SOURCE: McKenna, Bernard. “‘Fancies of Exclusive Possession’: Validation and Dissociation in Mary Seacole's England and Caribbean.” Philological Quarterly 76, no. 2 (spring 1997): 219-39.

[In the following essay, McKenna analyzes the hegemony that colonizing cultures have over their conquests and the dynamic created when the colonized both accept and reject the new culture.]

The English essayist William Hazlitt spoke without optimism of travel and its potential consequences.

I am one of those who do not think that much is to be gained in point either of temper or understanding by travelling abroad. Give me the true, stubborn, unimpaired John Bull feeling, that keeps fast hold of the good things it fancies in its exclusive possession … What is the use of keeping up an everlasting see-saw in the imagination between brown-stout and vin ordinaire, between long and short waists, between English gravity and French levity. … What, in short, do we obtain by the contrary method of vain and vexatious comparison, but jealousy of the advantages of others, but dissatisfaction with our own? … Man was made to stay at home … to vegetate, to be rooted to the earth, to cling to local prejudice, to luxuriate in the follies of his forefathers.¹

Hazlitt uses the familiar term “John Bull” to refer to England, a term originally presented in satire but soon adopted with pride to represent the perceived unique qualities present in the English character. The “feeling” that he cherishes then suggests a provincialism of mind and attitude that values the supposed singular qualities of the British subject:² his superior racial and cultural characteristics, his temperamental nature, his blind loyalty, even if occasionally punctuated by fits of invective. Hazlitt's essay further suggests that he acknowledges the illusory nature of English provincialism with all its “prejudices” and “follies,” but the essay also suggests that Hazlitt saw value in these “fancies” because they gave them a sense of confidence and assurance.

Certainly, it is ironic then that the same provincialism Hazlitt would preserve by rooting his fellow citizens serviced an ethos of imperial conquest. Indeed, there is a contradiction in a nation whose “expansion was supported by a loose racial myth” that would initiate encounters and interactions (and potential contamination) with “lesser” communities. Specifically, the “British were the Germanic, Teutonic, Nordic race, as opposed to inferior Latin, Celtic, and Semitic peoples. The myth is of a hardy, northern people destined to expand.”³ In order to inure the traveler and explorer against possible contamination, a “discourse” of racial and cultural superiority emerged, in mid-to-late-Victorian England, that would be serviced by the creation of an historical, cultural, and economic lineage and inheritance that can be found in the writings of Charles Kingsley, E. B. Tylor, and, ultimately, Sir James Frazer.

In terms of English history, expansion was celebrated as the expression of the Anglo-Saxon as opposed to Norman character … which was to associate it with middle-class values of law, industry, and domestic sentiment; it was also associated with Elizabethan expansion … which allowed for values of adventure.

(Cotsell 16)

However, even as England found her fullest expression as a military and economic force, fissures began to appear in the narratives associated with expansion. Travel writing not only began to question English and imperial values but began to be written by figures from the periphery of society, by individuals whose claims to the masculine, protestant, and racially pure “John Bull” inheritance are questionable. Even narratives such as The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands whose stated aims and rhetorical strategy seem to support tenants of expansion subtly undermine the imperium.⁴

Mary Seacole tends to subvert a discourse of English colonialism by subtly reaffirming three important aspects of her Jamaican identity in relation to England as a colonizing force: race, spirituality, peripheral membership in the empire. However, her work does not initially or overtly validate her unique non-British character. On one level, because “Seacole's narrative” reflects “the freedom to possess the Caribbean as native space legally as well as culturally” in the sense that liberty “is reconstituted as the freedom to possess the imperial center as a site of self-definition,”⁵ so “there are times when the author's voice assumes the tone of an English gentleman, that is, reflecting the prejudices and mores of the class to whom the book was directed.”⁶ The consequence of echoing the biases of mid century, for Mrs. Seacole, would be a more likely acceptance of her narrative by an English public. Specifically, most Victorian travellers must show how they remain separate from the contagion of the abroad in order to maintain the colonial discourse. However, Mary Seacole is the contagion. Consequently, her narrative must rely on the rhetoric of imperial expansion in order to testify to the fact that she does not carry the contagion with her, that she is not part of the alien. On this level, her work finds a resonance with the group Edward Brathwaite, writing in the 1970s, calls the “Creole Intellectual Elite” which is defined as

a small number of white, black, and coloured politicians reacting against (mainly because excluded from) the privileged classes. This group became the spokesmen for the majority of coloureds, who, miscegenated between Europe and Africa, felt they ‘had no country’ except it was that of their birth; and for those blacks (educated, ambitious, nervous, successful) who wanted to have nothing to do with their origins and the taint of slavery. … For them, the Caribbean was a substitute for Europe, not an autonomous creature in itself.⁷

Further, Mrs. Seacole becomes a type of George Lamming's “exile.”

When the exile is a man of colonial orientation, and his chosen residence is the country which colonised his own history, then there are certain complications. For each exile has not only got to prove his worth to the other, he has to win the approval of Headquarters, meaning in the case of the West Indian writer, England.⁸

However, Mary Seacole's text does not only exist as narrative supporting the imperium.

