Custers Luck
Sergeant Major
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2013
- Location
- Chesterfield VA.
WELL who knew this, I guess they were not only used for the warmth of the day....
No way a man could possibly understand or break the fan code.
Hmmm....interesting..... then why did so many men go see fan dancing???So much truth to the Venus/Mars thing.
These signals are for the ladies themselves.
No way a man could possibly understand or break the fan code.
Cause that's a different kind of dane'sn we understand
Pet Peeve--The Language of the Fan
It never seems to fail: when a docent or re-enactor group decides to do something on "Victorian Etiquette", they haul out "The Language of the Fan"... The notion is that there was this universally understood form of semaphore which was somehow used to convey secret love messages between young ladies and young gentlemen...
The best that can be said about it though, is that it MAY have been mentioned in a period source, but there is no evidence that I have found that would suggest that it was ever put into real practice. It would appear that it never caught on.
"Unfortunately, the fan language--and other, similar codes like the language of the handkerchief and the language of the parasol--were largely the result of advertising campaigns meant to popularize and sell accessories. There is little evidence that the fan language was ever in widespread use, though the concept was satirized by several writers in the 18th and 19th centuries."
I don't know where CL got her list of behaviours associated with fans,
but to equate that with an across the board declaration that because there exists somewhere a light hearted explanation of a kind of sociological ' fan dance ' of a certain era, there's just no attention paid to detailed research on women's History, is a purdy fur stretch.