Fluhr, Nicole - Mary Seacole's Maternal Personae

Victorian Literature and Culture (2006), 34, 95–113. Printed in the United States of America.
Copyright C 2006 Cambridge University Press. 1060-1503/06 $9.50
“THEIR CALLING ME ‘MOTHER’ WAS NOT, I

THINK, ALTOGETHER UNMEANING”: MARY
SEACOLE’S MATERNAL PERSONAE
By Nicole Fluhr
IN AUTUMN OF 1854, Mary Jane Grant Seacole traveled to England from Jamaica and
“laid . . . pertinacious siege” to the official and private residences of Sidney Herbert,
Secretary-at-War, hoping to secure a post as hospital nurse in the Crimea. Thwarted in her
attempts to see the Secretary, Seacole applied to his wife, Elizabeth Herbert, who informed
her “that the full complement of nurses had been secured” (Seacole 78, 79). Seacole made
one last effort, meeting this time “with one of Miss Nightingale’s companions”; this woman,
she reports, “gave me the same reply [as Mrs. Herbert], and I read in her face the fact, that
had there been a vacancy, I should not have been chosen to fill it” (79). These interlocutors
rejected her, Seacole implies, on account of her colored skin (her mother was Jamaican, her
father Scottish), but English prejudice did not keep the “doctress” (as she termed herself)
from the front.
In January 1855, Seacole arrived in Crimea, where she tended to injured and ill soldiers
and opened the “British Hotel,” a restaurant and store that catered to the troops. One medical
officer speaks in his memoir of making
the acquaintance of a celebrated person, Mrs. Seacole, a coloured woman, who, out of the goodness
of her heart and at her own expense, supplied hot tea to the poor sufferers [wounded men being
transported from the peninsula to the hospital at Scutari] while they were waiting to be lifted into the
boats.
. . . She did not spare herself if she could do any good to the suffering soldiers. In rain and snow,
in storm and tempest, day after day she was at her self-chosen post, with her stove and kettle, in
any shelter she could find, brewing tea for all who wanted it, and they were many. Sometimes more
than 200 sick would be embarked in one day, but Mrs. Seacole was always equal to the occasion.
(Reid 13–14)
She won respect for her medical skill and prospered as an entrepreneur until the decla-
ration of peace rendered her stock obsolete, bankrupting her. Returning to England, Seacole
sought to revitalize her flagging fortunes by writing a memoir, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs.
Seacole in Many Lands (1857), that capitalized on and sought more firmly to establish her
status as “a Crimean heroine!” (Seacole 76). Styling herself the “Mother” of the British troops,
95
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universität Würzburg, on 10 Feb 2021 at 14:57:15, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150306051060
96 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Seacole coded her entrepreneurial ventures and medical work in the Crimea as maternal labor,
positioning the soldiers who were her customers and patients as figurative children.
Describing her initial desire to travel to the front, Seacole speaks of the “delight [I]
should . . . experience if I could be useful to my own ‘sons”’ (75). Alexis Soyer, the French
chef whose memoir of the Crimean war appeared in the same year as Wonderful Adventures,
provides perhaps the most striking examples of the persistence with which Seacole claimed
figurative kinship with the men at the front. On meeting him, he recounts, Seacole cried out
“Who is my new son?” When she learns his name, she replies, “God bless me, my son . . .”
(231), announcing that “‘all those fine fellows you see here are my Jamaican sons – are you
not?’ . . . ‘We are, Mrs. Seacole, and a very good mother you have been to us”’ (232), one
answers. (Seacole terms these men her “Jamaican sons” because she had known them in
Jamaica, where some soldiers fighting in the Crimea had been stationed previously.) Soyer
reports two additional instances during this brief meeting of Seacole’s allusions to her “sons,”
and she not only identifies herself as standing in the position of a mother vis à vis the soldiers
but exhaustively documents soldiers’ recognition of this relation, citing multiple instances
when others refer to her as “Mother.” Her claim to the title is further ratified by independent
accounts.1
However, while the autobiography repeatedly invokes a maternal persona it remains silent
about the biological daughter who appears to have accompanied Seacole to the Crimea. While
Soyer’s account establishes Seacole’s claim to figure as a mother to the troops, it also troubles
her self-representation as a strictly figurative mother by mentioning “Miss Sally Seacole.”
Soyer identifies this girl as Seacole’s daughter and quotes her calling out “Mother, mother!”
to Seacole (269). The girl, variously termed “Sally” and “Sarah,” appears more than once in
Soyer’s memoir. He refers to her as “the Egyptian beauty, [Mrs. Seacole’s] daughter Sarah,”
“swear[s] by [her] blue eyes and black hair” (435) and insists that she “richly deserves the title
of the Dark, instead of Fair, Maid of the Eastern War” (436). Wonderful Adventures makes no
mention of this child, and, in their preface to the British edition, editors Ziggi Alexander and
Audrey Dewjee argue that “Soyer was probably mistaken about the relationship,” although
they acknowledge that “it is odd that Mrs. Seacole makes no reference to Sarah in her
autobiography” (43n 22). Critics have largely ignored the single published reference to the
girl.2 Seacole’s silence may be odd, but, having discovered a second reference that confirms
substantive details of the published account, I believe Soyer was not mistaken.