She subverts the British colonial discourse both implicitly and explicitly. The implicit contradiction of a narrative of empire written by a figure on the margins of the imperial system leads to the same sort of uncertainty highlighted by James Clifford, in his essay “Traveling Cultures”; it is on this level that Mary Seacole subtly undermines the values of the imperium. Specifically, Clifford suggests that the “hotel” (the word recalls Mrs. Seacole's hotel's in Central America, Jamaica, and the Crimea) operates “as station, airport terminal, hospital, and so on: somewhere you can pass through, where encounters are fleeting, arbitrary” (96).⁹ Clifford goes on to suggest a figure that can stand for the sense of “travel and displacement” in the “disconcertingly hybrid ‘native’ met at the ends of the earth: strangely familiar, and different precisely in that unprocessed familiarity” (97). Mary Seacole, of Scottish and Creole ancestry, writing a travel narrative that ostensibly supports but covertly undermines English provincialism, speaks to an insular English bias from the position of Clifford's hybrid, comforting yet disquieting, reassuring yet unsettling. Mary Seacole subverts the imperial system even though she “does not challenge the idea of Empire, but she does struggle to redefine her place in it” (Paquet 652). The result is a tacit valuing of the “Other”; her act of writing defies English bias against the intellectual abilities of other races and cultures. Consequently, her text produces a sense of association simultaneous with dissociation. She both values and devalues English colonial epistemology. However, she values and devalues certain aspects of her Caribbean identity as well, positing representations contradictory to mid-nineteenth-century English convention in the depiction of blacks and the supposed “lesser races,” of mystical as opposed to rational spirituality, and of the Irish (like the countries of the West Indies, a nation at once within and without the imperial structure). The resulting text of The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands embodies the contradictions of imperial expansion. On one level, the urge to expand requires the production of an hegemony of racial and cultural superiority. However, on another level, just as William Hazlitt suggests, encounters with alternative societies and peoples will shake the “fast hold of the good things” the English mind “fancies … its exclusive possession.”

Mary Seacole systematically represents blacks, Amerindians, and Creole populations in negative terms linking pejorative physical and behavioral characteristics to race and, ultimately, staging those racial differences for a white audience. She reserves her representation of physical appearance for blacks describing them with “eyes rolling angrily” and “white teeth gleaming” (115).¹⁰ Her focus on teeth and eyes twisted in emotion gives the impression of a threatening animal who is angry, whose physical form channels emotion without intellectual discipline or mitigation. The word “rolling” suggests deliberate and threatening action, a focused hostility. The word “gleaming” suggests a weapon sharpened and poised, prepared for an assault. Later, she represents blacks as “good-for-nothing … cooks [who], instead of lending me their aid, would stand by and laugh with all their teeth” (141). Rather than a figure of threat, the black cooks become comic. The stress is on the external, the immediate, implying a connection between the impulsive and the character of the black. Seacole will also criticize, in detail, the supposed additional character flaws of both blacks and Amerindians. However, that she chooses only to focus on examining the physical form of blacks indicates a particular bias in her representation. The deep black skin, as opposed to the lighter skin color of Amerindians, creates a further distance between blacks and white Englishmen. As skin color and race were considered markers of relative intelligence and capability, it is logical to conclude that Mrs. Seacole's narrative would privilege the position of the white English reader in her attempt to write for an English audience. Moreover, her efforts suggest an attempt to distance herself from black colored skin. In the latter description, she focuses on work while the blacks are simply observers mocking her efforts. Further, she rationally describes the advance of the threatening figure in the former example not allowing herself to be overcome with emotion. Further, she reflects on the blacks in both scenes. Whereas, the blacks themselves only react to immediate stimuli. Her motives behind the effort to draw a distinction between blacks and herself take on a more complex association after considering the comments of a contemporary of Mrs. Seacole: “She told me that she had Scotch blood in her veins. I must say that she did not look like it, but the old lady spoke proudly of this point in her genealogy.”¹¹ Mrs. Seacole may be attempting to detach herself from the negative connotations directly associated with her dark skin. She, by assuming the stereotypical representation of blacks in her narrative and by projecting it outside of her, distances herself from the stereotype (and the dark skin color) implicitly casting herself as the insider.

In other parts of her narrative, she, focusing on behavioral characteristics, suggests that the “Central Americans should adopt the hammock as their national badge; but for sheer necessity they would never leave it” (14). “The poor cowards never stirred a finger to clean out their close, reeking huts, or rid the damp streets of the rotting accumulation of months” (27). In addition, Mrs. Seacole writes that she “found the Spanish Indians treacherous, passionate, and indolent, with no higher aim or object but simply to enjoy the present after their own torpid, useless fashion” (72). Again, the portrait is of a racially “inferior” group who focus on immediate gratification. Like the black figure with gleaming teeth, the Indians represent threat as well as laziness suggesting a stationary people, indolent, chained to their hammocks, and unwilling to “stir” to clean their environment and preserve their health. The representation of their behavior implies a connection between the outbreak of the epidemic and some ingrained racial propensity to laziness contrasting with the English-Nordic-Teutonic values of industry and labor that manage to avoid the most severe effects of the disease, that manage, in the person of Mrs. Seacole, to service a cure for the outbreak. Further, she goes on to represent blacks as superstitious portraying “the silly fellow [who] had a notion that the soul of the slain Russian soldiers had entered the bodies of the rats, and made vengeful war upon their late enemies” (116). Once again, Mrs. Seacole is the rational observer, the reporter of the irrational for her audience. She, once again, contrasts her behavior with that of the inferior racial type.

