SOURCE: Hawthorne, Evelyn J. “Self-Writing, Literary Traditions, and Post-Emancipation Identity: The Case of Mary Seacole.” Biography 23, no. 2 (spring 2000): 309-31.

“… unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in my own way, I cannot tell it at all.”

Written at the height of the Victorian period, The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands (1857) is a paradigmatic black woman's text of self-authoring that has been lauded as “one of the most readable and rewarding black women's autobiographies in the nineteenth century” (Andrews, Introduction xxviii). Representing a locus classicus of culturally sanctioned feminine self-reliance, it was written and published in England by Mary Jane Grant Seacole (1805-1881), a free-born Jamaican who achieved fame for her work as a nurse during the Crimean War, meriting several medals.¹ Transgressing gender, race, and class roles as an adventuring businesswoman in Jamaica, London, Haiti, New Granada, and Cuba, and as a female who, undaunted by the horrors of the battlefield, deployed herself to the Crimean War, this heroine is extraordinary by any standard. But in addition to its biographical importance, this work is an invaluable means of espying how the free(d) female subject fashioned her identity, from a socially, racially, and economically disempowered position in the post-Emancipation historical environment.²Wonderful Adventures is a cultural text that reveals how Seacole, a woman of color, exploited critical historical moments to construct a new social identity. At the same time, though, Seacole's independence raises questions about the role of the dominant power in the free(d) subject's search for equality and social rights, for Seacole seems to have advanced through her own machinations, rather than through the inconsistent British script of freedom offered to the colonial, racial subject.

I will argue that Seacole's textual and rhetorical strategies encode contestatory practices that enable her to author herself and to critique and unsettle Victorian ideology. By manipulating genre and linguistic conventions, Seacole promotes a double-voicedness that allows her to challenge “disciplining” systems (in Foucault's sense of non-coercion)—practices which mark her as a resisting subject.³ By foregrounding cultural issues of race and gender, thus forcing them into higher public visibility, Seacole also contends against the contradictory and conflictual text of freedom. Though seemingly ideologically compliant, then, the work's signifying strategies produce a text that contests authority while textualizing the authenticity of difference and hybrid subjectivity.

When the location of the center shifts from Jamaica to England, Seacole finds this new site of difference less predictable than the colonial one.⁴ The rejection Seacole encountered when she applied to serve as a nurse under Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War suggests how confusing the faces of freedom were for the post-Emancipation subject in nineteenth-century Britain. In Jamaica, Seacole had learned medicine from British surgeons. Her work there and in Panama, especially during cholera and yellow fever epidemics, had earned her a reputation as a nurse, and the title of “yellow doctress.” When she became aware of the desperate conditions at the Crimean warfront—the newspapers were full of stories about untended soldiers dying more from diseases and lack of care and sanitation than from war wounds—a self-assured Seacole traveled to England to volunteer, carrying letters of recommendation from well-ranking surgeons. But despite her training and her letters of support, both the Secretary of War and the Office of Quatermaster-General ignored her. Seacole responded by getting to the Crimea on her own. Forming a corporation with an old family friend, she financed her own expedition to set up there as a “sutler.”⁵ Sailing first from England to Constantinople with her warehouse of provisions, she then made her way to Balaclava. At a place near the battlefield, she spent the considerable sum of eight hundred pounds to erect her store, the “British Hotel.” Since she had also outfitted herself with medicines, she soon began to render nursing services to many of the sick and wounded British troops. Especially in this capacity as nurse, Seacole won considerable fame in Britain, largely as the result of several wartime news stories by the Times correspondent W. H. Russell. Crimean War surgeons such as Douglas Arthur Reid would later praise her skills as well. But in her memoir she would reprove her readers about “how hard the right woman had to struggle to convey herself to the right place” (134).

Seacole's work, a rare cultural text that provides a key source of information about black, gendered self-construction in the mid-nineteenth century, has also provoked conflicting readings. Recent critics writing about the black presence in England regard Seacole as a resistor of British imperialism. In Staying Power, for example, Peter Fryer discusses Seacole as one of the four noteworthy Black Britons to have challenged the British social status quo. Like Chartist Movement leader William Cuffay, Anglo-American classical actor Ira Aldridge, and London-born composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Fryer regards Mary Seacole as an early hero who refused to accept a place at the edges of English society. In The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie hails her as yet another example of a black heroic figure occluded by British hegemonic history (292). And of course, in her native Jamaica she is considered an heroic cultural symbol, a model of self-reliance and ambition. Public buildings, such as the headquarters of the Jamaica Nurses' Association, a ward at the Kingston Public Hospital, and a residence hall at the University of the West Indies, are named for her. Other critics, however, fault Seacole for her “British” self-construction—her seeming reverence for British values, and her complacence with its racial hypocrisies. In “The Enigma of Arrival,” Caribbean scholar Sandra Pouchet Paquet lauds Seacole's uniqueness and abilities, but severely criticizes her individualism, her self-construction as male heroic subject, her “servility” to British imperialism, and her corresponding minimizing if not erasing of her formative Caribbean heritage.⁶ Finally, William L. Andrews ends his Introduction to Seacole's work by asking if she sufficiently discerned the irony of her condition “as a black woman trying assiduously to make a respectable place for herself in the Western scheme of things” (xxxiv).

