Snuff box

Public Access Description:

This snuff box was one of 13 objects investigated in 2019 as part of ‘Gendering Interpretations’: a collaborative project between the V&A, University of Plymouth, Vasa Museum (Stockholm), Lund University, Leiden University and the University of Western Australia.

The anonymous text Pandora's Box: A Satyr Against Snuff (1718) bemoaned that, “For females fair and formal fops to please, / The mines are robb’d of ore, of shells the seas.” Tortoiseshell for snuff boxes and other trinkets was mostly imported from the Caribbean. The role of women in the tortoiseshell trade, and the gender dynamics of indigenous Caribbean (Taíno) society, were shaped by European colonisation from the late fifteenth century onwards. When Taíno men were conscripted to labour in Spanish mines, women took over hunting duties: without specialised hunting experience, they found it easier to fish for turtles than to kill land animals, so turtle meat and tortoiseshell trading became far more important.

Early opponents of tobacco tried to convince men to give up smoking because their wives would hate the smell. Later, snuff became associated with gender nonconformity. Satirists portrayed the “formal fops” of Pandora’s Box as an effeminate elite, more interested in their appearance – and snuff – than in serious political matters. Snuff-taking women were mocked for unladylike behaviour: one anonymous author wrote, “Our English Women...do so transform the Physiogonomy with this nasty Snuff that Foreigners take them to be young Soldiers, with long Mustachoes or Whiskers”.

The design on this box, showing Mars and Venus, is one of many sexually suggestive snuff box lids created for young male consumers. In early modern culture, Mars and Venus were well-known for their adulterous affair. Only in the late twentieth century did they become emblematic of a simplistic gender binary in which “men are from Mars and women are from Venus”.

Curatorial comment:

This snuff box was one of 13 objects investigated in 2019 as part of ‘Gendering Interpretations’: a collaborative project between the V&A, University of Plymouth, Vasa Museum (Stockholm), Lund University, Leiden University and the University of Western Australia. This project aimed to recover the complex gender dynamics that made objects meaningful to early modern people, and to increase the visibility of women and LGBTQ people in museum collections. Research on the V&A objects was carried out by Dr Kit Heyam (University of Plymouth).

In addition to the findings noted in the Public Access Description, research on this object revealed the following:

Colonisation of the Caribbean – from which Europeans sourced tortoiseshell and silver, enabling the crafting of objects such as this snuff box – reshaped the gender dynamics of the indigenous Caribbean Taíno society. Taíno people did not have strict gendered division of labour – women, like men, played important political and economic roles – and this enabled their society to avoid collapsing after Spanish colonisers conscripted Taíno men to labour in their silver mines, since the women left behind could easily take on the jobs that the men had previously done. When Spanish men married Taíno women, they imposed European gender roles – but the women retained their cultural identity, bringing Taíno cooking practices to their new households.

Taíno women also continued to hunt turtles for food and the tortoiseshell trade. In fact, it has been argued that the hunting of turtles was crucial to the success of the European colonial project: without this source of food, early Caribbean colonies would not have survived.

The tobacco that was stored in this box was also grown on colonised land and tended by African slaves. The early English colony of Virginia quickly became a tobacco plantation, and in 1621, when women were shipped over to help establish the colony, the crew who transported them were paid 120lb of tobacco for each woman who successfully married a male colonist. Tobacco was thus directly implicated in the treatment of women as transactional goods.

It is likely that any object whose material was sourced from colonised countries, or with links to slavery, has a similar gendered history. For more information on the links between slave-ownership and the V&A, see the previous research project ‘Opening the Cabinets of Curiosities Part II’: https://www.vam.ac.uk/research/projects/opening-the-cabinet-of-curiosities-part-ii.

Tobacco – both as snuff and for smoking – was recommended as a panacea for a wide variety of health complaints, including sexually transmitted diseases and abortion (supposedly induced by excessive sneezing). The French queen Catherine de Medici used tobacco to treat her migraines, and later decreed that it should be named ‘Herba Regina’ as a result. In 1624, Pope Urban VIII issued a bull banning snuff-taking on pain of excommunication. It has been claimed that this ban was motivated by a fear that the sneezing caused by snuff ‘was thought to be too close to sexual ecstasy’; however, on inspection of Urban’s bulls, this appears to be an urban myth.

(Dr Kit Heyam, August 2019)

References:

Key references

• Jerome E. Brooks, Tobacco. Its history illustrated by the books, manuscripts and engravings in the library of George Arents, Jr. [A catalogue of the library.] Together with an introductory essay, a glossary and bibliographic notes (New York: Rosenbach Co, 1937-52.)
• Kathleen Deagan, ‘Reconsidering Taíno Social Dynamics after Spanish Conquest: Gender and Class in Culture Contact Studies’, American Antiquity, 69:4 (Oct., 2004), 597-626
• M. T. Jones-Davies, ‘Discord in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida; or, The Conflict between “Angry Mars and Venus Queen of Love”’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 25:1 (Winter, 1974), 33-41
• Peter McNeil (1999) “That Doubtful Gender”: Macaroni Dress and Male Sexualities, Fashion Theory, 3:4, 411-447

Further reading

• Erin Mackie, ‘Boys Will Be Boys: Masculinity, Criminality, and the Restoration Rake’, The C18th 46.2 (2005), 129-49
• J. T. McCullen, Jr., ‘Tobacco: A Recurrent Theme in Eighteenth-Century Literature’, The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Vol. 22, No. 2(Jun., 1968), pp. 30-39
• John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2005)
• Nikolay Sapundzhiev and Jochen Alfred Werner, ‘Nasal snuff: historical review and health related aspects’, The Journal of Laryngology & Otology, September 2003, Vol. 117, pp. 686–691: