TEA

Make tea, child, said my kind mamma. Sit by me, love, and make tea.

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1747)

Ah, the Joke Post comes upon us at last. T is for ‘t’… very droll. I lift a cup to that. But fie! Have we learned nothing on this lexical journey? First and foremost, tea was not always pronounced as we currently say it: when it first appeared in English in 1601 it was ‘taaaaay‘ and often written tay (like the modern French thé, a bit). It is not quite clear when and why the shift to ‘ti’ happened, but, then, few things are as easy to lose sight of as pronunciation (how many people remember that Keats was a Cockney?)

Shall I be mother? Catherine of Braganza, painted by Jacob Huysmans.

Tea, of course, has the additional complication that it is not an English word (although what is?) – it came from the Dutch thee, in turn from Malay and, eventually, Chinese Amoy dialect: t’e, or the Mandarin ch’a. Woven into the geographical etymology, then, is a legacy of import history: around the mid-seventeenth century we procured our tea from the Dutch, who imported it from Malaysia and, ultimately, China. What exactly were they importing? Why, tea‘s first definition, of course: ‘the leaves of the tea-plant, usually in a dried and prepared state for making the drink’. In this form, tea began with a queen, and quickly became every eighteenth-century Cosmo girl’s first route of seduction.

Brew and Thunder.

But first – the drink. ‘Made by infusing these leaves in boiling water, having a somewhat bitter and aromatic flavour, and acting as a moderate stimulant’ – in this sense, the word tea is first recorded around 1601, so some trendsetters must have been aware of it before the widespread importing of the later seventeenth century, when tea really came into its own: Samuel Pepys tried it in 1660, and a couple of years later it found a celebrity backer in the be-farthingaled shape of the Portuguese queen consort to Charles II, Catherine of Braganza (remember her?). So, in England at least, tea was from the beginning tending towards the female of the species.

Catherine’s tea-drinking was partly to do with Portugal’s colonial links with Asia, but also with her temperament: solemn and pious, she initially had trouble fitting into the Protestant English court and her preference for a ‘moderate stimulant’ over the ales and beers otherwise drunk marked one of many departures. But tea was quickly owning its stimulating qualities and being marketed as a ‘tonic’, a civilized alternative to alcohol capable of soothing aches’n’pains and spurring on mental capacities: a zeitgeist for the intellectual impetus of the early Enlightenment – as against Charles II’s well-known debauchery – and, in fact, a ‘panacea‘:

Hail, Queen of Plants, Pride of Elysian Bow’rs!
How shall we speak thy complicated Powr’s?
Thou wondrous Panacea, to asswage
The Calentures of Youth’s fermenting rage,
And animate the freezing veins of age.

Nahum Tate, from Panacea: A Poem Upon Tea (1700)

But what started out as a Portuguese import became a matter of English national identity, and by the next century London’s East India Company had established a monopoly on trade, controlling imports into Britain (and thus, prices), using its extensive trade links with Queen Catherine’s dowry –then-Bombay – and the East Indies, and Asia. It was thus that the English turned not into a nation of coffee drinkers, but to devotees of the ‘Queen of Plants’. And a queen she certainly was, and not entirely distinct from the maternal and oft-secluded Queen Anne, who dramatically reduced the size of the English court and inspired a new fashion for calm domesticity and politeness. Thus, the bustling male-dominated coffee-houses, but also a more feminine fix at home…

Five Leaves Left.

So in 1738 tea came to mean not just some withered leaf, but also an opportunity for socialising! Hurrah! To be precise, tea became ‘a meal or social entertainment at which tea is served; especially an ordinary afternoon or evening meal, at which the usual beverage is tea’. The fact that it could connote an ‘ordinary afternoon meal’ made tea a convenient beverage to offer casual social callers, although it was also, of course, a beverage that demanded a whole host of conspicuous purchases: a full tea-set and the crucial Other Element – sugar. Thus your tea-table represented Britain’s colonial interests off in China and India to the tea-side, and Africa and the East Indies to the sugar-side, with all the attendant horrors of the emergent slave trade conveniently swept under the (Persian) rug.

Tea. Photo par Hodge.