William Menzies Calder, an assistant surgeon to the 49th regiment, which was stationed
in the Crimea, echoes the French chef’s claim. Calder recorded in his diary that “the celebrated
black lady Mrs. Secole [sic] . . . has a daughter about 16, called Sarah, a great character too”
(115). Because Soyer traveled widely in the Crimea, the peripatetic nature of his travels
may raise doubts about his ability to identify with any degree of certainty the relationship
between the two women. And yet Calder, whose diary refers to “Secole” several times, was
stationed within a few miles of her store for a minimum of eight and a half months (his
extant diary covers the period from 1 July 1855 to 18 March 1856). It is unlikely that he, too,
was mistaken about the way the relation between Seacole and her young companion was
understood by the community at the front.
Although several of the essays written about Seacole since the autobiography’s
republication (in Britain in 1984 and in the United States in 1988) analyze her strategic
use of a maternal persona, they focus primarily on her claim to figure as the mother of British
soldiers and only two mention Sarah.3 Arguing for a broader understanding of the maternal
“Their Calling Me ‘Mother’ Was Not, I Think, Altogether Unmeaning” 97
identity Seacole constructed, this essay reads that identity through the lens of four of her
affiliations: her relationship first to the figurative sons she nursed; to her mother, whose career
the author presents as the model for her own; to the “little servant” girl who accompanies
Seacole to Panama but does not appear in the chapters set in the Crimea (57); and to the
biological daughter whom Seacole does not mention.
Building on Simon Gikandi’s and Evelyn Hawthorne’s claims that Seacole fashioned a
hybrid identity, I show how the text appeals by turn to a range of apparently incompatible
maternal ideals, juxtaposing English and Jamaican, middle- and working-class, and black,
mixed-race, and white mothering practices. The essay has two purposes: first, to examine the
range, composition, and effects of the hybrid maternal identity Seacole claimed in Wonderful
Adventures; then, to consider why, given this unorthodox textual persona, the existence of a
biological daughter struck the autobiographer as inassimilable to the written account of her
life.
SEACOLE, OF COURSE, was not the only nurse in the Crimea who was seen as a maternal
figure. Nurses were regularly associated with mothers and were aware of the association.
One nurse observed that the Turks “call us Mother” (Leaves from the Annals 180), while
another meditated on the significance of the association:
We often thought it curious that the last words of a great number of the men were of their mothers,
though many of them must have left a wife and children. We speculated whether this resulted from
the fact of our being elderly women, and therefore bringing the memory of this parent more vividly
before their failing faculties; or whether it was true that a man’s highest, strongest, most enduring
earthly affection is his love for his mother. (Goodman 108)
Margaret Goodman offers two rationales for the men’s readiness to see mothers in their
nurses: that the nurses are like the men’s mothers with respect to age and sex, and that
mothers are the most significant figures in men’s lives. Seacole takes up Goodman’s notion
that she is like the men’s mothers in age and sex, but what Goodman finds “curious,” Seacole
declares natural, implicitly claiming that the men she nurses are justified in associating her
with their mothers.
Amy Robinson spells out the argument that Seacole makes, namely that the
“title . . . ‘Mother’ . . . marks [Seacole’s] position as a substitute object for the women who
are absent from the lives of the soldiers she tends” (546). Seacole’s rhetoric figures the
autobiographer as a stand-in for the “English home” and its most potent synecdoche, the
mother:
Don’t you think, reader, if you were lying, with parched lips and fading appetite, thousands of miles
from mother, wife, or sister, loathing the rough food by your side, and thinking regretfully of that
English home where nothing that could minister to your great need would be left untried – don’t you
think that you would welcome the familiar figure of the stout lady whose bony horse has just pulled
up at the door of your hut. . . . I tell you, reader, I have seen many a bold fellow’s eye moisten at such
a season, when a woman’s voice and a woman’s care have brought to their minds recollections of
those happy English homes which some of them never saw again. . . .
Then their calling me “mother” was not, I think, altogether unmeaning. I used to fancy that there
was something homely in the word; and, reader, you cannot think how dear to them was the smallest
thing that reminded them of home. (127)
In establishing herself as a substitute for the real mother who cannot be there, Seacole
suggests two apparently contradictory attitudes: on the one hand, she seems humbly to
indicate that such a substitution is possible only because of the desperate plight of these
soldiers – that she will do only because she is as close to the real thing as they can get.
On the other hand, she proudly insists on the value of her work and on her ability to step
into the shoes of the absent mothers who are unable to care for their sons – unable not only
because they are not present, but also because they are not equipped with her medical skill.
In the chapter from which the preceding passage is drawn, Seacole reproduces testimonials
from her patients, documents citing her facility for setting broken bones and her skill at
curing or warding off jaundice, diarrhea, and cholera. Juxtaposing passages describing her
tender care with those attesting to her medical skill, she subtly displaces the image of herself
as makeshift substitute with a portrait of the doctress as the best woman for the job. She
represents herself as qualified to care for these men as even their mothers are not.