While in the Crimea, Mrs. Seacole assists the soldiers in their representation of “home.” Commenting on their establishing a mock race course, she observes that “in order that the course should still more closely resemble Ascot or Epsom, some soldiers blackened their faces and came out as Ethiopian serenaders admirably, although it would puzzle the most ingenious to guess where they got their wigs and banjoes from” (183). Even though some critics represent Mrs. Seacole's behavior as a surreptitious “counter-discourse,” indicating that, although the staged event is

[r]eminiscient of minstrelsy, these performative inversions call attention to the temporary and theatrical stature of white women and Black men who can provisionally occupy the spotlight only as a spectacle to be consumed. The Black woman, the storyteller, authorizes and instructs such transgressions but manages to divert the spotlight from her own material embodiment as the exception to the rules regulating race and gender codes.¹²

However, such interpretations assume a late-twentieth-century readerships' sensibilities conditioned to see black-faced depictions as a demeaning representation.¹³ For a mid-nineteenth-century audience, the narrative facilitates the white image of the black and portrays them as the audience would have expected them to be portrayed. Further, as Robinson suggests, the representation allows Mrs. Seacole to disassociate herself from the portrayal and manipulates her position so that she is outside the staged event.

Moreover, Mrs. Seacole's depictions of blacks and racial “inferiors” are reminiscent of mid-Victorian portrayals. Specifically, as Robinson indicates, Seacole's representation recalls the black minstrel.

Early ‘nigger’ minstrel shows consisted of a small number of performers who began the entertainment seated on chairs in a horseshoe formation, with the two corner-men clowns, Tambo and Bones, at either end of this semi-circle and Mister Interlocutor in the centre. … [T]he interlocutor's function was to introduce and guide the proceedings through its various parts, drawing upon the troupe's repertory of acts and material, and adapting it to the audience's response as appropriate. An impresario he generally assumed an air of pomposity and hateur which was continually subject to deflation. … The afterpeice could also be given over to Shakespearean burlesque, circus-style slapstick or farcical skits.¹⁴

Mrs. Seacole, within the analogous relationship between the minstrel show and her narrative, becomes a type of interlocutor. She interprets black behavior for a white audience, stages it, and adapts it to conform to her audience's expectations. She too assumes an attitude of haughtiness and grandeur that could become comic if she ever were to be deflated. That she remains apart from the stereotype, that she distances herself from the blacks and other “darker” racial groups, that she emphasizes her Scottish ancestry serve to keep her from degenerating into a comic type of interlocutor. The context of her representation explains her efforts to stand apart from blacks. Her narrative must conform to mid-Victorian racial expectations but, at the same time, she must not allow her narrative to degenerate into a burlesque. She does conform to the translator's function of the interlocutor but avoids the humorous associations of the role in order to preserve the integrity of her narrative and in order to preserve her role as a non-black. She is physically dark but, in terms of attitude and disposition, she is English. Her behavior confirms this. Her ability to keep the narrative from degenerating to a comic parody of a travel narrative confirms this. In contrast, the interlocutor of Victorian melodrama can communicate as a non-black for short periods but he will ultimately degenerate into his “natural” form confirming his supposed racial inferiority. That her narrative does not degenerate suggests that Mrs. Seacole's “natural” form is that of a white Englishwoman. However, the “natural” form of the objects of her characterization is black and inferior and drawn according to the minstrel show stereotype.

In terms of their physical characteristics, blacks were consistently represented in “comic blackface with its broad manic grin” (Pickering 179). Further, the “grossly exaggerated image which was perhaps most frequently referred to was the gargantuan mouth. … Connected with the recurrent image of cellar-like mouths and ‘sausage lips’ are references to the negro's starry pop-eyes” (Pickering 197). These images suggest an antecedent for Mrs. Seacole's depictions of blacks with large, rolling eyes and gleaming teeth. She describes them as her audience would have known them, as if they were characters on the stage. Further, “[b]lacks were represented in minstrelsy as naturally self-indulgent, lazy, carefree, undignified and vain” (Pickering 201) again recalling Mrs. Seacole's depiction. Simultaneously, as in the representation of minstrelsy, she demonstrates that her representation of blacks does not contaminate her for, in “‘nigger’ minstrelsy … the blackface mask formed the centerpiece of a cultural impersonation, in caricatured forms, of black people by people with white skin” (Pickering 179). The skin color becomes the least important indication of inherent “whiteness.” The color can be shed to reveal the true nature of the performer. In this same way, Mrs. Seacole's skin color becomes the least important manifestation of her true nature.

Many people have also traced to my Scotch blood that energy and activity which are not always found in the Creole race, and which have carried me to so many varied scenes: and perhaps they are right. I have often heard the term ‘lazy Creole’ applied to my country people; but I am sure I do not know what it is to be indolent. All my life long I have followed the impulse which led me to be up and doing; and so far from resting idle anywhere, I have never wanted inclination to rove, nor will powerful enough to find a way to carry out my wishes.

(1-2)

She, in disposition, in character, and in behavior is English. She can, like the interlocutor, describe black behavior, can interpret black behavior. However, like the minstrel performer (as opposed to the character he plays), she is not contaminated by it, and, like the performer, her true nature reveals itself not in the perceived color of her skin, her mask, but in her ability to communicate within her narrative to interpret and represent black behavior but also in her ability to remove herself from the associations of black skin.

However, fissures appear in Mary Seacole's minstrel-type representations of blacks. At times, her narrative represents them as equal to the English. While in Central America, Mary Seacole details a confrontation between black authorities and white Americans.

