Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan. By Grace E. Lavery

Abstract

The destination ‘Orient’ is not eastwards but inwards, and the directional hand is a white one, defining for the peoples of ‘the East’ what it means to be the East. In Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan, Grace E. Lavery makes clear, often and early, the difficulties of classifying Japan as part of the Orient at all. The Victorians considered Japan an exceptional case, what Lavery calls an ‘Other Empire’ with true military and cultural independence, while other nations were reduced, in social perception, to mere projections of Western influence. ‘Japanese art appeared as a force already manifested, a creativity already cultured: an other, in other words, whose claims to aesthetic universality had already gained priority over the western self’. Though ‘universality’ suggests a broad scope of comparative study, Lavery mainly focuses on two aesthetic communities, those of Victorian England and Japan. Her preface asks three questions about the ‘exquisite’, a term Lavery describes as ‘extremely beautiful; it is also weirdly incomplete’. The other half of her title, ‘quaint’, refers to how it is that exquisite objects ‘become (or fail to become) historical evidence’. (‘Quaint’ has connections with the word ‘cunt’, as in the Canterbury Tales, a fact which, in this academic context, should be kept in mind, even if at the back.) These are context-specific definitions she will return to over the course of the book, to revise and flesh out.