White grandmas love the exotic
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"At the same time, American women drew upon the cache of meanings that surrounded Oriental goods to challenge the propriety of the Victorian era; as the century came to a close, the American “New Woman” marked her independence and liberation by owning, wearing, and displaying goods that conjured Western ideas of a sensual and exotic East. By this time, a wave of popular writing about interior design promoted a scaled-down version of upper-class decorative styles to middle-class American women. Unable to furnish multiple themed rooms, women of lesser means were encouraged to combine several themes in a single room. They could “stuff the entire world into their parlors, confident that this was au courant.” Oriental goods thus became a marker of class status, and a vehicle of class striving, at multiple levels of society." (Bald, 18-19).
This past fall reading break, some friends and I roadtripped to the small lakeside town of Muskegon, Michigan where my roommate's extended family lived. The house we stayed in had belonged to their old family friend who maintained that the house and all its belongings remained as is. Needless to say, we snooped around aggressively and found all sorts of relics and stuff. In the old passports of the woman who had resided there were stamps dating across the 20th century from places like Thailand, Bengal, India, Burma, China, Japan, and other names that we may now consider archaic. These travels manifested in postcards of the Taj Mahal, Japanese prints, and Chinoiserie displayed around the house. At my friend's grandmother's house two doors down, we were shown scrolls of Buddhist charcoal rubbings from Thailand. On our drive back from Michigan, we stopped for lunch at another friend's grandma's house in Kitchener and her house was also filled with Chinoiserie and "exotic" art.
Maybe I'm just not frequenting the homes of old white ladies that often but I was kind of surprised by this phenomenon even though I knew of it in its various extents. Both my friends' grandmas and the family friend were white women of recent upper middle class origins during the 20th century instilled with the motivation to put their wealth towards worldly pursuits and delights. They were part of a generation of women who, thanks to newly acquired familial wealth, increasing globalization, and shifting cultural expectations, were able to forge more autonomous and empowered existences through travel and vicarious exoticism, “to push beyond domestic constraints—to assert their connection to a wider world” (Bald 18). The characteristics of exoticism, as through the feminizing of the Orient, conveniently coincided with the "New Woman" and thus construed to be a sort of white feminism. The sensuality of exoticism/Orientalism, the independence of travel, the intellectual and material wealth of being interesting and interested in "the world"—the pursuit of these notions clearly reflected the autonomy, individuality, and social mobility 20th century/post-Victorian white women eagerly sought at the same time that it was superficial and harmful to the people being exotified and othered. I am sorry though... because this post discusses nothing of these implications on the topical Bengali peddlers...