Around the frightened soldiers swelled an angry crowd of … Americans, abusing and threatening the authorities in no measured terms, all of them indignant that a nigger should presume to judge one of their countrymen. At last their violence roused the sleepy accolade, that he positively threw himself from his hammock, laid down his cigarito, and gave such very determined orders to his soldiers that he succeeded in checking the riot.

(45)

Significantly, in this passage, the whites are ruled by their emotions. The black officer must restore calm and authority by force of will. Further, the officer rises from his hammock, an association of laziness. It is as if he rises from his stereotypical role and climbs into a position of legitimacy, of authority. Mary Seacole can grant blacks a role beyond the stereotype in this context, without offending an English audience, because she frames the non-stereotypical behavior as a reaction to American over-aggressiveness. Blacks then become an ally against the United States, an emerging military and industrial rival to England. Significantly, she could have easily achieved an anti-American sentiment without elevating black behavior. Her choice to include the scene, and others like it, suggests that she manipulated her narrative so as to develop a space for the non-stereotypical black man. Subsequently, Mary Seacole comments on her abortive efforts to volunteer for the Crimean nurse service. “Was it possible that American prejudices against color had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because by blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?” (79). The scene draws an explicit parallel between the English authorities and Americans and an implicit parallel between the Central American officer and herself. Originally, both Seacole and the black officer exist within the stereotype. However, each embodies action for a higher purpose, specifically, to enforce the laws of the Republic or to serve the nation in time of crisis. To England, Seacole offers the possibility that not only does English prejudice parallel American bias but that it is the source, the “root,” for it. Her choice of words would compel an English audience to consider the sources of their own prejudice and to consider the value of non-white, non-Teutonic races. Such valuing contrasted with the stereotypical minstrel-like representations suggests that Mary Seacole understood both the black stereotype and the necessity of its utilization. If she could pacify her audience by conforming to the conventional representation, not only might they be more inclined to accept her, especially considering her efforts to distance herself from the stereotype, her audience might be more inclined to accept the notion that blacks do not always conform to the stereotype, that they have an existence beyond the conventional representation.

However, her valuing does have a price. Because she privileges a non-British race, she subtly undermines the tenets of British expansion. Her stereotypical representation services “the feeling that the suffering of the English poor was being neglected because of the gullible idealizing of black peoples” (Cotsell 41). Her English audience could take the passages that represent blacks as minstrels to justify a provincialism that tends to excuse the racist attitudes and policies of an empire because those policies alleviate the sufferings of English men and women who are not only a nation apart but a race apart, a race destined to rule the world. However, English audiences would also have been aware of

the extent of the contribution that West Indian slavery had made to the British economy; the moral insistence of anti-slavery agitation; the fate of the white owners when blacks refused to work plantations after emancipation; the consequent decline of the sugar trade … [which] had by mid-century created a complex nexus of guilt and hostility, which was intensified by the British association of dark peoples with repressed and feared aspects of themselves.

(Cotsell 41)

Seacole's narrative taps into an intricate matrix of sometimes contradictory impressions and beliefs. By raising those contradictions in a single book, alternatively valuing black culture and representing it in stereotypical form, Seacole would undermine the force of will and moral assurance that supports English hegemony. In this way, Mrs. Seacole posits an alternative discourse that, rather than supporting the imperium, undermines it. Further, her act of writing the narrative and of serving the empire as at least a partially black woman would undermine the notions of Charles Kingsley and others that support expansion in the service and as proof of an ideal race. Further,

For the majority of people during the Victorian and Edwardian expansion of Empire, ‘nigger’ minstrelsy provided perhaps the major source of knowledge of the ‘negroid’ type, and the views this knowledge engendered were ideologically loaded in the sense that (speaking relatively) their alchemical transmutation of falsity into truth had the indirect effect of endorsing the validity and intrinsic rightness of so-called Victorian values.

(Pickering 191)

Mary Seacole offers differing association with the “negroid type,” associations that, rather than “endorse” the intrinsic rightness of Victorian values, subtly undermine them. Consequently, she functions as a type of Clifford's disconcertingly hybrid native pointing out the arbitrary nature of English racial hegemony and colonial discourse.

Mrs. Seacole's representation of Catholics follows the same pattern as her representation of blacks. On one level, she regularly portrays the religion and its practitioners in negative terms. In fact, her depiction directly relates Catholics to the stereotypically negative characteristics of non-British/non-white peoples. She describes a “lazy black priest” (35) or a “coarse black priest” (33). Her use of the word “lazy” associates not only the black race but the negative associations of black behavior with Catholics. “Coarse” carries with it the suggestion of being not civilized, of being crude or inferior. Additionally, she relates the story of how “the Cruces people bowed down before the plague in slavish despair” (26) and made “the priests bring out into the streets figures of tawdry dirty saints, supposed to possess some miraculous influence which they never exerted, before which they prostrated themselves, invoking their aid with passionate prayers and cries. … Very likely the saints would have got the credit of helping them if they had helped themselves” (27). Not only is Catholicism represented in close association with “lesser” races, it assumes many of the characteristics of “primitive” religions including polytheism and non-rationalism. Moreover, Seacole presents blacks and Amerindians relating to their faith only as a possible salvation from disease while she stands apart using scientific methods and English rationalism to solve the plague. Her response bases itself in thought and individual control over her fate; their response bases itself in sentiment and a surrender of self-control. As in the representations of blacks and Amerindians in the stereotypes associated with race, Mrs. Seacole stands apart, distancing herself from non-British manners and customs. Further, Mrs. Seacole associates Catholics with superstition and fear. She describes “frightened priests” (32) and her “difficulty … rout[ing] the stupid priest and his stupid worshippers, and do what I could for the sufferer” (33). The Catholic religion is, once again, positioned in opposition to rationality and science providing no comfort to its practitioners in the face of death but, rather, offering the panic and frenzy of its Amerindian worshipers and the stupidity and laziness of its “black” priests.