These various critical positions suggest that Seacole's work should be re-examined for those complex interactions that Paul Gilroy notes create the “social ecology of identity and identification” for the black subject in England (22). Seacole produced her memoir in a Victorian ideological environment, with its ambiguous racial and gender discourses, and constraining literary traditions. Among the most pressing questions to ask of this text is what the (literary) restraints were for the gendered and racialized subject in the mid-century Victorian environment. What, in short, were the literary options made available to, or imposed upon, Mary Seacole? Further, what politics of voice could Seacole have employed within the structures of literary and cultural domination? And most importantly, how might some aspects of her work—and especially those most criticized—result from Seacole's struggles and successes in defining herself within such an environment saturated with racial and ideological discourses?

Most literary histories of this period would suggest that in adopting any one of three favorite genres—memoir, autobiography, or travel writing—Mary Seacole was displaying “exceptional” literary behavior. As recent scholarship on the Victorian period shows, these genres were generally androcentric and patriarchal domains, customized to express adventurous, ambitious, event-making, male personae. In Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920, Regenia Gagnier has described the Victorian construction of gender this way:

In Britain, middle-class boys experienced and wrote of an ordered progress from preschool at home to childhood and youth at school and university, through the Raj, diplomatic corps, or civil service. … Middle-class women wrote of early life with fathers and afterlife with husbands. These two patterns—as central to the great nineteenth century realist novels as to Victorian autobiographies—represent middle-class gender construction of masculinity and femininity, public power and domesticity.

(44)

Those mid-century Victorian women writers who followed the female pattern eschewed the “indecency” or “egotism” that was associated with “manly” genres, writing instead diaries, journals, and (autobiographical) fiction. As for autobiography, according to Valerie Sanders, many Victorian women “were only too well aware of the dangers inherent in any serious form of self-writing” (10); Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for instance, maintained that “To be one's own chronicler is a task generally dictated by extreme vanity” (130, qtd. in Sanders 10), and in fact, many women even felt it unseemly to speak “before a sexually mixed audience, or what journalists of the period liked to call a ‘promiscuous gathering’” (Warhol 159). Before 1920, according to Elizabeth Winston, women autobiographers were “modest, self-effacing” figures who “underestimated achievements, disclaimed interest in personal recognition, stressed the broad historical value of their life stories” (110).

Mary Seacole would transgress these patriarchal codes and restrictions; in writing of her travels, she would trespass as well. Victorian travel writing had very pronounced cultural valences at mid-century. As Mary Louise Pratt and other scholars indicate, travel writing was nationalistic and Eurocentric (see Birkett, Middleton, Mulvey, and Nerlich). Its practitioners assumed their superiority, and their representations of “others” displayed that presumption. Furthermore, those women who did write travel narratives seemed to consider it a genre of “gentility.” Most of these travelers were aristocrats who routinely identified their status with titles such as “Baroness,” “Lady,” “Marchioness,” or “Vicomtess.” Other authors were predictably connected to high officials or to missionaries. Even when they maintained conventions of propriety and patriotism, women were still often censured for pursuing an androcentric genre, as Mrs. Henry (Fanny) Duberly, Seacole's fellow writer of the Crimean War, discovered when she tried to secure permission to dedicate her work, Journal Kept During the Russian War, to Queen Victoria.⁷

I would propose that Mary Seacole not only intuited liberating possibilities in these genres, but also that when writing Wonderful Adventures she appropriated and then altered them in ways that enabled her to create a self-empowering story founded on alterity and creolity. Viewed from this perspective, her text supplies numerous examples of how she manipulated literary domains of exclusivity to inscribe her “different” subjectivity.

PART 1: NEGOTIATING GENRE

I was born in the town of Kingston, in the island of Jamaica, some time in the present century. As a female, and a widow, I may be well excused giving the precise date of this important event. …

As W. H. Russell suggested in his Preface to Wonderful Adventures, Seacole's narrative needs would have called for the genre of memoir:

If singleness of heart, true charity, and Christian works; if trials and sufferings, dangers and perils, encountered boldly by a helpless woman on her errand of mercy in the camp and in the battle-field, can excite sympathy or move curiosity, Mary Seacole will have many friends and many readers.