Seacole stakes out this position early in the text, when she relates in detail an incident
that occurs in Jamaica and foreshadows the more-briefly sketched moments she will describe
in the Crimea: “A young surgeon . . . fell ill [and] they brought him to my house, where I
nursed him, and grew fond of him – almost as fond as the poor lady his mother in England
far away. . . . I used to call him ‘My son – my dear child. . . .”’ As this man lies dying, he
says to Seacole, “Let me lay my head upon your breast. . . . It’s only that I miss my mother”
(61–62), and after his death, the man’s mother sends Seacole “a little gold brooch with his
hair in it” (63) and a letter of thanks. Both the patient and his mother recognize Seacole as a
surrogate mother, as her payment – a sentimental token, rather than a cash reward – indicates.
(Mary Seacole’s status as surrogate is further underlined by the signature appended to the
mother’s letter: “M S ” [63].) This story, in which an English soldier and an
English mother endorse Seacole’s work as nurse and authorize her to stand in for the absent
mother, serves as a potent fable of authentication.
It is impossible to evaluate Seacole’s maternal persona without reference to that other
famous Crimean nurse who was portrayed as a mother figure.4 Soyer records Seacole’s
interest in linking her name with Florence Nightingale’s, noting that Seacole asked
him to
“. . . give my respects to Miss Nightingale, and say, if I were not so busy I should run as far as the
hospital [at Balaclava], to pay my duty to her. You must know, Monsieur Soyer, that Miss Nightingale
is very fond of me. When I passed through Scutari, she very kindly gave me board and lodging.”
This was about the twentieth time the old lady had told me the same tale. (435)
Even as Seacole is careful to insist that she is too busy nursing to pay her respects
to Nightingale, her repetition of this “tale” testifies to her perception of Nightingale’s
importance as a model with whom the public might compare her, and evidence shows
that their contemporaries did compare the two women. Catherine Judd notes:
The ongoing comparison between Seacole and Nightingale was immediate and long-lasting. For
example, a letter to the Times signed by “Da Meritis” queries whether the “humbler actions of Mrs
Seacole [are] to be entirely forgotten” while the “benevolent deeds of Florence Nightingale are being
handed down to posterity with blessings and imperishable renown.” (103)
As individual celebrities, the two women’s claims to fame were similarly grounded in their
“compassionate treatment of infirm British soldiers” (Judd 103), and Seacole was quick to
underscore and insist on her resemblance to her more famous counterpart.5
However, what the autobiography has to say about Nightingale, whom Seacole calls
“that Englishwoman whose name shall never die, but sound like music on the lips of British
men until the hour of doom” (91), is rather different from what it implies. The humility
Seacole expresses when she notes that “Punch . . . allowed my poor name to appear in the
pages which had welcomed Miss Nightingale home” (133)is qualified by her implicit claims
to equality with and, at times, superiority to Nightingale.6
As she was traveling to the front, Seacole encountered a doctor she knew in Jamaica, who
gave her “a letter of introduction to Miss Nightingale” (85). In the midst of organizing her
stores in Constantinople and preparing to travel on to the Crimean peninsula, Seacole “found
time . . . to charter a crazy caicque, to carry me [across the Bosphorus] to Scutari, intending to
present Dr. F ’s letter to Miss Nightingale” (87). Once there, she encountered “an old
acquaintance . . . an old 97th man” (87) who showed her around and establishes for readers
how welcome she was to the wounded men in the hospital. As the day waned, another
acquaintance “agreed with me that the caicque was not the safest conveyance by night on
the Bosphorus, and recommended me to present my letter to Miss Nightingale, and perhaps
a lodging for the night could be found for me” (89). Looking for the superintendent, Seacole
first encountered “Mrs. B[racebridge]”; although Nightingale’s companion manifested great
surprise at Seacole’s presence and at her request to see Nightingale, Seacole informs us that
“there is that in the Doctor’s letter (he had been much at Scutari) which prevents my request
being refused” (89), and Nightingale received her. In the brief interview that ensued, Seacole
quotes her hostess as saying, “What do you want, Mrs. Seacole – anything that we can do
for you? If it lies in my power, I shall be very happy” (91). A (flea-ridden) bed was found,
and Seacole spent the night, going on her way the next morning.
What was Seacole doing on this trip, and why does she recount the story in such detail?
Initially, she tells us that she chartered the boat in order to present the letter to Nightingale;
however, rather than seeking out the superintendent upon her arrival, Seacole postponed their
encounter until she was forced to ask for Nightingale’s help. The autobiography suggests
Seacole had gotten so caught up in reminiscing with old acquaintances and easing stiff
bandages that she failed to notice how late it had grown, but the inconsistencies in this
account become irrelevant if we read this as another tale of authorization; it then becomes
apparent that Seacole’s seemingly pointless visit to Scutari in fact accomplished a great deal.