Moreover, Mrs. Seacole attempts to distance herself from “superstitious” and “non-rational” spirituality in connection with death and dying. Her healing practice utilizes techniques developed outside the laboratory and, as such, would have been viewed with suspicion and even hostility by certain factions in English medical society that would have associated her methods of healing with “primitive” and “savage” cultures and customs, including religious and racial customs. Therefore, because Mrs. Seacole first associates Catholicism with the “inferior” and “superstitious” religious practices of a “savage” populace and, subsequently, distances herself from both the indigenous population and their faith as it is practiced in connection with death and illness, she can dissociate herself from suggestions that her form of medicine is superstitious and non-rational.

Mrs. Seacole's depiction of Catholicism, moreover, reflects the convictions of the mid-nineteenth century England. Specifically,

[t]he new ideologies brought into prominence by the passage of the Reform Act tended to narrow attitudes and restrict sympathies. Evangelicalism tended to heighten the traditional English mistrust of continental immorality and dislike of Catholicism.

(Cotsell 3)

Not only does the notion of associating Catholicism with immorality find a resonance with Victorian attitudes regarding blacks whose dark skin was thought to house the repressed urges of the English consciousness, it also finds a resonance with England's early colonizing efforts in Ireland. In both English accounts of Ireland and in Mrs. Seacole's narrative, there is an association between Catholicism, racial inferiority, and immorality. David Hume would write of Ireland, after the Popish Plot controversy, that the population possesses a tendency towards “barbarism” and “habitual sloth and ignorance.”¹⁵ In a further association of Catholicism with a threat to an English culture and values (an association which also presents interesting parallels to the late-seventeenth century), “[f]rom November 1850 through the period of the writing of Villette [1853], the newspapers were full of reports of ‘papal aggression’ in response to the perceived intervention of the Pope in British affairs.”¹⁶ Catholicism represents then not only an affront to English consciousness but also a very real temporal threat. Specifically, “Papists were still, after Waterloo, regarded as too dangerously disloyal to be admitted to any post of power or responsibility.”¹⁷ Indeed, its institutionalized structures, its hierarchical organization, its utilization of a form of hegemony not dissimilar to English colonial discourse represents one of the most manifest threats to English expansion. In short, Catholicism was linked, since the Reformation, with negative racial qualities; it was seen as both the cause and the symptom of an inferior mind. English discourse in both the period after Restoration and in the years after the Oxford Movement deepened the associations because of the perceived threat posed by Catholicism to English expansion and hegemony. By distancing herself from Catholicism, Mrs. Seacole, once again, distances herself from pejorative associations that would have likely applied themselves to her alternative medical practices and aligns herself with her empire against the influence of another power.

However, Mary Seacole's narrative does not exclusively associate religious practice with the “savage” and “primitive.” She relates the story of watching soldiers on the battlefield face death.

I have stood by receiving the last blessings of Christians; and closing the eyes of those who had nothing to trust to but the mercy of a God who will be far more merciful to us than we are to one another; and I say decidedly that the Christian's death is the glorious one, as is his life.

(61)

On one level, the structure of the selection resembles a Victorian evangelical testimonial of “witness” for the Christian faith. It begins with the word “I,” reflecting a personal interaction with faith and the Christian worshiper, as opposed to interaction through an intermediary such as a priest or saint. Nothing here, unlike in Central America, comes between Mrs. Seacole and the dying. Seacole appears to value a Protestant way of coming to terms with death obstensibly supporting British values. However, on another, more subtle level, she undermines British hegemony. By taking a spiritual comfort in death, the soldiers dissociate themselves from a rational opposition to death; they yield self-control; it is clear that Mrs. Seacole does not attempt to dissociate herself from these religious customs, and it is also clear that she places a value and a dignity in these practices. Therefore, if “Catholicism was regarded as a threat to control, both on the national, patriotic level, and also at the individual, psychological level,” (Shuttleworth 183) and the English Protestant soldiers yield self-control in the face of death just as Catholics do, then, not only are the English valuing a form of spirituality formerly devalued but the English also recognize a place for the nonrational in response to death and disease. By connection, then, Mrs. Seacole's methods of healing, even with their associations with the “dark” and “primitive” world, have a place in connection with death and dying. Just as her contradictory representations of blacks subtly value that which is without perceived value and simultaneously undermine the Victorian stereotypical views of blacks, Mary Seacole's contradictory representations of spirituality in connection with death value her heritage while simultaneously devaluing English prejudice and bias.