The conspicuous consumption tea represented was exacerbated by its price: before mass importation in the mid-century had driven costs down, the leaf itself was fixed at so extortionate a price (a bargain in 1680 was 30s a pound) as to necessitate the purchase of a lockable tea-chest, which would become the responsibility first of the lady of the house, and, when age-appropriate, of her daughter. The woman who held the key to the tea-chest was, naturally, also the woman who made the tea – thus ‘Shall I be mother?’, a phrase of uncertain origin. One theory I came across was that it is a Victorian idiom related to the phenomenon of women unable to breastfeed naturally using teapot spouts to convey milk to their infant instead. OH THE SYMBOLISM.

Whatever the phrase’s specific origins, it’s certainly true that from tea‘s domestic beginnings onwards whole family power structures could hang on which woman this ‘mother’ was. Alas, London’s major galleries forbid image reproduction (WAAH), but if you turn to your handouts,  you will see this in action. This is the Tyers family: that’s Mr Tyers on the left, and his son just down from one of the universities. His daughter, on the far right, is about to be married (she’s putting her gloves on to go out – out of the door and out of the family). Her role as tea-maker has, in consequence, passed onto her younger sister, who now sits as squarely in the middle of the family portrait as she does in the family sphere. Conversely, in Clarissa, when the heroine angers her parents they sack her from her tea-task and grotesquely divide it up among other family members (“My heart was up at my mouth. I did not know what to do with myself”, she recalls, distraught. I WANTED TO MAKE TEA!).

And she feeds you tea and oranges…

Of course, while assigning the tea-making to your daughter could be a loving gesture of trust, it also pimped her marriageability: it requires a cool head and calm demeanour to remember five-plus milk’n’sugar preferences, judge the strength of the tea and pour it, all the while making small-talk and remaining attentive to your guests. Add to this the weighty responsibility of locking the tea away from thieving servants and you have the management skills of housewifery in miniature. It also showed off physical charms: poise, posture, the elegant turn of a wrist, a beautifully framed bosom. To take this momentarily out of the salon, no respectable punter would get down in an eighteenth-century brothel without first taking tea with the girls: Fanny Hill spends at least as much time drinking tea as (That’s enough – Ed), and, of course, this kind of performative tea-ritual femininity is a mainstay in the professional life of the Japanese geisha.

So, along with its identity as a colonial mainstay in Britain’s trading life, tea in its origins is also something specifically feminine: a kind of Muse inspiring intellectual greatness, a Queen to be worshipped as a symbol of Britain’s health and power, and a key element in the women’s domestic lives. It could be stimulating, relaxing and seductive, but, as would become disastrously clear, it was always political.

NEXT WEEK: U is for Uterus

PUSSY

daaa be da-da da da da-da DA da da da da da da-da

Robert Smith, The Lovecats (1983)

What’s New Pussycat?

Where's the cat? The Toilet, by Francis Boucher (1742) (Detail)

It should take no great mind to figure out that there is a relationship between pussy and puss, right? The second is, as with so many -y words, a diminutive form of the first.

Etymologically, puss comes from a family of Germanic words, including the Dutch ‘poes’ (= ‘cat’, or ‘a large soft mass’), and this is one of those words that has had a telling journey from its initial meaning to its modern significance. In simple form, of course, it just means ‘cat’, with a tendency towards the proper name, as in Puss In Boots. The dictionary refines this to a ‘call-name’ or ‘nursery term’ for a cat, perhaps originating in the sort of ‘tsk tsk tsk’ noises even the most Serious People inevitably make when seduced by the classic paws, ears and whiskers combo (‘Here puss puss!’).

Around the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pussy hit its most common modern usage as ‘the female genitals’ (‘the vulva or vagina’, specifically), with an attendant list of seductive compounds and phrases: eat pussy, pussy posse, pussy patrol, pussylicker… &c. For the moment, though, eyes on the road: pussy’s earliest non-feline meaning was ‘a girl or woman exhibiting characteristics associated with a cat, especially sweetness or amiability’ (1580s), where it could also be used as a term of endearment (pussycat. Oh, Mr Jones, really…).

This is, natch, a colloquial usage, as is its subsidiary meaning under this banner, ‘a sweet or effeminate man’. Only later does this degenerate into the unarguably opprobrious, as ‘a weakling, a coward, a sissy’, in which sense citations tend to link it to the idea of ‘a domesticated man’, akin to a ‘house-cat’ (of which more presently). Of course, suggestions about sexuality are never far away from such mockery, and a pussy could, from its earliest beginnings, refer also to ‘a male homosexual’ (where it sits in parallel to pussy‘s final meaning as ‘the anus or mouth of a man as an object of sexual penetration’, connecting it to ‘weakling’ through the concomitant feminisation such penetration implies).