When we read it as a mission designed to compel Nightingale’s recognition, it appears
as an admirable success. Seacole wins what she takes as Nightingale’s approval for her
work, garnering an expression of respect that she is careful to record and publicize. For
instance, Soyer reports an encounter with Seacole during which she boasts of Lord Raglan’s
patronage and then notes, “I know Miss Nightingale too. She was very kind to me when I
passed through Scutari, on my way here; she gave me lodging and everything I required, in
the hospital” (233). In fact, as we have seen, Seacole’s trip to Scutari took her out of her
way; she made the overnight trip from Constantinople and returned to that city, where her
ship, the “Hollander,” was moored, before traveling on to the Crimea. Her insistence that
she “passed through Scutari, on [her] way” to the Crimea emphasizes the strategic nature
of the story, whose point is that Nightingale puts herself out for Seacole, not vice versa.
The memoir thus claims the recognition that Seacole had earlier been denied by the war
office and Nightingale’s proxies in England. Those proxies may treat her rudely (at home
and abroad), but this visit effectively disposes of their condescension by revealing Seacole’s
ability to command from their superior the respect they would deny her.
This point is brought out by the exchange with Mrs. Bracebridge that preceded Seacole’s
interview with Nightingale:
What object has Mrs. Seacole in coming out? This is the purport of her questions. And I say,
frankly, to be of use somewhere; for other considerations I had not, until necessity forced them on me.
Willingly, had they accepted me, I would have worked for the wounded, in return for bread and water.
I fancy Mrs. B thought that I sought for employment at Scutari, for she said, very kindly –
“Miss Nightingale has the entire management of our hospital staff, but I do not think that any
vacancy – ”
“Excuse me, ma’am,” I interrupt her with, “but I am bound for the front in a few days.” (90)
This exchange constitutes a pointed reminder of the circumstances under which Seacole
was initially denied the opportunity to go as nurse. The “necessity” that forced her to fund
her nursing by opening the British Hotel was none other than the prejudice of “one of
Miss Nightingale’s companions,” whose countenance told Seacole, when she petitioned for
a nursing position in England before resolving to voyage to the Crimea herself, “that had
there been a vacancy [in the second contingent of nurses being sent to Scutari], I should not
have been chosen to fill it” (79). In this subsequent exchange, Seacole reminds readers that it
is not her fault she has had to engage in commerce, laying the blame at the feet of the British
war office, Nightingale’s assistants, and, perhaps, Nightingale herself.
In underscoring the point that prejudice is responsible for her commercial ventures
and recounting her triumphant deflection of Bracebridge’s snub, Seacole revises the earlier
scenario in which she was passed over for a nursing post. Then, she found herself in tears on
a public street, stinging from her rejection and questioning the motives of those who refused
her services; now, the story is repeated with a difference. As Bracebridge begins to refuse
a request that Seacole, this time, has not tendered, the autobiographer effectively silences
her interlocutor, rejecting the falsely sympathetic rebuff she is about to receive before it
can be made.7 In this encounter, Seacole assures us she is not a petitioner whose merits can
be unfairly overlooked, but a nascent heroine who cannot be prevented from realizing her
destiny.
Seacole’s rebuke is the more pointed because it follows hard on the heels of the felicitous
thought that occurs to her as she walks the corridors of the hospital, “lending a helping hand
here and there”: “I felt happy,” she relates, “in the conviction that I must be useful three or
four days nearer to [the soldiers’] pressing wants than this” (88–89). Without ever criticizing
Nightingale, Seacole reminds the reader that her desire to get to the Crimea was nearly
thwarted by that lady’s assistants and implies that she will be able to succor sick soldiers
better than the more famous Nightingale, since she will be “nearer to their pressing wants” by
several days. Encouraging readers to compare her to the lady with the lamp as she encouraged
them to compare her to soldiers’ mothers, Seacole again obliquely but unmistakably suggests
that she is at least as well equipped to care for the men as their mothers and as her more
famous counterpart.8
WHILE THE COMPARISON to Nightingale helped Seacole position herself as a substitute for
the soldiers’ mothers, Wonderful Adventures simultaneously insists upon her difference from
and her resemblance to the white British mothers whom she proposes to displace. This point
is brought home by two incidents Seacole relates, both of which occur when she first appears
on the wharf at Balaclava to nurse the sick and injured soldiers bound for the hospital at
Scutari. As she tends to a man whose sight is gone, she writes, “his hand touched mine . . . and
I heard him mutter indistinctly, as though the discovery had arrested his wandering senses
– ‘Ha! this is surely a woman’s hand.”’ Before she leaves him, he tells her, “God bless you,
woman – whoever you are, God bless you!” (97). The text invokes the soldier’s testimony
to establish the significance of Seacole’s identity as a woman; the man who provides such
testimony is literally blind to all distinctions other than sex, and the scene serves to show
the insignificance of the differences distinguishing Seacole from the “loving ones” at home
“who would ask no greater favour than the privilege of helping” (97) the man she tends.
If this anecdote has not established this point with sufficient clarity, she offers another: “It
was on this same day, I think, that bending down over a poor fellow whose senses had quite
gone . . . he took me for his wife . . . calling me ‘Mary, Mary,’ many times. . . . Poor fellow! I
could not undeceive him. I think the fancy happily caused by the touch of a woman’s hand
soothed his dying hour” (99).