Significantly then, just as in her process of valuing blacks and other despised races, Mrs. Seacole's text suggests fissures in the British system it, on one level, proports to support. Edward Brathwaite observed a similar problem in the 1970s. If the English accept Mrs. Seacole's methods and presence then that “acceptance implies the eventual absorption of the (former) subordinate into the ‘mainstream’ of the (former) superordinate” (Brathwaite 62). Therefore, English notions of a “John Bull” style of purity and provincialism are at risk just as William Hazlitt's predicts in his essay. In the case of Mrs. Seacole, “the subordinate but spiritually vital culture of African slaves was able … [to] begin the spiritual possession of the landscape” (Brathwaite 62). If mid-Victorian society accepted spiritually vital healing practices that utilized the preternatural potentialities of the land, then this acceptance suggests not only that Mary Seacole and people like her, racial and religious “inferiors,” have more of a connection with their native landscape, but also that they have a right to occupy an English landscape as equals. Therefore, the driving force behind expansion, English cultural, racial, and spiritual hegemony, is undermined. As is the case of Catholicism in Victorian England, acceptance of Mrs. Seacole and her methods places “[a]t issue … not simply a religious difference, but the dominant social and economic ideologies of Victorian England: individualism and self control” (Shuttleworth 182). By accepting that supposed non-rationalism, in the form of Catholicism and in the form of Mary Seacole's medicinal customs, has a place in England, the Victorians then must yield self-control, must relinquish an exclusive hold on the higher moral purpose that justifies their empire. The result is a sense of fleeting and arbitrary values, of dispossession of the supposed reality of Victorian discourse, and of a yielding of the self-supporting myths of individualism.

Mary Seacole's narrative devalues (only to later value), in traditional Victorian terms, the Irish, creating a distinction between her and another “race” on the periphery of Empire. Her means of depreciation is language. She writes the Irish idiom in dialect, and

Paddy the Irishman is above all the archetype of mistranslation. By concealing the labour of translation, the difficulties that many Irish people faced in learning English as a foreign language, coupled with mother tongue interference and with apparent idiosyncrasies of accent and idiom, were presented as the undistinguished hallmarks of stupidity. Depending on the state of relations between Ireland and England, the dullness was cast as sinister or endering.¹⁸

On her way to the war, she recounts the story of her conversation with a soldier who cannot hide his astonishment that she would travel to the center of conflict.

‘By Jove! yes, mother,’ answered one, an Irishman. ‘It isn't many women—God bless them!—we've had to spoil us out there [the Crimea]. But it's not the place even for you, who know what hardship is? You'll never get a roof to cover you at Balaclava, nor on the road either.’ So they rattled on, telling me of the difficulties that were in store for me. But they could not shake my resolution.

(84)

The speech of the soldier, explicitly identified as Irish, is laced with expletives, “By Jove” and “God bless them.” Further, in another part of her narrative, Mrs. Seacole encounters another soldier with “bright, restless, Irish eyes, who hallooes out, ‘Mother Seacole! Mother Seacole!’ in such an excited tone of voice” (88) suggesting that the Irish are not in full control of their emotions, suggesting that they cannot reason as clearly as the English; they “halloo” out like animals. Further, the first speaker uses colloquialisms like “a roof to cover you” indicating that his range of expression is limited, that he does not have enough of a command of the language to conceptualize for himself. Further, the Irishman uses ambiguous and confusing syntax. He asks the question, “who know what hardship is?” rather than “do you know” further reinforcing his lack of ability to express his thought in a clear way. He tells her that “You'll never get a roof to cover you at Balaclava, nor on the road either” rather than saying that she will “not get a roof either on the road or at Balaclava.” His elongated syntax implies that the Irish cannot think clearly enough to communicate properly. Indeed, Seacole suggests that the soldier “rattled on” indicating that his speech is simply an empty chatter or a trivial overuse of words whose details carry no import. Further, the Irish soldier threatens to divert her from her purpose. However, he ultimately “could not shake” her “resolution” juxtaposing his tendency towards the inert with her proclivity for movement and action.

Mrs. Seacole also portrays the Irish as naive and unsophisticated representatives of rural life contextualizing her behavior through the metaphor of the stupid Irish peasant. By using the familiar stage Irish character, she demonstrates that she has access to the currency of mid-Victorian British devaluations of the Irish. She aligns herself with the metaphors of colonial discourse in opposition to the marginalized members of the empire. Further, she provides an example of the Irish farmer. “One made me promise, when I returned home, to send word to his Irish mother, who was to send me a cow in token of her gratitude for the help I had been to her son” (133). Mrs. Seacole's story is intended as a joke directed to a “sophisticated” English audience who would have recognised the “simple” Irish character demonstrating her awareness of the devaluing currency. She conveys the idiotic charm of the Irish boy to her readership and unites herself and her audience in a position of superiority smiling at the naive, provincial innocence of the young soldier. The young soldier himself is represented as having no knowledge of the realities of the world beyond his small Irish village. Mrs. Seacole places him inside the discourse of English devaluations of the Irish and gives him the language of unsophistication, creating an imagined Ireland for him, a place beyond English civilization, values, and refinement. In representations of the Irish as distracted warrior and stupid farmer, Mrs. Seacole marginalizes the Irish in traditional ways, consequently, positioning herself at the heart of empire rather than on its periphery margins, distinguishing her identity, itself as a marginal imperial subject, from the Irish.

