porcelain, and perhaps the hand-painted wallpaper that adorned the room. Montagu’s sister, the novelist Sarah Scott, likewise contributed to the room with a painted toilette and what she called ‘Chinese baskets’ that she made with Montagu. Chinoiserie was a style well suited to amateur artistic efforts throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, and female friends and acquaintances supplied further japanned (or imitation lacquer) furniture and decorative objects. These objects, initially brought together in a piecemeal fashion, were integrated into a coherent decorative scheme by the London cabinetmakers William and John Linnell, whom Montagu hired in 1752. While virtually nothing of the room survives today, it was one of the earliest fully articulated chinoiserie interiors in England, and it inaugurated the Linnells’ notoriety for the style, firmly associating chinoiserie with fashion and femininity.

Despite Montagu’s rather disingenuous statement to the contrary, the decoration of the Chinese room in which many of her famous bluestocking assemblies took place was not incidental, nor does it indicate that she was simply a follower of fashion. Rather, her self-effacing use of chinoiserie was a visual testimony of a conventional feminine identity that served to mask her radical intellectual and social ambitions. Montagu played upon chinoiserie’s associations as a trifling and feminized style in order to make an intervention within the primarily masculine sphere of intellectual conversation. As such, chinoiserie was a masquerade through which Montagu was able to displace conventional English social norms and to perform female authority within a new type of conversational sphere.

Theories of the masquerade provide a useful framework for understanding Montagu’s project. The early twentieth-century psychoanalyst Joan Rivière famously theorized the psychological condition of some intellectual women as a masquerade. Femininity, for Rivière, is always a performance, which masks the potentially de-sexing effects of intellectual practice.2 By drawing on behavioral, sartorial, and, I would add, decorative signs that reinforce conventional femininity, Rivère observed that the scholarly woman creates a ‘mask’ that is able to deflect intellectual or social reprisal. More recently, gender theorists have built upon Rivière’s thesis in order to demonstrate the performative nature of all gender identity.3 However, masquerade was also an eighteenth-century phenomenon intimately linked to the cultural, sexual, and psychological formation of individual identity during the period.4 Dror Wahrman has argued that the mid-eighteenth century notion of ‘identity’ was a fluid and malleable concept, achieved more through costume and performance than the modern notion of a fixed or essential ‘self.’ Wearing a mask (either literally or figuratively) and playing a role were crucial to the creation of one’s identity as a sociable being.5 While the liberating effects of this attitude can be easily overstated, masquerade was one way in which both men


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and women were able to assume various and unconventional roles, without penalty to their primary gender, racial, or class identification. Montagu seems to have been keenly aware of this fact and used it to great effect in her early intellectual performances.

In the eighteenth century, the social event of the masquerade held at amusement sites such as Vauxhall and Ranelagh was one venue for identity play, while interior decoration in the home was another. In particularly, the chinoiserie interior of the mid-eighteenth century provided a stage for occupants and visitors to perform various sociable identities. Likewise, the decoration of a room could provide visual testimony of its owner’s qualities and characteristics, freeing him or her to behave in contradictory ways. While there has a great deal of recent scholarly attention to the conceptual formation of interiors and interiority in the eighteenth century, the relationship of these concepts to actual decorative and architectural spaces has been less fully explored. This chapter will investigate the theory of masquerade and the practice of decorating in Mrs. Montagu’s Chinese room to suggest a close relationship between the two.

Fashioning Bluestocking Conversation

Montagu clearly embraced a fluid set of identities, once describing herself as ‘a Critick, a Coal Owner, a Land Steward, a sociable creature.’6 Her husband, Edward Montagu, owned coalmines in Northumberland, which Elizabeth managed to great financial success beginning in 1766. She inherited the mines outright on his death in 1775, making her one of the wealthiest women in England. Apart from her business responsibilities, she is best known as a celebrated eighteenth-century wit and critic, and the leader of a loosely woven group of learned men and women from various respectable social classes, who were bound together by common intellectual interests and conversation. Beginning in the 1750s and codified by the 1770s, this group became known as the Bluestockings.7 Montagu, called the ‘female Maecenas of Hill Street,’ was the early leader of the group, a patron of some of the female authors associated with it, and herself later the author of a widely read and respected critical essay on Shakespeare’s dramatic works, as well as other essays on classical subjects.8 Though attended enthusiastically by both sexes, bluestocking assemblies were hosted by women, and their character was distinctly female-centric. These events had much in common with contemporary French salon culture’s feminine, intellectual and sociable nature, though they were generally less partisan and more concerned with the display of moral virtue.9

The name ‘bluestocking’ was inspired by the unfashionable, blue worsted stockings worn by the botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet, an early member of the group, to one of Montagu’s evening gatherings. Where white silk



stockings would have been more appropriate, Stillingfleet’s rejection of sartorial convention signified the intellectual tenor of the group. Apparently unconcerned with fashion, bluestocking assemblies likewise rejected the popular pastimes of drinking alcohol and gambling in favor of tea drinking and literary conversation. At these assemblies, the bluestockings developed a type of conversation, characterized by a move away from the rigid courtly separation of the sexes, and predicated on rational intellectual pursuits that seemingly stood in opposition to an increasingly commodified cultural sphere. Nevertheless, a study of contemporary descriptions of Montagu’s Chinese room suggests that the embrace of commercial culture through contemporary fashion and the material articulation of gender identity were central to the group’s activities and character.