Perfect As Cats

Where's the cat in Jan Steer's The Morning Toilet (1663)? (Detail)

But to really answer the question of when and why cats became synonymous with all this, we must, as usual, ask another question: when and why did cats enter our everyday lives in the first place? It happened late: like so many modern phenomena, cats-as-companions were an eighteenth-century innovation. They had been knocking around before, of course, but primarily as pest control; those showing undue affection for their felines were considered, at best, as a bit eccentric, and, at worst, in league with Satan, and the pagan forces of Nature. Dogs had had a bit more success elbowing their way into domesticity, due to their usefulness in hunting and their essential biddability, but even for them, the eighteenth century was a golden time.

See, it’s easy to forget the fear and awe this Nature lark could inspire in the centuries before efficient systems to keep it under ‘control’, and as the European traveller elbowed his way into Asian and American forests at the dawn of the Enlightenment, he must have felt he was asserting mastery over the very earth (along with the pesky native peoples already living there, of course). With confidence comes bravado, and this increasing satisfaction with Man’s superiority over the elements quickly sparked a fashion for adopting domestic creatures. And so it was that throughout the eighteenth century, cats were welcomed into the home partially as symbols of conquest (where they were painted, along with those Definite Symbols of Conquest, monkeys, parrots and exotically dressed African slave boys).

Inevitably, anything to do with the domestic sphere comes under the auspices of the woman, and the pet-keeping craze was almost universally spoken of as a female-driven trend (although cats were also the favoured companions of weirdo intellectual types like Samuel Johnson, Christopher Smart and Horace Walpole): while the men were out brokering deals down the coffee-house, their wives lounged around in their hoop skirts with an army of diverting creatures to keep them from complete mind-numbing boredom. Of course, fail to go down the coffee-house as a Man, and you risk mockery as a ‘pussy’ in the literal sense of ‘the creature that stays at home with the woman’, viz., a house husband.

Kitten As A Cat

Where's the cat? Where's the cat? 'Le Lever de Fanchon', c18th.

So we have here a consortium of pets, creatures the woman owns, something special to her, a possession and constant companion – and it is easy to see the short step from the woman’s private domestic world to pussy in its Naughty Connotation (spot the cat! spot the cat! passim). So the coincident lexical trend that ended in pussy as genitals must have begun with something along the lines of the now-common association of pet and owner – not a surprising association, since pussy‘s cousin, moggy originally meant just plain old ‘woman or girl’, and didn’t acquire its feline associations until the early twentieth century.

And these associations were standard: we only have to look at the legion eighteenth-century portrait variants on the theme of a girl holding a kitten to see a perceived resemblance extending even to the facial: something about the cat made it a perfect image of womanhood. Its furriness could hardly have been irrelevant (nudge nudge), but the cat’s synonymity with the female must have had a lot to do with felines’ status as a convenient symbol of beauty and cruelty, known to play with their prey before killing it. Thus, little girls looking at Joshua Reynolds’ contribution to the girl/kitten portrait were instructed by an accompanying Moral Poem to look at ‘this thy furry care’ and see ‘an emblem of thyself’, since, once grown, both girl and kitten will find delight in torturing, respectively, ‘some trembling MOUSE’ and ‘some sighing SWAIN’.

We’re gift-wrapped kitty-cats…

The sexual symbolism a cat could suggest also found expression in a series of male-dominated complaints about something slightly more insidious: the familiarities their would-be lovers allowed their pets – from monkeys sharing their mistress’ beds upwards. And, unsurprisingly, there was a particularly misogynistic strain of such writing aimed at the ‘old maid’, who had replaced the never-appeared fiancé and family with a veritable menagerie of domestic animals (an idea that endures to this day, for who else is the ‘crazy cat lady’?), with an inevitable imputation in many cases that there was some kind of sexual element to the displacement, however repressed it might be.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, to find that pussy eventually resolves itself into a final definition as ‘a woman, or women collectively, regarded as a source of sexual intercourse’ (thus pussy patrol), and, in specifically prison-based slang, as ‘a man or boy regarded in this way’ (cf. bitch). Curious that feline and canine should find themselves so aligned…

NEXT WEEK: Q is for Queen

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