Just as in her representation of Catholics and non-English races, Seacole's devaluation of the Irish follows a standard Victorian pattern.¹⁹ Once again, Seacole adopts the type established on the English stage. Specifically,

There were two types of stage Irishman. One, the uneducated servant whose mistakes, verbal and logical alike, provide the basis of popularity[.] … He is presented with a broad accent, spelt phonetically, and a tendency to contradict himself foolishly. … The second version of the stage Irishman was more socially elevated. He was a landowner, a man of means, with military experience. … [He] was ignorant by English standards and used the language ineffectively and at times ridiculously, with Gaelicisms sprinkled throughout his speech.²⁰

The former type finds a resonance with Mrs. Seacole's representation of the young farm boy. He, in Victorian melodrama, as in Seacole's text, becomes “the active comic man as foster-brother [foster son] and devoted supporter of the … valiant-hearted hero” (Cave 97). Mrs. Seacole and the staged English man then “seemed,” in contrast, the personification of “virtue, proudly flaunting all those qualities that were seen as the making of the Empire.”²¹ The Irish function not simply as a contrast to Mrs. Seacole, they enable her to access the dynamics of the Victorian stage to establish herself as a hero of the Crimean campaign and English expansion. Her audience would have, conditioned as they were by the dynamic established in melodrama, placed Mrs. Seacole in the role of a central player in English hegemony.

Further, her representation of the warrior type of stage Irishman finds resonance with Victorian convention. The soldiers, as participants in the Crimean campaign, would not have been viewed as hostile to England. Therefore, because “[d]epending on the state of relations between Ireland and England, the dullness was cast as sinister or endearing,” Irish dullness would have been cast as an endearing quality. Mrs. Seacole's use of dialect, which establishes the “endearing” characteristics of the soldiers, is reminiscent of the English stage where “diction reduce(s) the subject to the level of the bated beast, while the figurative language permits cleverly of reference to other recurrent aspects of the type, his cheekiness (‘sauce’) [and] his tendency to exaggerate and over-react” (Cave 63). Each of these qualities finds a resonance with Seacole's encounter with the wounded Irish soldier on her way to the Crimea, and finds a resonance too with another characterization of the Irish. While cooking, Mrs. Seacole depicts an Irishman's suggestions on how to prepare a meal. “Sure, he likes them well done, ma'am. Bake 'em as brown as your own purty face, darlint” (187). Within this context, Mrs. Seacole reveals the color of her skin and her function as cook. Both might serve to indict her as a type of black servant in the eyes of an English audience. By putting this characterization in the stage-Irish dialect, Seacole, as in her other representations of Irish phraseology, can devalue such characterizations as the “cheeky” and “exaggerated” declarations of the “mere Irish.” Consequently, she, by extension, devalues all associations not only between herself and the perceived negative qualities of her person but between the marginalized Irish. Mrs. Seacole removes herself, as a person from the West Indies (like Ireland within yet a part removed from Britain), from the periphery of the imperial system to its center.

However, as in her representations of Catholics and non-white races, fissures appear in an otherwise uniform characterization of the Irish. Returning to Jamaica, Mary Seacole writes that she

found Navy Bay but little altered. It was evening when I arrived there; and my friend … carefully piloted me through the wretched streets, giving me especial warning not to stumble over what looked like three long boxes, loosely covered with the débris of a fallen house. They had such a peculiar look about them that I stopped to ask what they were, receiving an answer which revived all my former memories of Darien life, ‘Oh, they're only three Irishmen killed in a row a week ago, whom it's nobody's business to bury’.

(63-64)

Mary Seacole places her sympathetic portrayal of the Irish in Jamaica, a location which makes her supportive representation most vulnerable to an association, to Ireland; both locations are islands conquered by the British, and both house an indigenous population who are members of a supposed “inferior” race. The Irishmen are characterized as the victims of a “row.” Like the stereotypical representation of the Irish, the dead men allowed anger to control reason. The nameless speaker also informs Mrs. Seacole “it's nobody's business to bury” the dead and begins his observations with a casual “Oh,” suggesting that the men are of no import. Clearly, the speaker's attitude is represented as inhuman and uncompassionate. Conversely, the Irish dead are seen as sympathetic figures, as human figures, victimized by a biased and stereotypical English prejudice. By connection, Mary Seacole's position, as a figure who also might be considered as not worth human consideration, becomes elevated not at the expense of the Irish but at the expense of stereotypes that devalue people. Consequently, her choice of Jamaica as the scene for elevating the Irish to human status, rather than making her more vulnerable to negative associations of birth and race, makes her less susceptible to scorn because such contempt would align the individual making such connections with the revealed inhuman bias of the speaker.

However, a valuing of a periphery (Irish, Jamaican) culture and people at the expense of the central English culture and people serve to undermine the values of the imperium. Essentially, she attempts to position herself at the heart of empire and English hegemony. However, her presence, and the appearance of her contradictory representation of the Irish, posits an identity central to English expansion that is not all central to an English conception of itself. Mary Seacole, like the Irish soldiers, services the empire. However, their service is devalued as a consequence of their racial and cultural position in relation to England. Mary Seacole's contradictory representations of the Irish highlights England's contradictory characterization of the Irish and of herself. The imperial structures demand the support and labor of marginalized subjects to propel its expansion. The moral ethos behind expansion suggests that the marginalized inferior cultures are, by nature, incapable of sustaining themselves in any meaningful way. Consequently, the imperial structures will give the colonised peoples and lands a way of life they cannot give themselves. However, when the supposed inferior races support an empire, the central tenants of the imperium and English cultural hegemony are called into doubt casting suspicion on the moral and cultural forces that feed expansion. The result is the simultaneous sense of dissociation and association highlighted by James Clifford.

Mrs. Seacole's narrative both supports and undermines the discourse of English hegemony resulting in association simultaneous with dissociation, of reassurance combined with insecurity, anticipating the crisis of the modern identified with James Clifford's writings and George Lamming's sense of exile.