Well before she published her first literary criticism in 1760, Montagu cultivated her identity as a sociable intellectual through copious and performative letter writing, and through her assemblies. Until she moved to her lavish house at Portman Square in 1781, Montagu held these gatherings in her Hill Street home.10 That Montagu held some of these events in her dressing room was consistent with the eighteenth-century practice of using that semi-private space – physically associated with the female body – for informal entertainment and conversation.11 The room was located on the first floor of the house, adjacent to both a Great Room, used for larger, formal entertainments, and Montagu’s bedroom.12 Until altered by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart around 1767, the Great Room was likely furnished in relatively conventional English rococo style, the ceiling of which survives today. For small gatherings, the dressing room was used independently of the Great Room, and in conjunction with it when larger assemblies were planned.

The activities that took place in the dressing room are known primarily through epistolary accounts. In 1752 Montagu apologized to Frances Boscawen for a late reply to her letter, stating, ‘I proposed answering my dear Mrs. Boscawen’s letter yesterday, but the Chinese room was filled by a succession of people from eleven in the morning till eleven at night.’13 The French poet and playwright, Marie Anne Fiquet du Bocage, later described a bluestocking assembly she attended at Montagu’s house as a cosmopolitan event bringing together ‘both the people of the country and strangers … in a closet lined with painted paper of Pekin, and furnished with the choicest moveables of China.’14 Montagu’s close friend and collaborator, Gilbert West, and Edward Montagu frequently referred to the Chinese room in letters to Elizabeth simply by the phrase ‘your room.’15

Bluestocking assemblies cannot be described by the modern term of domesticity, though neither were they wholly public, at least in the Habermasian sense. In the 1750s, the concept and practice of mixed-gender conversation as a mode of social politeness was still being formulated. The bluestocking social space was part of what Lawrence Klein has termed the


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‘associative public sphere,’ a space in which a range of social, discursive, and cultural activities took place. Klein points out that the most common eighteenth-century understanding of the word ‘public’ was sociable, in opposition to solitude, which was ‘private.’16 Thus, the associative public sphere referred less to particular spaces than to the practices that took place within them. For Montagu and her peers, the home was an eminently sociable realm. Understanding the home as a sociable space was in keeping with the longer tradition of the English country house and its cousin, the London townhouse, which had for centuries acted as stages in which public expressions of the character and qualities of the owners were self-consciously on display.

Bluestocking culture therefore complicates Jürgen Habermas’s model of the masculine public sphere that emerged in the eighteenth century. Habermas’s public sphere was one constituted by (masculine) language and its assumed rationality and universality that implicitly excluded the feminine, the particular, and the domestic.17 By contrast, Deborah Heller has identified bluestocking assemblies as ‘the locus where the vexed issues of publicity, reason, conversation, and gender in the eighteenth century all converge.’18 Montagu scholar Elizabeth Eger has further observed that bluestocking conversation ‘both elevated private concerns to the level of public significance, and incorporated public spirit into the home.’19 The product was a hybrid space in which domestic, political and intellectual culture intermingled. This new space required a new type of interior, and decorative program, that could signal multiple, fluid subject positions without a fixed referent.

Chinoiserie offered just such an imaginative, semiotically ambiguous style. Its locational references alternated between ‘the world outside’ – the site of new, proto-imperial commerce, a place that was at once sophisticated and barbaric – and ‘the lady’s chimney-piece,’ the site of fashionable diversions of questionable aesthetic value.20 Chinoiserie was a style that signified a cosmopolitan identity and opened up a space for female participation in the social sphere, yet, because of its associations with femininity and aesthetic frivolity, did not challenge the traditional preserves of masculine power. If Montagu was later concerned with demonstrating her taste in relation to a moral and charitable use of luxury, her earlier attempts at self-fashioning were predicated on a self-conscious display of vapid consumerism and frivolous taste as testimony of an essential, ‘feminine’ nature.21 To that end, chinoiserie was her style of choice.

Chinoiserie in England

A noted presence in the English interior from the late seventeenth century, the English popular taste for chinoiserie reached its height in the 1750s. Demand for imports of Chinese and continental porcelain and other exotic decorative



items grew steadily grew from the late seventeenth century to the third quarter of the eighteenth century.22 Although generally associated with elite French taste, by the 1750s English chinoiserie was increasingly distanced from aristocratic European taste as it became more closely allied with fashionable consumer culture. By this time, the economic, social, and aesthetic dangers posed by British imperial commerce were frequently articulated as critiques of the objects and consumption of East India trade and domestic chinoiserie. The perceived aesthetic excess of chinoiserie was at the heart of those critiques. Both the methods of acquiring Chinese objects and the objects themselves were figured as barbarous, dangerously mobile, and responsible for the decline of English economy and taste.23 Women, as a category, were positioned as the agents of this demise. While commissioned, purchased and used by men and women alike, chinoiserie was chiefly understood as a product of feminine taste.24