The mention here of “camp” and “battle-field,” with their tragic narrative connotations, leaves no doubt as to the intent of Russell's sponsorship. That the work is dedicated to Major-General Lord Rokeby, K.C.B., and concludes with acknowledgements to fourteen military men, also points to the patriotic bounds that would dictate a particular kind of life-writing.

Seacole was well aware of the British public's avid interest in literature about the Crimean War. However unpopular it might have been, by 1857 the war was the subject of a proliferation of new writing, some even by women, such as Frances Duberly's Journal Kept During the Russian War (1855) and Fanny Taylor's Eastern Hospitals and Nurses (1857). The pragmatic Seacole acknowledges the competition: “the reader must have had more than enough of journals and chronicles of Crimean life, and I am only the historian of Spring Hill” (146-47). But Seacole also knew that the public was well acquainted with “Mother Seacole” of Crimean War fame. She had been the subject not only of news stories by Russell, but of a poem, “A Stir for Seacole,” which appeared in Punch (Dec. 6, 1856: 221), and even of an opera, “The Mother of the Regiment.” In fact, a “grand military festival for the benefit of Mrs. Seacole” was held at the Royal Surrey Gardens on July 27-30, 1857.⁸ “Nothing could have been more triumphantly successful,” the Times reported:

Notwithstanding that the charge for admission was quintupled, there was an immense concourse in the hall, and it need scarcely be said that the audience was of a character more ‘exclusive’ than is customary at transpontine musical performances. … Mrs. Seacole sat in state in front of the centre gallery, supported by Lord Rokeby on one side, by Lord George Paget on the other.

(“Festival,” qtd. in Alexander and Dewjee 32)

Together these various publications and performances had ensured that, as the Times noted, “Few names were more familiar to the public during the late war than that of Mrs. Seacole,” and especially since the war's unexpected ending had left her with an unsaleable surplus of goods and virtually bankrupt, she would have been eager to produce a marketable work, so as to recoup the losses from her Crimean adventure.

And yet, the narrative Seacole actually produces begins surprisingly with literary rituals commonly associated with slave narratives, rather than war memoirs. Take for example her familiar “I was born …” opening. Contemporary readers familiar with slave narratives would immediately recognize this strategy linking Seacole's work to such familiar precedents as Mary Prince's History, which begins, “I was born at Brackish-Pond, in Bermuda …,” or the even more famous Narrative of Frederick Douglass, which begins “I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot County, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age. …” In his essay “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature,” James Olney identifies this generic pattern as “1. a first sentence beginning, ‘I was born …,’ then specifying a place but not a date of birth; 2. a sketchy account of parentage, often involving a white father” (153). Seacole follows this pattern by providing the requisite place of birth, indeterminate age, and deferred mention of parentage, but she also asserts her difference and her authorization by undermining the conventions as well.⁹ Her echoing of this opening convention is markedly irreverent and highly parodic. Through such flippant phrases as “sometime in the present century,” and her claiming that “she may be well excused giving the precise date of this important event” because she is “a female, and a widow,” Seacole breaks the sober decorum of the slave genre with carnivalizing jocularity. It can be argued that post-1840s slave narratives such as Douglass's were already egoistic, even “conceited” works, which challenged narrative expectations through innovative rhetorical strategies such as “novelizing” or “performing” the self (see Andrews, “Uses”). But these narratives still proceed with a requisite decorum and solemnity. Seacole is more disruptive. Her humor accompanies her hubris, and creates a unique voice that disrupts the “master narratives” of both the literary and imperial authority systems. Refusing to inscribe her story in the social codings of racial humility, the resisting creole rejects the rules in ways which underline her contempt not only for slavery (existing still in the U.S., though discontinued in her native Jamaica since 1833), but also for servility. Seacole subverts familiar narrative rituals and outdated epistemological constructions, and in the process avoids authority's surveillance so as to present herself as unfettered subject. She asserts a privilege of freedom.

Why did Seacole adopt this strategy? Genre shapes what can be said, and with its heroic persona and idealized subjectivity, the androcentric form of the memoir would have constrained Seacole's self-expression. Instead, in her account of the Crimea, Seacole stretched the boundaries of the memoir to negotiate and produce the truths of her own existence. By interpellating the slave narrative genre into her account, Seacole thematizes her social biography, inscribing a space for the hybrid, Caribbean subject within the imperial, authenticating genre of the war memoir.

Seacole also exploited the authority of travel writing, with its ethnographic gaze, to enhance further her representation of a post-Emancipation black subject. In England, the subject of native “laziness” saturated commentary in journals, letters, histories, and essays, as well as travel and ethnographical writing. In his “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question” (1849), Thomas Carlyle was only the most famous figure of many to harangue England with this pernicious idea. Since this “laziness” theme commonly erupted in debates over the readiness of ex-slave societies to assume self-governance, or even whether slaves (in the U.S. in particular) should be free at all, Seacole's interventions come at a time of crisis. By appropriating that male, classed authority that allows travel writers to observe and comment on “mores and manners,” Seacole re-presents the black subject at the same time that she demythologizes white subjects, who appear in her work as crude and barbaric occupants of the frontier spaces of Panama.

