 Hello, I'm Nancy Locke, and I wanted to just begin by, again, thanking Martha, Aliyah, the Barnes, and the host institutions. I especially like the organization of the papers into these panels of three, which has been a wonderful morning and afternoon. I'm pleased to introduce my advisor, Hanji Khan, who is working toward her doctorate at Penn State University. Before arriving at Penn State as a university graduate fellow, which is our most prestigious and most selective fellowship, Hanji spent some important years here in Philadelphia as she did both her BA and MA at Bryn Mawr, where she worked with Professor Stephen Levine. Hanji has long been interested in questions of gender in women artists, and in both Japanese and French art in the 19th century. Her dissertation, Fleshly Japanese and Women's Bodies in France, 1870 to 1914, shifts the emphasis from representations of women to the realm of bodily experience as she examines a range of exciting topics in visual culture from perfume advertisements to kimono mania. Hanji has co-authored a book review with Christopher Reed that will be out this spring, and I'm very happy to announce that later this year she will be a Smithsonian Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Hanji's paper is entitled, A Dicey Promise, Japanese and Middle Class Parisienne in Henry Somes, Fantasie, Japanese, 1879. I present Hanji Khan. Thank you, Nancy, for that wonderful and generous introduction, and I just wanted to echo everybody's thank you to the Barnes and all the co-organizing universities and my fellow graduate students for sharing their wonderful research projects. The taste for Chinese and Japanese things. We were the first to have this taste, which today invades everything and everyone down to idiots and middle class women, who apparently, more than we, propagated it, felt it, preached it, and converted others to it. Writer Edmond de Goncourt's tirade testifies to an important shift in Japanese-ma during the 1860s and 70s. The sweeping popularization, commercialization, and feminization of the taste for Japanese things which had previously been mostly enjoyed by a small group of artists and writers. One of these Japanese, Henry Som, completed an etching around 1770, 1879 to promote a new shop owned by the prominent Japanese and East Asian art dealer, Sigrid Bing. Here, Japanese-ma is represented as middle-class women acquiring Biblot in commercial establishments. This paper turns from the etching's assumed documentary aspect to its conspicuously fantastic quality, visually and textually pronounced. This reading reveals the etching as an instance of male Japanese envisioning middle-class women jumping on the bandwagon of Japanese-ma. I argue that this image presents middle-class women's Japanese-ma as an ambiguous commercial transaction alluding to reverse prostitution. In Som's imagination, a fashionable Parisian, in search of pleasure, enters a particular venue, chooses object and slash or doll-sized Japanese men to her liking, and takes them away in exchange for money. In this talk, I hope to trace widespread discursive significations of fantasy, imagination, women's sexual desire, and Japan in late 19th century Paris. I argue that this wondrous vision, a doubly fantasized projection of Som's imagination of women's fantasies of Japan, betrays male Japanese anxiety over sharing the fantasies of Japan that had hitherto promised male consumers the possibility of transcending conventions and norms. The etching typifies Som's Japanese works, which mostly feature a well-dressed woman surrounded by Japanese men. Despite its connection to an actual venue, underscored by the inclusion of an address at the bottom, the image lives up to its titular inscription, fantasy Japanese, a man in a formal samurai dress holds a small sack as if he's offering it to his fashionable bourgeois customer. With its other hand, he gestures behind him, where some 20 fairy-sized men in Japanese hairstyle and outfit try to engage the woman by touting folding fans, offering objects, and bringing boxes, some freshly out of the boat. Som emphasizes the national origin of these men and objects by including images of the sun and Mount Fuji, two iconic symbols of Japan. These vignettes, using graphically adapted perspectives, confuse and conflate three spaces. First, the shop interior, second, the two-dimensional surface of the wall, and third, the distant landscape of Japan. Processing a float in this ambiguous space, these tiny Japanese men conjure up a sense of the fantastic. The Japanese was probably not the shop's name, but rather Som's own addition. From 1878 to the early 1880s, Dido Boutin, the French equivalent of the Yellow Pages, listed the store without a specific name, indicating either its address or the type of merchandise it carried. Another graphic advertisement for Bing's boutique iconographically underscores