Abstract
During the eighteenth century, both at close quarters and in crowds, folding fans served two kinds of femininity—flirtatiousness and modesty—allowing women to communicate a variety of affects, interrogatives, and illocutionary acts. Cheaply printed "maps" of the King's Opera House annual box subscribers' lists mounted as fans for seasons between 1787 and 1808 open up an additional perspective. Within the opera house, women dominated social affairs and wielded political influence over elite London society and national politics. This essay posits scenarios about how the information on these convenient box-plan objects was utilized by women aristocrats, gentry, and commoners with respect to sociability, regimes of observation, celebrity, social status, and social mobility that enhanced both social control and self-advancement in a constantly recalibrated register of prestige.
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