The passion with which women allegedly acquired Chinese objects, and the tension this caused amongst husbands and other ‘rational’ subjects, was a familiar theme in early eighteenth-century literature. Numerous articles in The Spectator, for instance, illustrated the trials of the prudent husband and his spendthrift wife. In one letter, a correspondent identified as ‘T,’ a prominent lawyer and orator by profession, argues disingenuously for the naturally superior oratory skills of women. According to T., women use ‘the silent Flattery of their pretty Faces,’ along with tears and fainting fits, as non-linguistic rhetorical strategies to extract money from their husbands. He offers the example of his own wife:

You must know I am a plain Man and love my Money; yet I have a Spouse who is so great an Orator in this Way, that she draws from me what Sums she pleases. Every Room in my House is furnished with Trophies of her Eloquence, rich Cabinets, Piles of China, Japan Screens, and costly jars; and if you were to come into my great Parlour you would fancy your self in an India Warehouse …25

The author connects the products of East India Company trade (both Indian and Chinese) with false rhetoric in order to make a folly of his wife’s implicitly illegitimate taste. In order for the manipulation to be complete, she spends his money on aesthetically vacuous objects that have no claim to ‘authentic’ – invariably understood as masculine – taste.

The chinoiserie interior, the vast ‘India warehouse’ of The Spectator’s complaint, was an aesthetically and materially excessive place that rhetorically conflated the commercial and domestic spheres. The style was a flamboyant rejection of the widely accepted contemporary aesthetic idea of beauty as a product of unity within variety.26 Chinoiserie designs, such as the Linnells’ design for a pier mirror that is similar (though not identical) to descriptions of the no-longer-extant Linnell mirror in Montagu’s dressing room, provide an example of chinoiserie’s aesthetic and material excesses (Fig. 7.1). Three tiny


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robed, pig-tailed figures holding a lute, a rake, and a cane, respectively, jut off the frame of the mirror. This is familiar iconography, as Chinese figures were frequently shown as musicians and gardeners – figures of cultivated artfulness – in chinoiserie design. Also typical of English chinoiserie of the 1750s is the

7.1 William or John Linnell, Design for a Pier Mirror, c. 1752, pencil on paper; © Victoria & Albert Museum, London



broadly rococo exuberance of the structure upon which the figures wander. Plants, scrolls, bells, and vases sprout off the arched structure of the mirror frame, capped with an upswept roof. This prolific ornamentation creates an extremely varied through hardly harmonious decorative design.

Satirical critics of chinoiserie such as John Shebbeare focused on this profusion and irregularity as evidence of a debased and feminized national taste. Writing under the pseudonym Battista Angeloni, Shebbeare notes of contemporary English taste:

The simple and sublime have lost all influence almost every where, all is Chinese or Gothic; every chair in an apartment, the frames of glasses, and tables, must be Chinese: the walls covered with Chinese paper fill’d with figures which resemble nothing of God’s creation, and which a prudent nation would prohibit for the sake of pregnant women.27

While Shebbeare casts collections of chinoiserie as indiscriminate and massive heaps, the style itself corresponded with its collecting practices as one marked by excess, distortion, and profusion. In this and other ways, chinoiserie was a style deeply bound to the pleasures and perils of the marketplace. Femininity, fashion, and exuberance were its watchwords, and its significatory power far exceeded its aesthetic claims.

Chinoiserie at Hill Street

Throughout her letters, Montagu herself assessed the ‘gaudy goût’ of chinoiserie in similarly negative, if less vitriolic, terms as Shebbeare. However, she also expended an enormous amount of time and money on the decoration of her Chinese room and seems to have relished the sense of massing, exuberance, and ostentation that chinoiserie afforded. While the building fabric and some other decorative schemes commissioned by Montagu exist today at 23 (now 31) Hill Street, two pieces of Linnell furniture are all that remain of the 1752 decorations. Letters between Montagu and her husband Edward, her sister Sarah, and especially her friend Gilbert West, who was a fellow client of the Linnells, provide the bulk of information about the original appearance of the room.

There were three major phases of decoration in the Chinese room. As early as 1748, Montagu was collecting imported Chinese furniture, textiles, and other objects from her brother, as well as domestic chinoiserie made primarily by herself, her sister, and other female acquaintances. In 1748, she wrote to Scott of the return of their brother from China. Delighting in her exotic take, she remarks:

My house looks like an Indian warehouse. I have got so many figures, jars, &c, &c, &c, you wd laugh at the collection, my gown I brought out of the


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ship buckled under my jumps, it is very pretty and ye work extremely neat. The Capt. has brought China, Lutestrings, taffeties and Paduasoys, they wear so well, but the colors are not as good as those of our manufacture.28

Echoing the ‘India warehouse’ of The Spectator’s description, Montagu situates her acquisitions within the realms of both feminized commerce and artful display. The image of the learned Montagu jumping up and down in delight with her new clothes and commodities self-consciously creates a sense of her as a vapid, girlish consumer. Her account reads as an inventory, with brief descriptive and comparative remarks on the objects, and an unfavorable comparison of the color of her Chinese imports to apparently superior English textiles. Yet she describes her acquisitions within the home as a collection, a term which distances them from the indiscriminate hording implied by the image of the warehouse.