the shop's specialization in East Asian objects, but the word fantaisie is nowhere to be found. Som's use of the word then invites an examination. Fantaisiecle definitions of fantaisie commonly implied a sense of wonderment transcending the banality of quotidian life. The word could refer to an impractical, possibly cheap yet pleasurable quality, like in the phrase objet de fantaisie, or the salon de fantaisie in an elegant Parisian apartment. The etching's inclusion of Japanese objects in the design not to such uses, but its fantastic quality alludes to other definitions of fantaisie, such as the faculty of imagination, inventiveness, an irrational and absurd idea, or something out of the ordinary. These uses imply the centrality of subjectivity in envisioning possibilities beyond one's own life world. Som's inscription then operates as a descriptive title. In Bing's shop, filled with fantaisies from a distant land, a Japanese fantaisie blooms in the consumer's mind. The Goncourt brothers indeed describe Japanese objet d'art, quote, captivating and hallucinogenic, end quote, emphasizing the power of their exotic allure. If fantaisie refers to the woman's reverie upon entering Bing's boutique, we may see the Japanese figures in Som's etching as part of her vision. Considering their imaginary origin, it is fitting to interpret these figures as personifications of the charm of Japan and its objects. Like the glamour of commodities, these Japanese men attract the consumer's attention and tempt her to purchase. And like the power of commodities, they operate within the consumer's mind. Som's use of fantaisie implies his recognition of women's imagination, capable of envisioning experiences that transcend the ordinary. Som was by no means alone in recognizing the imaginative capacities of women. Throughout the second half of the 19th century, medical authorities expressed concerns about women's fancies and daydreams, which were believed to be linked to hysterical hallucinations. Concerns over imaginative women seem to have floors, particularly because of the creativity attributed to men's imagination. For instance, the group of subjectivist writers around Auguste Villiers de Lille-Ladon championed consciousness as the only true reality. According to them, a universe imagined in one's mind was as believable as the so-called real one. Given the imagination's expansive, potentially subversive creative capacity, it seems likely that the discursive pathologization and stigmatization of imaginative women was driven by male authorities' fear of what imagination could offer to women. Japan was not so different from the concept of imagination in 19th century Western European minds. Oscar Wilde famously wrote, in fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country. There are no such people." In the West, received ideas and projections about Japan were hardly distinguished from its actualities. Spatial artists adopted stylistic devices from Ukiyo-e prints such as asymmetrical composition or dramatic play of spatial depth to outthink Western traditions. They did so, however, without realizing that these traits originated from Japanese artists' attempts to adopt European perspectival systems. Despite this misunderstanding, the promise of liberation offered by the ideas of Japan extended to a personal level for Japanese. As shown in this etching by Mark-Louis Salon, a member of the Société Japoniste Ginglard, which was a circle where male Japanese gathered to socialize, drink sake, and eat food with chopsticks, Japanese men provided male Japanese a haven for homosocial escape that was organized around the feminine and erotic mystique of Japan. Following middle-class women' access to Japanese moment, letting in middle-class norms of heterosexual domesticity that these men left behind when relishing this fantasy of Japan. In 1882, Jeweler Lucien Fallis expressed this concern in his epistolary article in Revue des Arts Décoratifs. He lamented that Japan, again, metaphorized as a woman, is always beautiful, smiling, and graceful, yet one hesitates on taking her as a wife. Because he explains, quote, while a small group of artists trembled at and rejoiced in the fresh scent of this version art, the fashion that Pimp, who is always on the lookout to seize new things, gave her a way to the commerce. Prostituted her in boutiques, rolled her in the mud of the smallest traits, undressed her and dirtied her, and this poor, ashamed one spreads in our discount bazaars, end quote. Considering some suggestion that this form of commercialized Japanese mercator to middle-class women, we may ask if it would have been possible to compare middle-class women purchasing Japanese Biblot to the clients of prostitutes. The concept of reverse prostitution for the lack of a better term seems to have crossed the minds of some fondestier Cliff Frenchman. In Albert Guillaume's