Seacole's invocation of the travel narrative perspective allows her to correct images of inferiority and underachievement codified in such types as “Quashie” and “Sambo,” and to present in their place accounts of black accomplishment. When writing about Panama, Seacole as travel writer reports that

… many of the negroes, fugitive from the Southern States, had sought refuge in this and the other States of Central America, where every profession was open to them; and as they were generally superior men … they soon rose to positions of eminence in New Granada. In the priesthood, in the army, in all municipal offices, the self-liberated negroes were invariably found in the foremost rank; and the people, for some reason—perhaps because they recognized in them superior talents for administration—always respected them. …

(51)

Within this recognizable, moderate, objective British narrative space, Seacole deftly reverses racist imaginings. Far from being lazy or undirected, freed socially-unencumbered black men in Panama are the founders of a free state:

What was of any worth in their institutions, such as their comparative freedom, religious toleration, etc., was owing mainly to the negroes who had sought the protection of the republic. … [T]he blacks are enterprising, and in their opinions incline not unnaturally to democracy.

(72)

Seacole's own sense of herself powerfully informs this description. As someone who occupies a second-class position in England, a position she became familiar with when she applied to serve in the Crimea, Seacole recognizes immediately the ambiguities of British discourses of freedom and equality, and the vagaries of their application. Adopting the perspective of the traveler allows her calmly to expose the lies and prejudices at work.

PART 2: NEGOTIATING RACE

I am a Creole, and have good Scotch blood coursing in my veins. My father was a soldier, of an old Scotch family; and to him I often trace my affection for a camp-life, and my sympathy with what I have heard my friends call “the pomp, pride, and circumstance of glorious war.” Many people have also traced to my Scotch blood that energy and activity which are not always found in the Creole race, and what 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.

This excerpt, the second set of sentences in the opening paragraph of Wonderful Adventures, not only reveals the source of Seacole's interest in the military—her father—but also by foregrounding whiteness and a “mulatto” discourse, opens up for the Victorian reader a complex and contentious history. Caught in a three-tiered hierarchical system, the Caribbean mulatto occupies a problematic sociopolitical space that Douglas Hall, the well-known Jamaican historian, describes as follows:

Between the “pure white,” the paragon of intellectuality and high civilization, and the “pure black,” the paragon of brute strength and barbarism, free colored people shifted uneasily, patronized by the whites and disliked by the slaves.

(211)

It should not be so surprising that Seacole would produce herself in terms of hybridization. As Robert J. C. Young has remarked, racial codings were the main instrument of imperial power in its subject-constituting projects, and the nineteenth century obsession with hybridity—often seen as “unnatural”—profoundly affected constructions of Caribbean identity. When she speaks of herself as “Creole” with “Scotch” blood, Seacole declares a “mixed” heritage. Furthermore, by claiming to be energetic and up-and-going, she also unavoidably introduces into the text the absent, but powerful, discourse of the “lazy native.” Although she does not reproduce the “bizarre imaginings and nomenclatures” of that imperial taxonomic and classificatory system responsible for such terms as mulatto, sambo, quadroon, and mustee among its 120-odd designations, by invoking such coded oppositions as laziness and industry, Seacole could still be seen as falling victim to those powerful disciplining knowledge systems which make their “truths” seem natural and inevitable (see Zavala 334).

But the passage is perhaps not rhetorically simple. By declaring “I have good Scotch blood,” Seacole undeniably appropriates—but as importantly mimics—the imperial idiom. Elaborating upon Foucault's description of sexuality as a “dense transfer point of power” (History 103), Ann Stoler notes that sexual grammars fundamental to maintaining the colonial order of things always operated to the detriment of the woman of color:

Being a less well-to-do woman and of mixed descent coded a range of social relation as erotically driven, sensually charged, and sexually precocious by definition.

(115)

Seacole's contemporaries would have agreed with this assessment. In The West Indies: Their Social and Religious Condition (1862), Edward Bean Underhill notes that “whatever their birth,” mulattos “were deemed always illegitimate” (225). Pro-Imperialist authors consistently accused women of mixed heritage with “immodesty.” In Domestic Manners and Social Conditions (1833), for instance, Mrs. Carmichael writes that she “observed coloured women at the door and windows of houses, the dresses of some of whom would have been elegant and graceful, had they been more modest” (10-11). Raised in this racially sexualized climate, Seacole undoubtedly found it necessary to define herself against the overwhelmingly negative, and plentiful, textualizations of mulatto immodesty and illegitimacy. One function of Seacole's passage could therefore be to neutralize or counter this pervasive racist discourse. By insisting on the dignity of her lineage—her use of the word “good,” for example—she presents herself as a black subject defending her legitimacy and worth. Furthermore, the term “good Scotch” calls attention to the ethnic propaganda buried within the imperium—in this case, the Scotsman's reputed energy and financial sharpness. Such “insider” language thus stands revealed in all its pomposity and political ambiguity.