Again, Seacole’s “woman’s hand” serves as a synecdoche for herself and a soldier’s
reaction shows that it is as a woman that she is important. This time, the soldier himself,
rather than the text, makes the point that Seacole is a substitute for a “loving one” at home
– namely, his wife. His conflation is explained by the fact that his “senses had quite gone”;
this information lets readers know that his mistake is not a threat to them – that they are
allowed to remember the distinction he forgets. At the same times, the story undermines
the importance of that distinction by giving the woman with whom Seacole is confused the
same first name as Seacole herself. This shared name suggests a kinship between the two
women – the two terms of this comparison – that blurs the boundaries distinguishing them.
As women who care to “soothe the dying hour” of this injured man, Seacole and his wife are
alike. Their differences, implies Seacole, while real, are less important than their similarities
and make precisely no difference to the dying man.
My argument is not that Seacole sees herself as the same as the white mothers whose
shoes she claims to fill, but that she is indifferent to their differences. While she lays claim
to the privileges of British subjecthood, she refuses to acknowledge either the hierarchical
structure of the colonial discourse of difference or the ways in which it seeks to label her
as inferior, and this refusal constitutes a challenge to the authority of a colonial discourse
predicated on the ability to make hierarchical distinctions.
Seacole’s insistence on her status as a British subject has been read as an eager
embrace of whiteness that constituted a rejection of her Jamaican heritage, but this reading
ignores important aspects of Seacole’s historical situation and rhetorical self-fashioning.
Amy Robinson argues that Seacole “simply presumes her status as a British subject and
erases her debt to a Caribbean national context” (546).9 Simon Gikandi draws the same
conclusion from the opposite premise, contending that Seacole writes in order to claim her
status as British subject – a status which she cannot presume.
Both agree that for Seacole to identify herself as a British subject was for her to repudiate,
however incompletely, her ties to Jamaica. In contrast, I would suggest that standing in for
the mothers of her British patients did not require Seacole to renounce Jamaican culture for
British or exchange a white, middle-class ideal of maternity for the example provided by her
mother. Instead, rejecting both white Creole and English abolitionists’ notions of black and
mixed-race femininity, she fashioned her own composite ideal.10
Although Seacole modeled some aspects of her public identity on the British mothers
of the men she nursed, she also drew extensively and explicitly on the particulars of her
own upbringing and education in Jamaica. Her self-chosen title aligns her with her mother,
the text’s only other doctress, and she grounds her medical authority not in formal British
training or recognition (she came to the Crimea without either) but in her Jamaican mother’s
practice.11 In this description of her childhood, Seacole represents her choice of her mother’s
profession as the result of her parentage and upbringing:
My mother kept a boarding house in Kingston, and was, like very many of the Creole women, an
admirable doctress. . . . It was very natural that I should inherit her tastes; and so I had from very
early youth a yearning for medical knowledge and practice which has never deserted me. When I
was a very young child I was taken by an old lady, who brought me up in her household among her
own grandchildren, and who could scarcely have shown me more kindness had I been one of them;
indeed, I was so spoiled by my kind patroness that, but for being frequently with my mother, I might
very likely have grown up idle and useless. But I saw so much of her, and of her patients, that the
ambition to become a doctress early took firm root in my mind. . . . (2)
Indicating that the example of her mother prompted her choice of profession, Seacole figures
their relationship in terms of an apprenticeship. Her account of her childhood does not assume
that a mother keeps her children about her or raises them herself; instead, the matter-of-fact
way in which Seacole describes the arrangement by which she lived with her patroness but
was “frequently with [her] mother” suggests that it was not living apart, but meeting often,
that made this mother-child relationship exceptional. While Seacole values the affection she
received from her patroness, she also sees it as dangerous, because it threatened to unfit her
for public work.12 Her mother was significant, in Seacole’s telling, for her ability to check
her daughter’s potential inertia, both inspiring and teaching Seacole to do useful work.
Her mother’s treatment of Seacole is strongly reminiscent of Seacole’s treatment of
the girl she calls “my little servant” or “my maid” (57, 70). Also named Mary, this girl
accompanies Seacole to Panama (though not, according to the autobiography, to the Crimea),
and the relationship delineated in the autobiography echoes the terms in which Seacole depicts
her own apprenticeship to her mother. Seacole scholars have speculated that this girl, who
appears in only a few scenes during the Panama section of the text, may have been her daughter
(see Hawthorne 323). Whether or not this child functions as a metonymic displacement of
Sarah, the memoir’s portrayal of Mary reinforces the paradigm of maternal care we see
in Seacole’s relationship with her own mother; the author seems to have “inherit[ed] her
[mother’s] tastes” not only in practicing medicine and running a hotel, but also in training
the children in her care.
