“Sexy in a ‘Tunbridge Wells’ Sort of Way”: A Study in the Literary Iconography of Place

Abstract

Afriend who left Canada to study acting England tells of an audition at a London theater school. The director instructs the female actor playing opposite my friend to sexy. She endeavors to do so, and the director amends his advice: No, not like that. I mean . . . a 'Tunbridge Wells' sort of way.1 The first question this raises is an obvious one: what on earth does it mean to a 'Tunbridge Wells' sort of way? A second and related question is less obvious, but ultimately more interesting. What makes the in- junction, sexy a 'Tunbridge Wells' sort of way, a meaningful utterance? Again, part of the answer is obvious. Place names signify. They evoke a complex set of stereotypes and associations. So an audience might expect actors attempting to look in a Parisian way, in a 'New York' way, or in a 'Bangkok ' way, to adopt slightly different poses and expressions. These poses and expressions would draw on both flattering and unsavoury ethnic, cultural, and gender stereotypes, and they would say at least as much about the actors and the audiences as they would about the places. Nevertheless they would say something about the places, or perhaps rather, about the conventions of representation surrounding the places-which might often be conventions of misrepresentation. They would, presumably, distil a host of previous literary, dramatic, historical, and popular references. My purpose here is to reverse that process and to identify some of the historical (and especially literary-historical) branches, stems, roots, and seeds of an expression like sexy a 'Tunbridge Wells' sort of way, particularly as they developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.A survey of representations of Tunbridge Wells reveals both continuity and change. While the spa town the Weald of Kent has been consistently gendered as feminine, both conventional and unconventional ways, discursive uses of that gendered identity have evolved over time. In distinguishing between static and dynamic spaces, Michel de Certeau has remarked on the importance of narrative, the stories . . . transform into spaces or spaces into places (118). In the two centuries after the discovery of mineral springs near the village of Tonbridge 1606, a complex interaction of material and narrative activity performed both sorts of transformation on Tunbridge Wells. First, builders, promoters, entrepreneurs, physicians, visitors, poets, and dramatists transformed a mineral spring and a few surrounding hills into a space for the simultaneously troubling and titillating (at least to the patriarchal mind) exercise of female sexual agency. Then, beginning the latter half of the eighteenth century, changing patterns of activity and changing modes of representation transformed Tunbridge Wells from a space which action occurs, a space through which real and fictional persons move, to a static place, a place where real or fictional persons end up, or to a place they come from. In the process, literary Tunbridge Wells was transformed from scene to sign, from the scene of sexual adventures and contests, to a conventional literary sign of stability, fixity, retirement, and especially of desexualized femininity or emasculation.Technically, there is no to tell that the director's phrase in a 'Tunbridge Wells' sort of way serves to attenuate, rather than to intensify the word sexy, or indeed, that it points to a wider pattern of usage. But knowing something of the twentieth-century reputation of the town as a stuffy upper-middleclass retirement community, the archetypal source of indignant letters to national newspapers signed Disgusted Tunbridge Wells, most English actors would understand the expression as a deliberate oxymoron, and strive for awkwardness and incongruity. The association of Tunbridge Wells with prudish privilege, though modern, has a long and rich literary history. …