When Seacole uses the word “creole” to refer to herself, she is deliberately courting linguistic confusion. In the nineteenth century this term, without the qualifier black or colored, generally referred to white, European settlers in the Caribbean, as its use by such writers as Monk Lewis, Mrs. Carmichael, and Edward Bean Underhill show. Like Henry Louis Gates's trickster in The Signifying Monkey, then, Seacole may be seen as trying to subvert meaning by “embodying the ambiguities of language” (52). A parallel play on meanings occurs when she ventriloquizes the voices of imperial authority by describing herself variously, as “brown,” “slightly brown,” and “yellow.”

A similar play is apparent in the qualifying phrase “and perhaps they are right” that resounds throughout the first chapter of her Adventures. By attributing statements to external, hegemonic voices, Seacole not only identifies such statements as intrusive knowledges, but also identifies her potential differences with them. Such phrases as “what I have heard my friends call,” “Many people have also traced,” or “I have often heard the term,” are therefore also interventions into scripts of authority which implicitly mark her as independent.¹⁰ These and other passages that I have discussed actually indicate that Seacole's literary practice is more contestatory than a simply conventional reading might suggest. Through her writing Seacole found ways to comment on those European-induced anxieties of race and hybridity at the center of their powerful yet ambivalent scripts. Further, it is Seacole's Caribbeanness, developed in her native environment and buoyed up by native progressiveness, that has granted her a culturally empowered independence of mind.

But Seacole's experiences in England would have been unsettling to her native self-confidence for more confusing reasons as well. England during this period basked in a reputation of racial tolerance and fairness (see Midgley, Fryer, Gundara and Duffield)—a social presumption toward racial enlightenment that made England more ideologically opaque and therefore more disorienting. The country's period of “scientific racism,” when ideology and behavior would support overt institutionalized racism, still lay in the future. And even though there had been many instances of racism, as Peter Fryer details in his chapter “The Everyday Struggle, 1787-1833,” in the 1850s England was perceived as a haven for black people, who were “relatively free to denounce discrimination when they encountered it” (Lorimer 47). Black Americans, and especially visiting abolitionist celebrities, expressed unequivocally positive reactions to England. Harriet Jacobs proclaimed that during her time there she “never saw the slightest symptoms of prejudice against color” (278, qtd. in Lorimer 38), and writing in 1855, Frederick Douglass declared that he enjoyed “nearly two years of equal social privileges in England” and “never, during the whole time having met with a single word, look, or gesture which gave me the slightest reason to think my colour was an offense to anybody” (388). Historian Douglas A. Lorimer suggests that English humanitarian attitudes not only affected political and economic developments, but even encouraged British abolitionists to act as a social influence curbing overt racism, serving as “watch-dogs over any evidence of discrimination” (278).

Both the constraints of the memoir form and this historical context would together have tempered expressions of outrage toward the British. But even in these circumstances, Seacole resists by puncturing the decorum with personal narratives of discrimination. Take for example the following reversion from a public voice to one that is impassioned and blunt:

Of course, had it not been for my old strong-mindedness … I should have given up the scheme a score of times in as many days; so regularly did each successive day give birth to a fresh set of rebuffs and disappointments. I shall make no excuse to my readers for giving them a pretty full history of my struggles to become a Crimean heroine!

(76)

By suggesting that her “pretty full history” would make it clear that only her own self-reliance made her a “Crimean heroine,” Seacole critiques British complacency. By emphasizing her “strong-mindedness,” she further counters prevailing views of black dependency. And finally, Seacole also testifies to the strength of her own response to racial hostility: “Strangely enough, some of the most vivid of my recollections are the efforts of the London street-boys to poke fun at my and my companion's complexion” (4). Into a narrative of the Crimean War—the audience's reason for reading the work—Seacole therefore boldly interjects a subtextual history of black racial mistreatment in England.

Seacole can be equally subtle in her use of irony to puncture British “highmindedness.” In the following passage she even goes so far as to suggest that the virulence of North American racism might have still recognizable British origins. “Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here,” Seacole muses, “Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?” (79). Seacole conducts this questioning of Victorian racial fairness through an intimate dialogue with her reader. And pride must also be recognized as a factor. At the time of writing the memoir, a year after the war ended, Seacole would have felt vindicated not only by her successes, but by her superiority of performance when compared to the nurses who had been chosen. As Fanny Taylor wrote at the end of the war, when the Crimean nurses were assembled, “From the beginning it was determined that all party feeling was to be merged in the one common bond of alleviating suffering, and in the selection of nurses few questions were asked, and no objections made on the ground of differences of creed or shades of opinion” (5-6). As events unfolded, however, reports indicate that many of these nurses performed poorly. Some were simply incompetent; others were drunkards and had to be sent back to England. Mary Seacole had stayed and succeeded within these parameters, but when writing her Adventures, she made it clear that while shades of creed and opinion may well have been discounted, shades of “color” still had made a difference.

