Talk:Flapper
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- a Flapper History (Actually and external link to Neopets --ZayZayEM 01:10, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC))
Lookin' Good!
This external link does seem to work. It may just be me, but I was asked to log in first (after I had typed in "Flapper"). Once I did, it was all cool, thank you for the awsome link. Rock on, and best wishes. -Mel KF 02:12, 18 Dec 2003 (UTC)
- If a direct link to some actual relevent content is impossible, I think we can do without it. -- Infrogmation 05:40, 18 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Contents |
[edit] More than one meaning?
A story I once heard makes the flapper a person sitting at the side of the (English?) king.
This meaning is also used in Gulliver's Travel by Jonathan Swift, part 3, chapter 2:
... Ay my alighting, I was surrounded with a crowd of people, but those who stood nearest seemed to be of better quality. They beheld me with all the marks and circumstances of wonder; neither indeed was I much in their debt, having never till then seen a race of mortals so singular in their shapes, habits, and countenances. Their heads were all reclined, either to the right, or the left; one of their eyes turned inward, and the other directly up to the zenith. Their outward garments were adorned with the figures of suns, moons, and stars; interwoven with those of fiddles, flutes, harps, trumpets, guitars, harpsichords, and many other instruments of music, unknown to us in Europe. I observed, here and there, many in the habit of servants, with a blown bladder, fastened like a flail to the end of a stick, which they carried in their hands. In each bladder was a small quantity of dried peas, or little pebbles, as I was afterwards informed. With these bladders, they now and then flapped the mouths and ears of those who stood near them, of which practice I could not then conceive the meaning. It seems the minds of these people are so taken up with intense speculations, that they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others, without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing; for which reason, those persons who are able to afford it always keep a flapper (the original is CLIMENOLE) in their family, as one of their domestics; nor ever walk abroad, or make visits, without him. And the business of this officer is, when two, three, or more persons are in company, gently to strike with his bladder the mouth of him who is to speak, and the right ear of him or them to whom the speaker addresses himself. This flapper is likewise employed diligently to attend his master in his walks, and upon occasion to give him a soft flap on his eyes; because he is always so wrapped up in cogitation, that he is in manifest danger of falling down every precipice, and bouncing his head against every post; and in the streets, of justling others, or being justled himself into the kennel. ...
- The term, as used by Swift is also mentioned in Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, if I'm not mistaken. It's certainly worth mentioning.
- Peter Isotalo 20:03, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
[edit] oh, man
Okay, having no proof of certain things, I have taken them out. First, I took out "drank in public" because that implies on the sidewalks, in the streets, not at parties. That means without glasses, tables. That is called a wine-o. If someone can reference it, they can put it back in. Also, I took out "-men that they would have sex with" because that's made clear later without being so cheezy. I took out the "wrapped their breasts in cloth to make them smaller" because that's quite a claim for not having a reference. There it is.
- I reverted your edits. But I'll try to find the references for those claims later today. -BrianSmithson 12:27, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
The last link is the only one that suggests actual binding the way we know it today, all others talk about bras that were made to flatten. The wiki article as it is seems to suggest that tight bindings were the norm, rather than tight bras and straight line dresses as it seems in these links. It would be fair to mention the occasion of tight binding or dieting to gain the flapper look, but these links say that it was not such a desperate endevor for most. It's a subtle distinction, I know.
[edit] slang
Flapper slang expanded, and may be expanded even more than that. The link added is to 1920's slang in general, but the stuff in the article is most assuredly flapper.
[edit] confusion
It seems like the origins of flappers talks more about the times leading up to the 1920s, prohibition, speakeasys and gang violence than about the origins of the girls behaviour specifically
[edit] The Magazine Cover
What's the date on the magazine cover? It seems to be pre-World War I. This would be important for dating the term.
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- The life magazine cover is 1922 and the "Flapper Magazine" was titled 1922 in it's jpeg form by whoever uploaded it.
Flappers are generally tied to speakeasies, and the whiskey that trademarked them was certainly not as common before prohibition, or as fashionable. I guess we all wanna be outlaws, just a little.
[edit] Betty Boop
Betty boop is way off as far as being flapper. She hasn't got the boy-look, in fact, she's really curvaceous. She has clevage. While understandably some aspects of the flapper could not be shown in a cartoon, while they couldn't have her drinking whiskey- they could have had her in flapper dress, or have a keen flapper sarcasm. Betty was incredibly malleable and innocent.
Betty is a pin-up girl, which has kind of sort of ties to the flapper, but only if you read flappers as being the end all be all origin of promiscuity.
The only similarity to flappers Betty boop has is having kind of short hair, and dancing.
Also, she was created in 1930, at the end of the flapper era. She more closely resembles the pin up girl Betty Grable who was popular just before the time of Betty Boop's creation.
Minne mouse is at least independent and defiant as could be portrayed on reel at the time. They could have gone that direction with Betty- they didn't because she's not supposed to be a flapper.
- I reverted, but you've almost convinced me. I'm reluctant to dismiss Betty Boop, because Charles Solomon considers her "the archetypical flapper". Here's the quote from his The History of Animarion: Enchanted Drawings (1994): "She was the archetypical flapper, the speakeasy Girl Scout with a heart of gold—already something of an anachronism in 1930. Despite the advent of the Great Depression, the Betty Boop cartoons remained rooted in the Jazz Age." But then he goes on to describe how feminine Betty Boop is.
