Fans were once used to stay cool—and communicate
The hand fan isn’t simply there to provide the means to cool you down.
After all, its movement can indicate so much more than a need for a breeze.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, the handheld fan also became a powerful, sometimes subtle, form of communication. With a flourish or tap, it could hint that it’s time to flirt or kiss, to woo or even stand back and move away. Fan usage developed a language, or code, all its own with fan owners wielding this language.
That’s the subject of a Saturday lecture at the P.J. Ahern Home titled “Secret Codes: the
the Language of the Fan.” Jamie Simmons, curator at the Texarkana Museums System, will discuss how folding fans have been used as a communication tool. Attendees will even get their own fan with which to practice and to take home.
The TMS has exhibited the collection of fans at the museum before, but never focused on this aspect of their use until now, the curator explained.
“It’s going to be a casual program. We’ll begin with a history of the fan lecture, but I’m also going to show vintage film clips that go through the language of the fan aspect and how that developed, along with actually showing people how the different positions of the fan meant different things at different times,” Simmons said. At one point, there was something of a Morse code in how one held a fan.
“It’s almost like flags, you know,” Simmons said, noting despite the fan’s humble beginnings as a manual device to help you cool down, fans became more. As humans do, they turned them into something beautiful and even incorporating them as part of religious ceremonies.
“They were a status symbol,” Simmons said, explaining that the accordion-style folding fan was developed in China. They’re technically sophisticated. When they made their way into Europe, they were used by people with status and wealth. To make them, one joined a guild.
“Along the 18th century, the folding fans became less expensive, more readily available to just about anyone,” Simmons said. There were still different levels, from paper to silk. Artists like Edgar Degas later painted fan fabric, she said.
The fan became part of a person’s body language, Simmons said.
“Through body language, you could, intentionally or not, communicate certain things,” she said. The way you held a fan was part of that. Then people cultivated its use as a weapon, of sorts.
In the 18th century, this was about flirting in public, Simmons said, but the moral code in the 19th century changed, meaning it changed to flirting in secret.
“In the 19th century it was about skirting the decorum in a way that wasn’t going to be noticed,” Simmons said.
There are some basic moves that have lasted to today, she explained. Touching your cheek with the fan? That indicates friendship. Touching your lips? “Basically means I’m ready to be kissed,” Simmons said.
There was an art to all this, and a woman could communicate with a fan using skill and speed.
To get a sense of this language and the coded things communicated, attend the Saturday lecture at the P.J. Ahern Home.
(Admission: $3 per person for TMS members, $8 for non-members. To register, call Jamie Simmons at 903-7934831 or email her at curator@ texarkanamuseums.org. The P.J. Ahern Home is located at 403 Laurel St. in Texarkana, Ark.)