A later letter to Scott suggests that chinoiserie was in full effect at Hill Street by 1750, and reveals Montagu’s deeper associations with the style.

My dressing room in London is like the Temple of some Indian god: if I was remarkably short and had a great head, I should be afraid people would think I meant myself Divine Honours, but I can so little pretend to the embonpoint of a Josse, it is impossible to suspect me of such presumption. The very curtains are Chinese pictures on gauze, and the chairs like Indian fan sticks with cushions of Japan satin painted: as to the beauty of colouring, it is carried as high as possible, but the toilette you were so good as to paint is the only thing where nature triumphs.29

Montagu indicates not only that the chinoiserie theme was well established in the room by that point, but also that she was conscious of its performative potential.

In fact, far from fearing the exotic, destabilizing identity that chinoiserie potentially carried, Montagu seemed to have reveled in the ostentatious artifice of her Oriental interior and in the social status she imagined her room conferred upon her. Describing plans for the room in autumn 1751, Elizabeth wrote to Edward of the sense of opulence, ease, and authority she planned for the room: ‘I have a great mind to sit this Winter like a true Empress of China in relived state with nodding mandarines about me. I think I have a Chinese Palace & why may I not have the rest of her Chinese Majestys prerogatives?’30 This sense of prerogatives and the clear, if playful, delight that Montagu takes in imagining herself as a Chinese empress points not only to the theatricality of chinoiserie, but also to its connotations with despotism, ease, and idol worship that were commonly thought in eighteenth-century Europe to characterize Chinese court culture.

While Montagu’s bluestocking assemblies opened up a freer conversational sphere than had previously been possible, they were also known as rigidly hierarchical events. Montagu placed the chairs (likely those noted in her letter to Scott) in a single semi-circle, with her own chair at the apex of the



curve. She determined the seating assignments, with persons of the most eminence or talent seated closest to her on either side. Conversation was limited to a single topic dictated by Montagu.31 In this regard, the image of the empress seated at court amidst nodding mandarins seems to have been reasonably descriptive of the social authority she intended the room to confer upon her.

The circle of chairs was also an important spatial articulation of the intellectual and social aims of the group. One of the primary aims of the bluestocking assemblies was to bind together a diverse set of polite people through unified, rational conversation. While other bluestocking assemblies, such as those at Elizabeth Vesey’s house, used the arrangement of furniture to create small, informal groupings, Montagu used the single circle not only to assert control and authority over the conversation, but also to create an environment conducive to learning. With a topic of conversation established by Montagu, various members of the group were encouraged to contribute their individual understanding of the subject, which would produce a greater understanding for the whole. The single topic of conversation assimilated the diversity of participants’ ideas and experiences into collective knowledge. The chinoiserie decorations of the room played a part here as well. Montagu’s single circle, set against the backdrop of an aesthetically diverse and chaotic chinoiserie interior, spatially manifested the social and aesthetic ideal of unity amidst diversity.

Likewise, the Chinese room would have immediately conjured references to the tea table, the conversational sphere most closely associated with women since the early eighteenth century. Tea drinking was a regular activity at Montagu’s assemblies, where its links to elite feminine sociability, polite conversation, and temperance would have mingled with attendant connotations of gossip, luxury, overseas commerce, and exoticism, and the dangers posed by each. An early eighteenth-century print suggests the simultaneous associations of the tea table as a nexus for polite conversation and deleterious gossip. Six respectably dressed women converse around a table set with a tea tray, fans, and an open book titled ‘Chit Chat’ (Fig. 7.2). Like unsupervised children, a dwarfish figure of Envy banishes tiny Truth and Justice from the room, with Justice’s broken sword lying in their wake. Two male voyeurs peer in from the window, suggesting the potentially illicit nature of women’s conversation. At Hill Street, conversation fueled by tea within a lavish Chinese room affirmed the female-centric social sphere that was cultivated by the bluestockings, while the myriad significations of the tea table required tight control over both the activities that took place there and its decorative program. The single circle headed by Montagu insured such control, while the room itself affirmed its essentially feminine nature.