Like Seacole, Mary receives practical instruction rather than sentimental affection from
a woman who treats her as an apprentice and expects her to make herself useful at an early
age. While Mary is put to work in Seacole’s hotel at Cruces, keeping guests honest and
protecting Seacole’s property from thieves, the few tasks we see the mistress set the maid are
no more onerous than those mothers might and did ask their children to perform. It is likely
that such work fell to Seacole in the early years before she left her mother, or in the visits she
hints at when she took up residence with her patroness. Seacole shares her rough sleeping
quarters with Mary and takes her on outings in Panama. Describing a confrontation with rude
Americans, Seacole notes that while she has been defying the women, their “children had
taken my little servant Mary in hand, and were practising on her the politenesses which their
parents were favouring me with” (57). The correspondence between the American women’s
treatment of Seacole and their children’s treatment of Mary establishes an implicit parallel
between the mothers’ relationship to their children and Seacole’s relationship to little Mary.
The suggestion of kinship between Seacole and her servant is strengthened by Seacole’s
description of the girl’s “yellow face” – a phrase that echoes Seacole’s self-portrait as “a
motherly yellow woman” elsewhere (57, 78). The girl’s given name is also Seacole’s, and
Ellen Ross reminds us of “the custom of giving the oldest child of each sex the name of the
same-sex parent” (131).
Seacole’s descriptions of her figurative sons and this figurative daughter invoke parallel
notions of maternal care, one characteristically middle-class, the other working-class. Ross
contends that
conceptions of the central place of female nurture in children’s spiritual development circulated in
middle-class advice books. But working-class mothers in the same period more unsentimentally
viewed their children in terms of the resources they required or contributed. They knew that love
was vital to their children, but they acknowledged that young children meant hard work, which the
children could later reciprocate. (129)13
Middle-class formulations of motherhood are sentimental, Ross suggests, because they

disavow the labor involved in maternal work. The middle-class ideal of motherhood to
which she refers imagines mother-love as disinterested – given with no expectation of any
return: a mother gives and a child receives. What differentiates working- from middle-class
mothers, then, is not only the formers’ insistence on the work involved in raising children,
but also their frank acknowledgment of the dividends their investment may yield when
their children begin to contribute to the household’s economy, working for parents or for
pay.
This notion of motherhood as exchange is readily apparent in Seacole’s relationships
with her mother and with Mary, but it is obscured by the sentimental rhetoric with which
the autobiographer describes her interactions with British soldiers.14 Seacole characterizes
her work as hotel- and store-keeper as the means by which she was able to support herself
in the Crimea and tend to her “sons.” As we saw her tell Bracebridge above, her object was
“to be of use somewhere. . . . Willingly, had they accepted me, I would have worked for the
wounded, in return for bread and water” (90). Portraying herself as forced into commerce
by necessity, she insists that her true calling is caring for the soldiers. But her business is
not merely incidental to her medical/maternal work. As mother of the British troops, she
counters the idea of mothering-as-exchange with the notion that commerce itself can be a
form of maternal care, figuring her store as a giant kitchen that supplies the multiple wants
of her needy sons.
Seacole reports that she once “resigned a plump fowl which [she] had kept back for [her]
own dinner” to one customer who, having lost his purchases in the Crimean mud, returned
to beg some more, pleading that “he had two fellows coming to dine with him at six, and
nothing in the world in his hut but salt pork” (142). The decision to “resign” her dinner
to the man accords perfectly with the ideal of a self-sacrificing mother who puts not only
her son’s needs, but also his wants, ahead of her own. Here, she makes no mention of the
price she received for her dinner, eliding the fact that she required her “sons” to pay for that
which a (middle-class) mother would freely give. Elsewhere, however, Seacole’s rhetoric
incorporates a working-class model of mothering that takes an entrepreneurial quid pro quo
for granted: “When a poor fellow lay sickening in his cheerless hut and sent down to me,
he knew very well that I should not ride up in answer to his message empty-handed. And
although I did not hesitate to charge him with the value of the necessaries I took him, still he
was thankful enough to be able to purchase them” (125).
It is significant that Seacole figures herself as a selfless, middle-class mother only
with reference to the British soldiers in her care. On an earlier foray to Panama, she also
established a hotel and set up as doctress; but while she treated entire towns – including some
small children — in the midst of cholera epidemics, she never codes these relationships as
those between mother and child; rather, she is the medical professional, they the patients.
Seacole’s selective use of a maternal persona indicates that she did not simply equate medical
and maternal work; rather, she sought to assert her claim to British identity by establishing
a metaphorical kinship with English soldiers that she did not seek with other, non-English
patients.
Seacole’s anxiety to justify her entrepreneurial work is elucidated by the memoir of
William Daverell Cattell, an assistant surgeon in the British army who documented both
Seacole’s suspect status and the success with which she transcended it:
An elderly mulatto from Jamaica, Mrs. Seacole, wished to open a restaurant at the end of the Light
Cavalry’s camp . . . but her intentions were misinterpreted, she was refused. [L]ater she established
herself higher up on the road. . . . Here her charity soon belied her unprepossessing appearance; with
a taste for doctoring and nursing, she combined the business of a settler [sutler].