PART 3: NEGOTIATING GENDER

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.

As Judith Lowder Newton argues, “power as ability has been defined both as achievement and competence and, by implication, as a form of self-definition or self-rule” (2). Although Seacole's paragraph demonstrates her ability to bend generic borders, the sentence above embodies another corrective discourse of her work: the argument for female empowerment based on woman's own sites of desire. Emphatic about her need to be “up and doing,” Seacole maps out her own unconventionality by preferring a space other than the domestic, maternal one. “I had from early youth a yearning for medical knowledge and practice which has never deserted me,” Seacole writes, and she also frequently expresses her desire for the independence and mobility afforded by travel. It need hardly be mentioned here how Seacole's professional aspirations clashed with standard nineteenth-century traditions. “What alarmed the Victorians,” Leslie Parker Hume and Karen M. Offen write, “were women's working activities that were distant from the household either in time or space, that were not traditional, and that seemed somehow to threaten the family.” For this reason, “However different the social backgrounds of these women, the prostitute, factory girl, doctor, and social reformer all proved troubling to nineteenth-century society, and their working activities appeared iconoclastic to many of their contemporaries” (278). At the same time, though, we should recognize that Seacole's aspirations, while anomalous to the British view, are natural to the Caribbean context. Historian Barbara Bush writes that women had brought with them from Africa culturally-derived gender formations that were creolized into their West Indian identities. In traditional African societies, for instance, women were “significant and indispensable” to food production and marketing, and they had “carried these skills with them to the Caribbean and, in addition to participating fully in the cultivation of provision grounds, they became prominent as market sellers and ‘higglers’ or commercial intermediaries” (48-49). The free “colored” women—to which group Seacole's family belonged—also exhibited gender norms different from the British. Gad Heuman describes multilevel entrepreneurship in which members of this group “became shopkeepers and sold provisions, millinery, confectionery, and preserves,” often having “two or three slaves who traveled into the interior of the island to sell commodities on the estates” (9). As subjects of slavery and colonialism, then, West Indian women often paradoxically followed patterns of female self-empowerment far more expansive than those available to British women. Colonialism, in short, did not encourage passivity in the colonized, which not surprisingly set Seacole's Caribbean consciousness at odds with the ideals and (double) standards that prevailed regarding British women.

Seacole's unabashed opposition to hegemonic systems is part of her ongoing articulation of a different selfhood. She is an early example of those women who historically have seized on opportune moments of cultural crisis to gain personal mobility. (Other examples would be those black women who, covered by the patriotic propaganda of “Rosie the Riveter”—a white, middle-class myth—used the social ruptures of World War II to create new economic and social spaces for themselves.¹¹) By employing the topoi of work and adventure, Seacole introduces into her text the possibility of new models for gender roles. Further, Seacole's account of her own mother suggests that a new, Caribbean-engendered female type had already existed for years. Instead of reproducing the popular, sentimentalized image of the mulatto subject as either the promiscuous deviant, or the desirable, abandonable woman of fictions such as Yarico and Inkle—one of the “most often repeated and most popular narratives of the eighteenth century” (Hulme 227)¹²—Seacole presents a non-sentimentalized narrative of womanly entrepreneurship. By valorizing her mother as a dignified and successful hotel owner, and as a knowledgeable “doctoress” of great importance within her community, Seacole not only undermines the stereotype of the female lodging-housekeeper as morally disreputable,¹³ but also celebrates an indigenous version of womanhood which stands in sharp contrast to those enervated Victorian definitions of true womanhood such as Coventry Patmore's “angel in the house.” In the process, racial stereotypes of colored women dissolve.

CONCLUSION

I did not return to England by the most direct route, but took the opportunity of seeing more of men and manners in yet other lands.

(197)

Seacole's defiance of gender norms and racial codings is barely concealed here. There is no yearning for the safe, domestic, female space, but instead an open statement of her male-evoking desire for adventure. She will not return “by the most direct route.” If aware of the British denigrative attitudes toward a woman “globe trotteress” (Hamalian), Seacole is not intimidated. As a black woman, through the language of travel writing—the desire to see more “of men and manners”—Seacole exercises her own claim to full liberties and privileges.