By 1752, Montagu had hired William and John Linnell, the father and son team of cabinetmakers who gained a reputation for their work in the


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chinoiserie style, and whose workshops were located adjacent to Hill Street, in Berkeley Square. The Linnell scheme survived until 1766, when Montagu hired the young neoclassical architect Robert Adam to create the third iteration of the room as a hybrid neoclassical/chinoiserie scheme. Letters to and from Montagu indicate that furnishings supplied by the Linnells in 1752 included a great glass chimneypiece and a large pier mirror, both common devices for maximizing available lighting and the appearance of space in the eighteenth-century interior. One of those mirrors had carved and bronzed pilasters as well as round molding on the top and bottom corners of the mirror frame, which were carved with twisted tillet and roses and gilded and painted blue to match identical carving around the doors of the room.32 In keeping with the Chinese theme, the chimneypiece had what Montagu described as ‘woobily boys,’ which stood on ‘rock-work’ that projected from the mirror frame.33 Consistent with the widespread fashion of the day, multiple porcelain figures

7.2 English School, The Tea-Table, 1710, etching and engraving on paper; © Trustees of the British Museum


7.3 Guangzhou, China, wallpaper, c. 1725–50, watercolor on paper; © Victoria & Albert Museum, London


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and vases, which Montagu mentions in passing throughout her letters up to and after this period, would undoubtedly have adorned the chimneypiece.34

Decorated with hand-painted Chinese wallpaper, Montagu’s Chinese room was redolent with color. While this paper was removed by Adam in 1766 and is lost today, given the popularity of floral Chinese wallpaper at the time and the floral motifs that proliferate elsewhere in the room, the paper may have looked similar to the contemporary example shown in Fig. 7.3. In addition to the gilding and blue paint on the chimneypiece, mirror and door frames, curtains hung from small canopies that were constructed from caned, gilt and red painted wood.35 Behind the curtains (likely the gauze curtains painted with Chinese scenes mentioned in 1750), the Linnells supplied carved shutters and sashes, which West recommended be neither painted blue nor gilt, though he made no further suggestion of their color.

The decorative exuberance of such chinoiserie designs is consistent with the two surviving pieces of Linnell furniture for the room: a writing table and cabinet on a stand (Figs 7.4 and 7.5). Each piece is japanned, or painted in black and gold to imitate Japanese lacquer, and features the open latticework that is characteristic of the Linnells’ chinoiserie designs of the early 1750s.36 The writing desk is faced with japanning that depicts vaguely Northern Song-style landscapes. The cabinet, dominated primarily by latticework doors, has

7.4 William and John Linnell, writing table, 1752; private collection



small painted scenes of rocks and flowers along the bottom and sides. The quality of the japanning and the latticework bear strong similarities to a set of bedroom furniture that the Linnells made for the Duke of Beaufort at Badminton around 1754.37 The forms of Montagu’s cabinet and writing table are unconventional for mid-Georgian lacquer furniture, which suggests that the cabinetmakers were using the novel style of chinoiserie to experiment with new forms.

Taste and Conversation

Gilbert West and Elizabeth Montagu’s shared interest in matters of taste and decoration offered the opportunity for conversation and collaboration between the two. Despite the highly feminized connotations of chinoiserie, many of Montagu’s male friends took a serious

interest in the style, and its tasteful use was the subject of much conversation. Since both were clients of the Linnell firm, Montagu and West acted as agent for each other when one of them was in London. This included advising each other on the progress and appearance of particular objects, making suggestions for alterations, and communicating those alterations to the Linnells. In a revealing letter to West, Montagu writes:

I hope you do not attribute my pleasure in receiving your letters, or readiness to answer them, merely to a Chinese taste & impatience for the ornaments of chimney pieces &c. I think it may be owing to a better goût, an admiration of what is beautiful in sentiment and morals, rather than for the fantastick and grotesque in forms and figure …38

Montagu is eager to diffuse any criticism that her enthusiasm for her new room is attributable to superficial, commercial, or fashionable interests, what she calls ‘a Chinese taste.’ Rather, she places her interest in the decoration of the room in the realm of conversation. She thus explicitly connects the decoration of the room and its function in facilitating respectable conversation with her male friend. In this sense, the Chinese room enabled rational conversation between the sexes not only in bluestocking assemblies, but also in the letters it occasioned.

7.5 William and John Linnell, cabinet on a stand, 1752; private collection


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Perhaps for this reason, Montagu seems to have relished the collaborative aspects of her room decoration, and trusted friends such as West and his wife Catherine significantly influenced her opinion on decorating. One of these matters was the issue of lighting in the room. Gilbert West recounted his wife’s suggestion that Montagu not use a Chinese lantern acquired from her brother to light the room. Instead, she suggested two candle stands with rustic, chinoiserie branches, as well as six candle stands upon the chimneypiece and four upon the pier mirror. Montagu took their advice and had Linnell draw up some designs of chinoiserie stands with branches.39 While Montagu clearly embraced the role of the demanding client in relation to Linnell, she was also deferential to her friends’ opinions. This instance indicates that the collaborative, social process of decoration that Montagu and the Wests engaged in was not strictly bound to a rage for consumption of luxuries, but was also connected to an idea of shared taste as a form of sociability.