Convoys of sick halted and were cheered with warm refreshment, later she came on the field at
Tchernaya with comforts for the wounded[.] [S]he developed as a philanthropist and soon became a
general favourite, and on great occasions appeared in the brightest of ribbons. (3: 24)
It seems likely that Seacole’s intentions were “misinterpreted,” at least in part, because of her
status as a sutler. Since enlisted men received only one meal and one shilling cash per day,
they had to forage for food; sutlers thus were essential to an army, but, since competition was
minimal, they could charge whatever the market would bear, and they had a well-deserved
reputation for exploiting their customers.15
Cattell suggests that Seacole neutralized that reputation by treating men without charge;
linking her popularity and her philanthropy, he implies that Seacole’s “charity” is what
transformed official skepticism to acceptance. In other words, it is by transferring attention
from her remunerated to her unremunerated labor that Seacole wins the trust and respect of
her customers and patients – and legitimates her claim to the title of “mother.” Just as she
did not claim a maternal relationship to her Panamanian patients, it is only in the Crimean
sections of the autobiography that Seacole takes pains to distance herself from a desire for
economic profits. Describing her work in Panama, she establishes her entrepreneurial savvy
by noting that her customers “were glad of my stores and comforts, [and] I made money
out of their wants” (50); those consumers were not part of Wonderful Adventures’ intended
audience, and she had no interest in persuading them of her disinterested affection.
Seacole’s rhetoric has two effects: it domesticates the public work of the store-keeper,
but at the same time it presents her “maternal” labor as a public service, rather than a
private chore. As hotel-owner, Seacole blurs the line demarcating public and private spheres,
because the establishment over which she presides is open to the public, and she does for
pay what English mothers were supposed to do for love and out of duty. Her work as a
doctress is another case in point. It is remunerative, public labor and thus distinct from the
nursing of family members and neighbors that both working- and middle-class British women
performed; however, the language Seacole uses to describe it conjures up the very register of
charitable visiting for which her fees disqualified her. Seacole did not charge for her nursing,
but she was paid for food and the medicines she stocked or, in many instances, prepared
herself.16 Because Seacole labels this work “maternal,” mothering appears in Wonderful
Adventures as public labor – or rather, as labor that bridges the divide between public and
private.
As I have shown, the training mothers provide their daughters in Seacole’s narrative
differs from conventional representations of mid-century middle-class English mothers’
conduct. The mother-daughter dyad is not isolated in a private domestic sphere separate
from the public working world, and mothering daughters does not consist of raising them
for marriages in which all labor will be done inside the home. Marriage, in fact, is a minor
concern in the autobiography. Anthony Trollope, who once stayed in a boarding house kept
by Seacole’s sister, noted, “there is something of a mystery about hotels in the British West
Indies. They are always kept by fat middle-aged colored ladies who have no husbands”
(195), and husbands are indeed absent from or peripheral to Seacole’s account of her early
life (neither her mother nor her patroness seems to have one). Instead, Seacole described
a female world in which women were both caretakers and breadwinners; “many . . . Creole
women” practiced medicine, she tells us, and Trollope’s claim about the prevalence of
colored lodging-house keepers has been well documented (see Kerr). Seacole’s story of her
childhood in Jamaica takes for granted a world in which women expected to work – and
were respected for working – in what British readers would have seen as the public sphere.
Seacole thus repeatedly asserted her resemblance to middle-class British women by
advertising her adherence to certain codes of feminine propriety, and at the same time she
offered detailed descriptions of the ways in which she flouted these self-same codes. Indeed,
Faith Smith suggests just how transgressive Seacole’s behavior would have seemed to her
British readers in this description of a Caribbean society stratified by gender and class
distinctions – distinctions that were established with reference to British constructions of
womanhood:
“vulgar” Afro-Caribbean jamettes [“members of the working (or ‘underworld’) class”] were
contrasted [by white British observers] to “dignified” Indo-Caribbean women, a comparison that,
in holding both groups of women to standards of Victorian Femininity, ultimately oppressed them
both.
. . . In contrast to the jamette’s independence and to her social marking as outspoken, ungainly,
and unladylike, the middle-class woman was positioned [by black middle-class commentators] inside
the home and her conduct was sedate and genteel. (921nn. 30–31, 910)
Seacole both does and does not fit Smith’s description of the jamette, who “violated gender
norms for freedom of movement and sexuality” (909). Seacole did not belong to the
“underworld” class, but neither did she restrict her activity to the home; she traveled on
her own to the theater of war and at the same time took pride in her respectable femininity,
as her repeated descriptions of the dresses and shawls she ruined in the Panamanian mud or
her insistence on the title “Mrs.” indicate.17
At the time Wonderful Adventures appeared, Baptist missionaries from Britain had for
several decades been striving to establish in post-emancipation Jamaica “what they saw
as a proper gender order, in which men worked for money and women stayed at home,
caring for children and household” (Hall 108). According to Catherine Hall, “the abolitionist
dream” was “a society in which . . . black women would become like . . . the white women
of the middle-class English abolitionist imagination, occupying their small but satisfying
separate sphere, married and living in regular households” (110). The most cursory reading
of Wonderful Adventures establishes that this was not Seacole’s dream, and her claim to be
like white British women can in no way be taken to connote her acceptance of the repressive
mold fashioned by the abolitionists.