- So, did the concept of the flapper change with the times to get away from the boyishness? Or does Mr. Solomon simply misunderstand what a flapper is? (By the way, be sure to sign your comments on talk pages by typing four ~ symbols in a row.) —BrianSmithson 06:24, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
If she's an anachronism in the time she was created, maybe she's an attempt to remake the flapper for a new generation interested in the old jazz age but knows nothing about it. There were a lot of jazz girls or singers that didn't have the flapper look, mainly burlesque dancers. When Betty Boop was created, the great controversy wasn't liquor or the pushy independence of young women, but the massive shutting down of burlesque houses.
So to the people at the time she was a throwback, because she was having fun in a time when living was easy. To an audience in the great depression, those are pretty remarkable similarities. But to us now, having a good time isn't such a dramatic defining point, and to call Betty Boop a flapper based on her attempt to appeal to half forgotten fantasies about the jazz age in the Depression is to confuse the issue.
This is why we have the characters played by Clara Bow as an example of flappers but not the 1975 musical Chicago. Fictional idealized versions of the flapper are molded to the ideals of that time. So an ideal archetype of fictional flappers may have been formed around the idea that the 1920s weren't just a fun time, but a simpler time when women were sweet, malleable and kind of dumb. We can see that this is kind of a popular idea with the babyish, whining, impulsive Roxie Hart. But from their speech, their habits and anything really historical about them, flappers are not like this. Arguably, within the Jazz age there must be some push and pull between the general ideal of cool superiority and helpless cuteness. But with all the controlled dressforms, sardonic slang and so on, it seems like flappers are almost exclusively cool and superior, and that jazz acts that played up the sexy victim weren't ever called flapper in the sense of the social standing.
So Betty Boop may be an archetype of the flapper in the strictest sense of the word. She's a common ideal for flapper characters in the literary or film world, not because she's the first or most genuine flapper, but because she set up her own roles for the jazz girl from which other versions of the flapper are derived, but that doesn't mean that it isn't just a popularized misconception.
Flappers as they are described in this article would not identify at all with the sweet, innocent, cinched waist Betty. Lotusduck 20:01, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
- Okay, I've removed Betty from the article again. I agree that she is a flapper in her free-spiritedness, love of jazz dancing, etc., but she doesn't fit the archetype as it was understood in the '20s. Better to not, as you say, confuse the issue. —BrianSmithson 02:07, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Gibson Girls
The article as it was a minute ago had more information on the gibson girls than the page on the gibson girls does. The idea that world war I gender imbalance caused flapper rebellion is neither common nor accepted. If there is a single dissertation promoting that claim, the idea can be used later in notes outside of the main body of flapper origins.
Prohibition is the main idea historians tie to the reckless fun of the roaring twenties. It is the most obvious and neccessary flapper origin. The article as it was seemed to confuse 1910 styles with flapperdom as we know it. The styles of Coco Chanel may have contributed to the boyish look, but the similarity is not clear.
Explanations for when the word came into use and when the word started to mean flapper lifestyle come from the oxford english dictionary.
[edit] Sound byte?
I've linked to sound byte from the term catchword, but wikipedia doesn't have an entry for sound byte. I thought it would. Does it have another spelling, or is there another similar concept to catch-word or sound-byte that anyone can think of? Lotusduck 04:37, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
- Perhaps catch phrase? —BrianSmithson 13:46, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
Oooh, good one. A sound byte basically is a press catch phrase. Similar to a talking point, but not as insidious and political. I'll change catch word to link to catch phrase for now. Since the Oxford English dictionary called it a press catch word, I wanted that phrase to be in there somehow -Lotusduck too lazy to log in
[edit] Popularized flappers as they were seen from a different period
Flappers as a popular image outside the 1920s differ from the flapper ideal in the time when they existed, but perhaps to keep these out of the main article, we add another header for the fictional flappeer out of the original context of flappers. None have the slang, and most are fleetingly historically accurate to the flapper ideal, yet still identifyably fictional flappers. If this is a neccessary part of this article, some examples would be Betty Boop, Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly from the various incarnations of Chicago, and Huguette Verberie from Pas sur la bouche- although the original non-musical Chicago was an in-context 1920s play and not really as much of an abstraction.
Anyhow, I haven't even convinced myself that this is worth doing, or how it would be organized, for instance as a list, or with descriptions for how they are flapper and how they are not or what.
- I'd say that a discussion of flappers in popular culture and the changing flapper archetype would be a very nice addition. I'd caution against a list format; articles read much better when ideas are organized into paragraphs. Good luck with it if you decide to pursue such an additon. —BrianSmithson 18:13, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
Eh, I haven't found many scholarly papers comparing the accuracy and flapperdom of speakeasy girls in the movies, so I couldn't do it without original research, and wikipedia is not the place for original research. Lotusduck 17:08, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Alternate meaning
Should the alternate meaning section be below External Links? Aren't External Links traditionally the last section in an entry? --Ben moss 00:50, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
- You're right; alternate meanings should be at the top as part of a disambiguation statement. — BrianSmithson 01:06, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] International phenomenon
The article as it is makes Flappers sound particularly American and English. This is not so. They had a presence in the rest of Europe as well, or at the very least in France and most likely elsewhere. I have French magazine caricatures and fashion images… The idea that American prohibition was that large an influence has to be taken with a pinch of salt. I’d have to say that the ending of the First World War would have had a much greater bearing, obviously (this is supported by most writing on the subject), as well as the exporting of American culture (such as Jazz) by record sales, American servicemen, and cultural exchange through the popular films at the time. In fact the start of the "origins of the flapper" section would seem to have been writen by someone who knows primarly about them through watching gangster films about the 1920's. I will make an edit along these lines, change it back if you find it unacceptable.OzoneO 12:37, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