The sociability of decoration was also on display with another set of objects that contributed to the decoration of the Chinese room. Baskets, a toilette box, and perhaps furniture made by Montagu and her relatives and friends were significant features of the room. The production of exotic crafts was a common part of accomplished, elite female activities in which Montagu participated.40 In addition to her patronage of the Linnell firm, Montagu solicited her female friends to create chinoiserie works to add to the room. In April 1752, in response to an undocumented letter from Montagu, Frances Courtenay, Countess of Devon, replied that ‘I hope very soon to comply with your request. I shall employ many people that I may have as much variety as possible and shall be vastly pleas’d if I can any way contribute to the finishing of that very pretty room.’41 There is no record of Montagu’s original request to the Countess but, given the date of the letter – 7 April 1752 – it is certain that ‘that very pretty room’ is the Chinese room. If so, it is likely that the Countess would have contributed a japanned work. Made popular through the published manuals that detailed the process and suggested patterns, japanning was practised by aristocratic and polite ladies throughout the century.42 Queen Charlotte, for instance, was a skilled practitioner of the art, and was responsible for the japanned screen behind which her eldest son, later King George IV, first appeared to the public. The collaborative practice of japanning and other feminine amateur artistic pursuits added another layer of sociability to the creation and use of Montagu’s Chinese room.

Feminine Masquerade

For whatever else the preceding description tells us, Montagu’s abundant correspondence on the subject of the room, and the lavish amount of money she spent on it, suggests that chinoiserie held some special meaning



for her that went beyond a passing fancy with a fashionable style.43 The self-conscious display of wealth, and its ethical counterpart, charity, were important factors in Montagu’s creation of her public identity throughout her adult life. Chinoiserie’s associations with luxury and opulence surely appealed to Montagu’s well-known desire to represent herself as a wealthy patron of the arts and literature. However, the mere representation of wealth and status through art explains neither why Montagu chose the particular style of chinoiserie, nor why she was so disparaging of it in her writing.

This discussion thus far has traced the dual threads of social authority and social politeness that Montagu cultivated through chinoiserie. Despite her evidently considerable intellectual and social talents, the easy expression of those talents in the cultural sphere of conversation was by no means guaranteed. Johann Caspar Lavater’s observation that ‘a woman with a beard is not as repulsive as a woman who thinks in her own right’ was in keeping with widely held contemporary ideas of the natural relationship between masculinity and intellect.44 While seldom criticized for masculine ambition, Montagu was well aware of the real social danger of being perceived as an overly intellectual or ambitious woman. She published her first written work, Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, under anonymous authorship. When her identity became known, she wrote to her father to explain herself:

In the first place, there is in general a prejudice against female Authors especially if they invade those regions of literature which the Men are desirous to reserve to themselves. While I was young, I should not have liked to have been class’d among authors, but at my age it is less unbecoming.45

Nevertheless, the supposedly de-femininizing effects of her age were not, apparently, strong enough to claim authorship from the start. Montagu here draws attention to the general cultural hostility towards thinking females, and directly connects it to a disinclination in her youth to be seen as an intellectual. Seen in this light, the feminizing associations of chinoiserie would clearly have been an asset in establishing a gender-appropriate space with which to associate herself.

At the same time, Montagu deftly contributed to the emerging image of the ‘exemplary woman,’ a persona that gained popularity in the second half of the eighteenth century in which talented women (primarily authors, artists, actresses, and musicians) were celebrated for their necessarily unique achievements.46 In both print and visual culture, Montagu stood as a model of rational, charitable femininity. Her portrait was included in Richard Samuel’s The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (1778), James Barry’s The Distribution of the Premiums in the Society of Fine Arts (1777), and an engraving from Barry’s mural printed in The Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum-Book (1778), all of which indicated her status as a celebrated


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cultural figure. Not only did public opinion reward Montagu for seemingly working within the constraints of conventional femininity; she seems to have policed those boundaries for others. Observing the public derision of Catherine Macaulay upon the publication of her radical Whig History of England (1763–82), Montagu attributed Macaulay’s troubles to gender transgression, remarking to Hester Thrale that: ‘All this has happened from her adopting masculine opinions and masculine manners. I hate a woman’s mind in men’s cloaths … I always look’d upon Mrs Macaulay as rather belonging to the lads … than as one of the gentle sex. Indeed, she was always a strange fellow.’47 In this light, Montagu’s adoption of the feminized mask of chinoiserie early in her life seems less a defensive gesture against external criticism than an enforcement of a conventional gender performance.

Montagu’s Chinese room offered a visual testimony of her femininity that could ameliorate the perception (either by herself or others) of masculine intellectual ambition. Despite her stated desire to preside as an empress over her assembly of friends figured as nodding mandarins, her letters more often present her as intellectually self-effacing, sometimes to the point of obsequiousness. While the formidable Montagu could clearly afford to feign humility, in truth, she could hardly act otherwise. Her considerable wit, intellect, wealth, social connections, and, most importantly, her display of those qualities left her open to criticism of an unfeminine nature, as much by herself as by others. To avoid performing as a ‘bearded woman,’ she used the feminizing decoration of her sociable room as a mask for her ambitious social and intellectual goals.