cartoon from 1893, L'émancipation de la femme, a woman whose paraphernalia recalls stereotypes of the new woman, picks up a man. She takes him to an orientalist boudoir furnished with a tiger rug, an ornate-side table, and a newer, and actively hits on him while he coyly responds. In the last scene, the woman, breast-exposed and missing her tie, hands a coin to the fully-dressed man who tips his hat. The cartoon is, of course, less of a social document than an anti-feminist joke, suggesting that women's emancipation will spawn virgos who will turn the world upside down. The humor, however, betrays anxiety around the figure of man-eating woman while implying that its premise was well enough established to be the basis of a joke. Situated in relation to ideas suggested by Fahly's and Guillaume, Somme's Japanese figures represent the spectacle of Japan prostituting itself to the female consumer. In this sense, the Parisienne's interaction with them recalls the interaction of a bourgeois man with de mémondins. Driven by desire and expecting pleasure, she selects, purchases, and enjoys. She possesses the power to fulfill her own desires through her capacity as a consumer to acquire through a commercial exchange. The sign of this exchange, the small pouch between two hands, further complicates the story by concealing its content. Is it a trinket? What kind of trinket? Or is it a very-sized Japanese man? At least two figures in the image know what's inside, but only can the woman know what she imagines to do with it. Her epistemological superiority establishes a power dynamic in which everyone else is already and always frustratingly disadvantaged, emphasizing the subversive autonomy she embodies as an active consumer and pursuer of her own pleasure. What happens when this woman, equipped with consumer power, desire, and imagination, opts for the fantasy of Japan? Yidemopasans une aventure parisienne, or a Parisian adventure from 1881, suggests an answer. Here, a provincial woman travels to Paris, the city of her lustful fantasies. After several disappointing days, she stops at a shop selling East Asian Bibles and spots one Monsieur Jean Varin, who is reluctantly giving up on a Japanese statuette due to its price. She jumps in and splashes out a staggering 1,500 francs for the object. After thus attracting his attention, she forces him to go through his daily routine with her, eventually leading to his bed. Some seems to have entertained this possibility of an unconventional love affair with Japan or with the help of Japan in his liturgical calendar of 1879. Its largest decorative vignette on the top left features now familiar figures, a well-dressed bourgeois and a man in Japanese garb. They walk arm in arm as if they're on a date. A second woman complicates the story, inserting herself into the dynamic by touching the paper lantern the man holds. While the nature of the trio is elusive, the woman's psychological interest in the Japanese man is unmistakable. The vignette to its right features a different trio in an equally fascinating, less equivocal relationship. A grinning devil-like figure in clown attire watches a foot-tall gentleman's ill-fated rescue mission as he offers the devil's tail to his adrift companion. The motif recalls another favorite iconography of some, vulnerable doll-sized Frenchman at the mercy of a fashionable fan fatale. One may suggest that this vignette is complemented, if not completed, by its neighboring image to the left bringing in the missing element of fashionable woman into the scene. While it is a stretch to claim that these two constitute a unified, coherent picture, it is difficult to dismiss their physical proximity as purely arbitrary. The two together alludes to a sense of threat posed by middle-class women seduced by Japanese things to the proper bourgeois world. She surrenders to her desire for exotic and sensual consumers' experiences, while literally turning away from the top-headed bourgeois who witnesses his fellow Frenchman's evanescence. Her delight in the fantasy of Japan blooms at the expense of Frenchmen in the French bourgeois order. Some's etching, then, suggests that Japanesma for bourgeois women could have been a dicey promise of liberation for normative orders. With its exoticism and imaginary qualities, fantasy Japanese offered middle-class women possibilities of difference from even defiance of mores, including those concerning women's desires, possibilities that could only be fully grasped by those women themselves. Against the contemporaneous backdrop of the rise of feminism, the new woman and women's increasing public presence as consumers, such a potentially subversive prospect would have been too noticeable to dismiss. And this would have been only more prominent in the eyes of male Japanese, like some who themselves relished a taste for something beyond Western conventions. Thank you.