We are made to feel a sense of exile by our inadequacy and our irrelevance of function in a society whose past we can't alter, and whose future is always behind us. Idleness can easily guide us into accepting this as a condition. Sooner or later, in silence or with rhetoric, we sign a contract whose epitaph reads: To be an exile is to be alive.

(Lamming 24)

The sense of exile, of desire for affiliation combined with attempted communion through a distorted or ineffective means resulting in alienation, finds a resonance in the writings of high modernism. Indeed, Mary Seacole's text indicates that there is a “link between imperialism and modernism.”²² For,

colonialism means that a significant structural segment of the economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere, beyond the metropolis, outside of the daily life and existential experience of the home country, in colonies over the water whose own life experience and life world … remains unknown and unimaginable for the subjects of the imperial power. … [D]aily life and existential experience in the metropolis … can now no longer be grasped immanently; it no longer has its meaning, its deeper reason for being, within itself.

(Jameson 11-12)

The crisis anticipated by Hazlitt in his essay on travelling abroad finds its voice in the literary production characterized by Fredric Jameson. The complexity of The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, with its endorsements and devaluations of the imperium, anticipates the modern texts of crisis arising from both the heart of empire and its marginal places.

Notes

1. Mary Seacole was born Mary Jane Grant in Kingston, Jamaica in 1805. Although slaves were not freed in the British West Indies until 1 August 1834, Mary Grant was born a freewoman. Her mother kept a boarding house of good reputation in Kingston and was skilled in the “arts of healing.” Her father was a Scottish soldier. As a young woman, she travelled to England and to various islands in the Caribbean, ultimately settling in Jamaica and marrying. After her husband's death, she founded a boarding house in her own right and ministered to British troops stationed in Jamaica functioning as a “natural healer”/nurse and as something of a surrogate parent becoming affectionately known as “Mother Seacole.” She also travelled to Central America establishing businesses and practicing her ministry of healing, battling, sometimes simultaneously, prejudice and epidemics. Rejected by Florence Nightingale's nursing corps, she travelled to the Crimea raising money from investors for the trip. During the Peninsula campaign, Seacole established a prosperous hotel and restaurant near the front. She was also decorated for her service to sick and wounded British, French, and Turkish troops. After the war, she returned to England a heroine but impoverished. Her memoirs were designed to resurrect her financial circumstances. Not only did their success give her economic security, but they also brought her to the attention of Buckingham Palace. In later life, she was a frequent visitor to the Princess of Wales, functioning as her masseuse. Mary Seacole died on 14 May 1881 and is buried in Saint Mary's Catholic Cemetery in London. The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands, was originally published in 1857 by James Blackwood. It was reprinted in 1984 by Bristol's Falling Wall Press and in 1988 by Oxford University Press as part of the “Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers.”

2. William Hazlitt, “Traveling Abroad,” Essays of William Hazlitt (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: The Walter Scott Publishing Company, 1889), 9.

3. I use British to refer to the attitudes and mechanisms that characterize the ethos of expansion and colonialism.

4. Michael Cotsell, “Introduction,” Creditable Warriors, ed. Michael Cotsell. (London: The Ashfield Press, 1990), 15.

5. Sandra Pouchet Paquet, “The Enigma of Arrival: The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands,” African American Review 26.4 (1992): 662.

6. Ziggi Alexander and Audrey Dewjee, “Editor's Introduction,” The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, by Mary Seacole (Bristol: Falling Wall, 1984), 39.

7. Edward Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Kingston, Jamaica: Savacou Publications, 1974), 29-30.

8. George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (U. of Michigan Press, 1960), 24.

9. James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” Cultural Studies, ed. by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96-116.

10. Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (Oxford U. Press, 1988).

11. Eyre-Todd, cited in Alexander, 27.

12. Amy Robinson, “Authority and the Public Display of Identity: Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands,” Feminist Studies 20.3 (1994): 545.

13. Robinson's argument bases itself in the assumption that a nineteenth-century audience would have been able to look beyond the conventional representation. My argument contends that Seacole's audience would not have seen any injustice in the conventional representation until confronted with the contradictions inherent in Seacole's narrative.

14. Michael Pickering, “Mock Blacks and Racial Mockery: the ‘Nigger’ Minstrel and British Imperialism,” Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790-1930, ed. J. S. Bratton, et al. (Manchester U. Press, 1991), 180.

15. David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688, vol. 6 (London: James and Company, 1827), 29, 544.

16. Sally Shuttleworth, “The Dynamics of Cross-Culturalism in Charlotte Bronte's Fiction,” Creditable Warriors, ed. Michael Cotsell (London: The Ashfield Press, 1990), 182.

17. David Thompson, England in the Nineteenth Century (1815-1914) (London: Penguin Books, 1951), 59.

18. Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland (Cork U. Press, 1996), 144.

19. Significantly, Ireland defies easy classification as a colony. Many of its soldiers and intellectuals supported the British empire. At the same time, its populace was degraded and marginalized racially and culturally.

20. Christopher Murray, “Drama 1690-1800,” The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: The Field Day Theatre Company, 1991), 504.

21. Richard Allen Cave, “Staging the Irishman,” Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790-1930, ed. J. S. Bratton, et al. (Manchester U. Press, 1991), 110.

22. Fredric Jameson, Modernism and Imperialism (Derry: Field Day Theatre Company, 1988), 7.