The Chinese room, therefore, set Montagu and her guests within a masquerade space. This space transported visitors into a realm where conventional English social customs and norms could be temporarily transgressed. Like the social event of the popular eighteenth-century masquerade, the room was comprised of aesthetically foreign objects and decorations that often used exotic costume and decor in order to suspend conventional social hierarchies. When Montagu observed in 1782 that ‘it is the ton of the times to confound all distinctions of age, sex, and rank; no one ever thinks of sustaining a certain character, unless it is one they have assumed at a masquerade,’ she could easily have been speaking of herself.48

Chinoiserie was able to contain the contradictory aesthetic and social positions of intellect and fashion, male and female, amateur and professional, and domestic and public that Montagu negotiated in her public life. It is precisely the mobility and fluidity of the style that appealed to Montagu and permitted her to stage intellectual and social performances that were at once conventional and radical. Montagu chose, despite some aesthetic reservations, to decorate her Chinese room, the nexus of her social and intellectual



production, in a chinoiserie style because of its ability to signify multiple and contradictory subject positions. Through the self-conscious use of fashion as a form of identity, Montagu used her Chinese room to perform a masquerade of femininity that obviated internal and external criticism of her intrusions into the masculine sphere of intellectual community.

Notes

I am grateful for the astute comments I received on drafts of this chapter from the editors as well as George Boulukos, Betsy Dougherty, Elizabeth Eger, David Pullins, Christopher Reed, Joe Sramek, and participants in the Clark Library conference, ‘Spaces of the Self: Sites of Exteriority.’

1. Cited by Arthur Oswald, ‘Mrs. Montagu and the Chinese Taste,’ Country Life (30 April 1953), 1328.

2. Joan Rivière, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade,’ in The Inner World and Joan Riviere, Collected Papers: 1920–1958, ed. Athol Hughes (London: Karnac Books, 1991), 90–101.

3. Most notably, Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory (1988),’ repr. in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (New York: Routledge, 2003), 392–402.

4. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1986); Catherine Craft-Fairchild, Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and Female Identity in Eighteenth-Century Fiction by Women (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993); Christoph Heyl, ‘The Metamorphosis of the Mask in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century London,’ in Masquerade and Identities: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, and Marginality, ed. Efrat Tseëlon (New York: Routledge, 2001), 114–34.

5. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

6. Elizabeth Montagu to Sarah Scott, 26 December 1767, Papers of Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, Huntington Library (hereafter cited as MO) 5871.

7. On the Bluestocking group, see Sylvia Harcstark Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738–1785, 6 vols, ed. Gary Kelly (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), the first volume of which is Elizabeth Eger’s Elizabeth Montagu; and the recent exhibition catalogue by Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Pelz, Brilliant Women: Eighteenth-Century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2008).

8. The description of Montagu was by Hannah More, Selected Writings of Hannah More, ed. Robert Hole (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), 8–9. Montagu published three anonymous essays on classical subjects in Sir George Lyttleton’s Dialogues with the Dead in 1760, and her Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare Compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets, with some Remarks Upon the Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire in 1769.

9. Elizabeth Eger, ‘Circles of Learning in the Bluestocking Salon: Patronage, Correspondence and Conversation,’ in her forthcoming book Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism: Living Muses (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). I am grateful to Elizabeth Eger for sharing an advance copy of this chapter with me.

10. On the building of Montagu House at Portman Square, see Kerry Bristol, ‘22 Portman Square: Mrs. Montagu and her “Palais de la Vieillesse,”’ British Art Journal 2, no. 3 (2001), 72–85.

11. John Cornforth, ‘More than a Dressing Room,’ Country Life 186, no. 16 (16 April 1992), 112–15; and his book Early Georgian Interiors (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 208.

12. David Pullins has argued convincingly that the dressing room was located between the Great Room and the bedroom, accessible to both and to a service hall. See his MA dissertation, ‘China at the Edge of the World: Making Space for Chinoiserie in the Interiors of Robert Adam,’ (Courtauld Institute of Art, 2006), fig. 23 and Appendix B. For an alternate theory of the placement of the room, see Rosemary Baird, ‘The Queen of the Bluestockings: Mrs. Montagu’s House at 23 Hill Street Rediscovered,’ Apollo 157, no. 498 (August 2003), 43–9.


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13. Elizabeth Montagu, The Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, with Some of the Letters of her Correspondents, ed. Matthew Montagu (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1813), vol. 3, 203.

14. Marie Anne Fiquet du Bocage, Letters Concerning England, Holland, and Italy (London, 1770), vol. 1, 7.

15. See Gilbert West to Elizabeth Montagu (30 May 1752), MO 6634, Gilbert West to Elizabeth Montagu (10 June 1752), MO 6635, and Edward Montagu to Elizabeth Montagu (7 July 1752), MO 1837.

16. Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytical Procedure,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 1 (1996), 97–109.

17. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1989). For a corrective view, see Johanna Meehan, ed., Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1995), particularly Joan B. Landes, ‘The Public and Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration,’ 91–116.

18. Deborah Heller, ‘Bluestocking Salons and the Public Sphere,’ Eighteenth-Century Life 22, no. 2 (1998), 59–82.

19. Elizabeth Eger, ‘“The Noblest Commerce of Mankind”: Conversation and Community in the Bluestocking Circle,’ in Women, Gender, and Enlightenment, eds Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 288–304.