Seacole forcefully intrudes her own Caribbean, free identity into the public space of the memoir's literary decorum. Though at times she feigns compliance, she does not go gently into that good world of Victorian decorum as she tells her self story. By calling attention to her self, Seacole flaunts her individuality in remarks like the following: “[If the events I write] be considered vain or egotistical, still I cannot help narrating them” (26); “I hope the reader will give me credit for the assertion that I am about to make, viz. that I enter upon the particulars of this chapter with great reluctance; but I cannot omit them” (124); or “A few words more ere I bring these egotistical remarks to a close” (199). At such moments, she is in fact highly reminiscent of that Caribbean cultural type whose voice is her power, a “powerful instrument of attack and defense” (Mathurin 13).

And yet, Seacole does remain silent on some topics that would flesh out her representation of Caribbean womanhood. Except for a brief account of her parents, presented in the work's first pages, and discussing them only distantly in terms of their positive influences on her work ethic, her respect for military life, and her love of medicine, Seacole obscures the nature of her intimate relationships. Though she speaks time and again of “sons” of the Crimean War, she reveals little of her actual maternal status. At various points Seacole describes herself as traveling with “a little girl,” “the little girl I have alluded to,” or “my little maid” (13, 36, 85), but she does not elaborate. Alexis Soyer, a French chef in the Crimea who knew Seacole well, suggests that the little girl was Seacole's daughter (252, 334, 435). Was she? And what can we make of Seacole's silence about her private life and some of her experiences? Is Seacole's silence a way of resisting exploitation of the gaze, especially a military one? Of course, the reasons for her reticence could be personal. Perhaps Seacole did not want to make her daughter (if she was present at such places as the Crimea) into a literary spectacle. In the same way, Seacole might also have decided not to dwell on the fact that she herself was raised until the age of twelve by someone other than her mother. And yet, though these omissions are regrettable because they deny us specific information about the Caribbean woman's singular ways of motherhood, and her self-fashioning in the context of cultural/historical pressures, Seacole is clearly directing her words to a different audience that she knows well—British surgeons and soldier-patients she knew in Jamaica; the customers at her “British Hotel” at Kadikoi, Crimea; the many she nursed there; and the parents and soldiers who wrote letters of appreciation to her. This regard for her audience, and for the demands of book marketing,¹⁴ lead her at times to become ostentatious, or even naive. But her manipulations of genre and rhetoric still suggest that this colonial writer struggled to negotiate within language a subjectivity identified with “difference” and originating in race, culture, and class. Furthermore, even as she utilized hegemonic literary tools and discourses, she asserted her resistance to their monopolies.

Though Seacole's generic and linguistic strategies serve to legitimize her as an “insider”—she “belongs”—at the same time she incorporates her “outsider/alien” status into the text, thus reflecting the tensions of this historical, post-Emancipation period. Emancipation itself was not unproblematic. The Act of Emancipation was short on enumerating the privileges of freedom to the newly freed, but very conscientious in delineating the privileges for the powerful—that justices, for example, would be provided for with an annual income of four hundred pounds per annum, and that slaveowners would be appropriately remunerated.¹⁵ Seacole recognizes herself to be a colonial subject of alterity, and as “colored,” a double outsider. This status grants her the ability to position herself in a liminal space of the possible, her empowered control deriving from the Caribbean historical/cultural circumstance, evolved from slave experience that allowed more fluidity in gender identity. She carried that positive value with her to the metropolitan center, and especially when its interventions are seen for what they attempted, the story she tells is compelling. A self-confident and headstrong heroine, Mary Seacole, I believe, intends all the effects produced by her generic and rhetorical strategies. Seacole's liminality is the basis of her own self-empowerment, making her the clearest proof that the “ability to absorb the contradictions of freedom may well be one of the most important legacies of emancipation for modern Caribbean societies” (Olwig 5). Or as she arrogantly and self-reliantly asserts from the beginning, “unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in my own way, I cannot tell it at all” (147).

Notes

1. There is some controversy over the number of medals Seacole received. According to Alexander and Dewjee, the Times reported four government medals—the number also appearing on the bust of Seacole made by Queen Victoria's nephew, Count Gleichen. But only two are exhibited with this bust at the Institute of Jamaica: “the Order of the Mejidie, which was a commendation granted by the Turks to the British for outstanding service, and the French Legion of Honour” (36).

2. Extant texts by women in the Anglophone Caribbean are few: the slave narrative History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831), and the collection of writings by the Hart sisters, Anne Hart Gilbert (1773-1834) and Elizabeth Hart Thwaites (1772-1833), texts that served them principally, however, to memorialize the significance of the Methodist Church in Antigua (see Ferguson). Apart from these, little else suggests the female voice except for such “texts” as some folk songs in J. B. Moreton's West India Customs and Manners (1793), Matthew (Monk) G. Lewis's Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834), and Michael Scott's Tom Cringle's Log (1833).

