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[The images that accompany this article are on the French Review website: <frenchreview.frenchteachers.org/Dossiers.html>.]
In his essay on eighteenth-century fashion and the Chinese taste, David Porter suggests that the enduring appeal of chinoiserie in eighteenth-century British society was due in large part to the quality of the umheimliche (uncanny) attached to exoticism: "I would argue, the exotic, by virtue of its unheimlich contortions of familiar experience, adds a tincture of sublimity in the more sustained, selfreflexive awareness it proposes of vast, unfathomable bodies of cultural meaning and human experience beyond the realm of the everyday" (404).1 Equally imbued with the chinoiserie craze, French society of the times added to this taste another, rather odd fondness for the singerie (the figural use of monkeys in decorative arts), which produced similarly unheimlich contortions of familiar experience adorning certain eighteenth-century French salons. More brazen in its estrangement of the rational, the singerie aesthetic collapses humans and simians in an array of characters and activities to satirize, allegorize or simply delight (Roscoe 99). As Victor Buchli reminds us: "Material culture has been often, and rather uncritically, referred to as a mirror [...] it becomes constitutive of desired and imagined subjectivities either nostalgic, futuristic or transformative" (9). This study sets out to explore the sorts of cultural meanings that resided within the convergence of chinoiserie and singerie aesthetics expressed in certain French Enlightenment images and objects and how the pairing of the Chinese human and simian figures reflected the growing social or political malaise expressed in scientific and critical discourses of the period. Historically and culturally, this essay will argue that as France's interest in China moved from serious intellectual engagement—as reflected, for example, in much of the work of missionaries to China and sinophile academicians of the seventeenth and first-half of the eighteenth centuries—to discernibly sinophobic attacks upon Chinese culture in other scholarly works, the Chinese human figure elides toward more animalistic representations. By the same token, the figure of the monkey sometimes playfully coupled with Chinese figures in the earlier half of the eighteenth century disappears only to emerge as a [End Page 157] troubling subject of scientific or fantastical study, a creature who, by its proximity to the human form, voices alarm, confusion, and anxiety before...