20. David Porter, ‘Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy,’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28 (1999), 27–54.

21. On Montagu’s ‘right use of luxury,’ see Elizabeth Eger, ‘Luxury, Industry and Charity: Bluestocking Culture Displayed,’ in Luxury and the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, eds Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 190–204.

22. Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (New York: E.P Dutton & Co., 1961); Oliver Impey, Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977); David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Stacey Sloboda, ‘Making China: Design, Empire and Aesthetics in Britain, 1745–1851’ (PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, 2004).

23. David Porter, ‘Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and Aesthetics of Chinese Taste,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (2002), 395–411.

24. See Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘Women, China, and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century England,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 2 (1996), 153–67; idem, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); David Porter, ‘A Wanton Chase in a Foreign Place: Hogarth and the Gendering of Exoticism in the Eighteenth-Century Interior,’ in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century, eds Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (New York: Routledge, 2007), 49–60; and Stacey Sloboda, ‘Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness, and Taste in Eighteenth-Century England,’ in Material Cultures, 1740–1920, eds Alla Myzelev and John Potvin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 19–36.

25. ‘T,’ [pseud. Richard Steele], The Spectator vol. II, no. 252 (19 December 1711), ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 480.

26. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 1997); Francis Hutcheson, An Enquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Farnborough: Gregg International, 1969).

27. John Shebbeare, Letters on the English Nation, 2 vols (London, 1755), 2:261.

28. Elizabeth Montagu to Sarah Scott (30 October 1748), MO 5705.

29. Elizabeth Montagu to Sarah Scott (3 January 1750), MO 5716.

30. Elizabeth Montagu to Edward Montagu (8 September 1751), MO 2241.

31. Regular Bluestocking member Fanny Burney described these seating arrangements and the conversational style in largely approving terms. Burney’s description is quoted by Eger, in Knott and Taylor, 295–6.



32. G. West to Elizabeth Montagu (25 May 1752), MO 6686, and G. West to Elizabeth Montagu (30 May 1752), MO 6634.

33. G. West to Elizabeth Montagu (19 June 1752), MO 6635. When Montagu demurred from the size of the figures and rockwork, Linnell offered to replace the figures with japanned birds, the designs of which Montagu thought looked like horses. Elizabeth Montagu to G. West (13 June 1752), MO 6688.

34. For examples of such treatment, see Christopher Gilbert and Anthony Wells-Cole, The Fashionable Fireplace (Leeds: Temple Newsam, 1985).

35. Linnell recommended the carved canopy, rather than a painted trompe l’oeil canopy, which West urged Montagu to accept in G. West to Elizabeth Montagu (10 June 1752), MO 6635. Montagu conceded to West’s opinion in Elizabeth Montagu to G. West (13 June 1752), MO 6688.

36. I am grateful to David Pullins for his conversation with me about the appearance of this furniture.

37. Helena Hayward and Pat Kirkham, William and John Linnell: Eighteenth-Century London Furniture Makers, 2 vols (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), 1:107–8.

38. Elizabeth Montagu to Gilbert West (13 June 1752), MO 6688. Matthew Montagu mistakenly put the text of this letter in the middle of a 26 May 1752 letter to West, Letters, vol. III, 182–6.

39. Eliz. Montagu to Gilbert West, 13 June 1752, MO 6688.

40. On women and the amateur arts, see Katherine Sharp, ‘Women’s Creativity and Display in the Eighteenth-Century Interior,’ in Interior Design and Identity, eds Susie McKellar and Penny Sparke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 10–26; Ann Bermingham, ‘The Aesthetics of Ignorance: The Accomplished Woman in the Culture of Connoisseurship,’ Oxford Art Journal 16, no. 2 (1993), 3–20; and her more recent book, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

41. Frances Courtenay to Elizabeth Montagu (7 April 1752), MO 721.

42. The earliest among these books, Stalker and Parker, Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (London, 1688) was reprinted throughout the century. The Ladies Amusement, or Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy (London, 1762) was another popular text, whose name points to its intended audience.

43. Records books for neither the Linnell firm nor Montagu’s household survive, and thus it is difficult to know exactly how much was spent. With characteristic rhetorical flourish, Montagu bemoans the cost of the room at its completion in autumn of 1752 in a letter to West. See Elizabeth Montagu to Gilbert West (16 November 1752), MO 6691.

44. Quoted in Angela Rosenthal, ‘Angelica Kauffman Ma(s)king Claims,’ Art History 15, no. 1 (March 1992), 38–59.

45. Elizabeth Montagu to Matthew Robinson (10 September 1769), MO 4767, quoted in Elizabeth Eger, ‘“Out Rushed a Female to Protect the Bard”: The Bluestocking Defense of Shakespeare,’ in Reconsidering the Bluestockings, eds Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg (San Marino CA: Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 2003), 127–51.

46. On the idea of the exemplary woman in another context, see Mary D. Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

47. Quoted in Eger and Pelz, 104.

48. Elizabeth Montagu to Hannah More, quoted in Wahrman, 260.


“Fashioning Bluestocking Conversation: Elizabeth Montagu’s Chinese Room”

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