3. According to Foucault, a technology of power underlies modern societies, a mode that employs institutional codes of “disciplines” through which the individual is subjected. This technology differs from slavery because it is “not based on a relation of appropriation of bodies” (“Docile Bodies” 138).

4. Seacole is a premiere example of the colonial subject as immigrant, with her identity in dispute. Her worth and legitimacy were not indisputable facts in England, a condition of Caribbean exile later dramatized in such works as Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark, George Lamming's Water with Berries, and V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men. The narrator of Rhys's novel, Anna Morgan, for instance, has become emotionally alienated by emigrating to England, with its gender, race, and class biases. She seems completely disoriented: “It was as if a curtain had fallen hiding everything I had ever known.” Voyages begins, “Sometimes it was as if I were back there and as if England were a dream. At other times England was the real thing and out there was the dream, but I could never fit them together” (7, 8).

5. The OED defines “sutler” as “one who follows an army or lives in a garrison town and sells provisions to the soldiers.” Since excessive profit-making was often associated with sutlers, W. H. Russell felt the need to describe Seacole, in the preface he wrote to her work, as “the first who has redeemed the name of ‘sutler’ from the suspicion of worthlessness, mercenary baseness and plunder.” In fact, the “adventure” in the title of Seacole's work may retain something of the eighteenth-century sense of “adventurer” as one who takes pecuniary risk, speculates, ventures into commercial enterprise (see Nerlich).

6. Pouchet Paquet draws on the rather extreme views in Bakhtin's essay “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” where, loathing idealism over social commitment, he criticizes what he terms the “adventurous-heroic” as driven by a desire “to have significance in the world of others.” Though undoubtedly the product of an early twentieth-century concern with literary form, Bakhtin's argument also arises from political constraints. For more discussion of the significance of politics in Bakhtin, see Holquist.

7. Piers Compton gives the following account: “‘It must be dedicated to the Queen,’ [Fanny] told Selina. But the Queen had found nothing to admire in Mrs. Duberly's exploits at the front. The Queen considered that Fanny had forced herself into a province reserved for men, and sometimes without due regard for the natural prohibitions of her sex” (187).

8. The Crimean War indeed stirred great patriotic sentiment. The most famous of its heroines, Florence Nightingale, received such honors as a diamond-studded medallion from Queen Victoria, the St. George's Cross and Royal Cypher, the Royal Red Cross, and the King Edward Order of Merit. She was also made “Lady Grace of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem,” and gained some ＄50,000 from collections and benefits like those held for Seacole (see Reid 44).

9. Seacole, her sponsors, and her readers, would have been very familiar with the slave narrative. At mid-century, it was a well-marketed, popular genre; Douglass's Narrative went through five British editions between 1846 and 1847, and by 1850 close to 30,000 copies had been sold (Lorimer 4).

10. Robyn Warhol convincingly argues that such interruptions “projected … into the reading experience, serve to create self-agency” (vii).

11. For an interesting view on war myths and media propaganda, and the countering motivations of some women who joined the work forces, see Honey.

12. In this well-known story, the Englishman Inkle, when stranded on a Caribbean island, befriends the beautiful brown woman Yarico. At the end of this convenient affair, Inkle does not simply betray Yarico, but sells her into slavery. According to Peter Hulme, at least forty-five versions of this story, in three languages, have been published since the late eighteenth century.

13. Female lodging-house keepers were often linked to a prostitution/mistress grouping. This pattern did surface in such places as Bridgetown, Barbados, but not generally in Jamaica (Beckles, Heuman). According to Paulette A. Kerr, while in England few women owned and operated hospitality houses, in Jamaica 88 of the 157 such houses recorded in the 1844 census were owned by women (200).

14. Though some have found fault with the financial motivation of the work, by bringing economic common sense to the activity of writing Seacole would hardly be exceptional. Though “the best English writing was nourished in rural parsonages or country cottages, as the careers of the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen attest,” Leslie Parker Hume and Karen M. Offen also note that “In each country, however, there were many women who turned to writing to supplement their incomes; this was one of the few types of work in which a needy middle-class woman could engage without losing social status” (280). “The golden goose can sell her eggs for a good price,” Louisa May Alcott, the American author of Little Women and Work gleefully wrote in her November 1874 journal entry, when her publishers won a bidding war. Nor were Black writers of slave narratives or of fiction exempt from such considerations—Nancy Prince (A Narrative of the Life and Travels), Harriet Wilson (Our Nig), and Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) were all concerned with profit. In fact, “[m]ore than a few slave autobiographies were published as fundraisers for their narrators, and most were labeled so” (Andrews, “Uses” 108). Seacole must be placed within this pragmatic cadre.

15. See Cap. LXXIII, “An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the manumitted Slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves [28th August 1833].” Except for forbidding treadmills, gross floggings, and capital punishments, the Statute barely addresses civil rights, while paying a great deal of attention to white compensation.

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