IGNORING THE TENSION between two radically different plots of female development, Seacole
chose to present herself both as conventionally feminine in British terms and as the product
of a Jamaican world with a different understanding of what women should be. She assumes
that the ideal of the self-reliant working woman is in no way at odds with the model
British mothers for whom she proposes to substitute. Accommodating her British readers’
assumptions about how the narrative of a woman’s life should read, Seacole also introduced
an entirely different set of conventions that might shape women’s lives.
Seacole’s account of her marriage exemplifies this process, both meeting and
undermining her readers’ expectations of female coming-of-age narratives. After nursing
her dying patroness, Seacole writes:
I went to my mother’s house, where I stayed, making myself useful in a variety of ways, and learning
a great deal of Creole medicinal art, until I couldn’t find courage to say “no” to a certain arrangement
timidly proposed by Mr. Seacole, but married him, and took him down to Black River, where we
established a store. . . . I kept him alive by kind nursing and attention as long as I could; but at last he
grew so ill that we left Black River and returned to my mother’s house at Kingston. Within a month
of our arrival there he died. (5–6)
Ushering her husband on and off the stage of the autobiography almost simultaneously,
Seacole’s off-handed invocation of the love plot makes it clear that matrimony plays second
fiddle to medicine in her life. The story of her marriage functions almost as an afterthought,
as Seacole incorporates it into the tale of her medical and entrepreneurial education.18
This tale does not simply blur the line demarcating public and private spheres; it erases
it, since the house over which Seacole’s mother presided – the house from which Seacole
“was taken” as “a very young child” – was a boarding house. Such an establishment straddles
the divide between public and private; its mistress is paid to fill the role that English mothers
were supposed freely to assume.
Critics have taken frequent note of the nonexistence of private space in Seacole’s memoir.
Robinson asserts, “Seacole stages her ‘private’ self (the ostensible self of an autobiography)
by rejecting the distinction between private and public which has so often relegated women
(as wives, mothers, domestic workers) to the ‘private”’ (549). I agree that the memoir
calls into question the differences between public and private realms, between the roles
of doctress/hotel-keeper and wife, and between remunerated and unremunerated female
labor, particularly in its representations of maternal care. But rather than reading this as a
confusion between public and private or as a rejection of their differences, I argue that it
reflects a different understanding of what constitutes public and private. Realms and roles
that middle-class English readers were accustomed to finding strictly demarcated intermingle
in Seacole’s description of the Jamaica in which she grew up.
If cultural differences are one factor in the autobiographer’s inscription of herself, the
significance of the audience for which Seacole wrote and her reasons for writing have also
been consistently underestimated. While critics acknowledge the importance of the fact that
she wrote in part to recoup the losses she suffered at the war’s end, their estimates of her
character rarely take into account the audience for whom she constructed this character.
Paquet, for instance, criticizes the memoir as “an entirely public account of self” (Caribbean
Autobiography 67). Yet these readings disregard the nature, prejudices, and expectations of
her intended audience and the influence Seacole’s sense of her future readers would have
exerted on her self-inscription.
Frances Smith Foster has pointed out that “African American women writers could
not assume a readership composed primarily or exclusively of women like themselves”
(83), and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese attributes the non-confessional style of black women’s
autobiographies to this aspect of black women writers’ relationship to their audience.
Rather than writing for readers “like themselves,” they “wrote to be read by those who
might influence the course of public events, might pay money for their books, or might
authenticate them as authors” (72). These writers needed to pay special attention to gauging
and responding to readers’ expectations, and, while Seacole was not African American, her
motivations, insofar as we can reconstruct them, fit this profile: her largely white, English,
middle-class audience was not “like her,” and she wrote to earn money after the war’s end
left her bankrupt, as well as to establish herself more firmly as “a Crimean heroine” (Seacole
76).
I have shown how the accounts of Seacole’s contemporaries reveal gaps in the story told
by Wonderful Adventures, but the autobiography itself also makes its silences legible. If she
promises candor, Seacole is also frank about her occasional reticence. Nevertheless, readers
past and present have attended more to the text’s admissions than to its strategic silences. W.
H. Russell calls Seacole a “plain truth-speaking woman” (vii), and William Andrews asserts:
we should remember that Seacole had little patience with pretense of any sort, preferring instead
to treat her reader “in a friendly confidential way” that let her speak her mind. Perhaps it is her
willingness to “confess” to feelings that many women of her time, white or black, would have
concealed that helps to make her autobiography so attractive. (xxxiii)
Perhaps, however, it is precisely this “willingness” that entices readers to accept Seacole’s
assertions at face value, even when the text itself teaches us that, in doing so, we may misread
it. The following anecdote is a case in point, and it illustrates the text’s penchant for using
silence as a form of implicit analysis.
While in Panama, Seacole treats a boy who has accidentally been shot by Dr. Casey,
the American proprietor of a gambling house. She visits Casey in jail, where he queries her,
first angrily, then nervously, about the boy’s condition. When he asks her, “how’s that
boy?” Seacole chastises him for his lack of concern and overstates the boy’s danger, leading
Casey to entreat her to intercede on his behalf with the local authorities, who have as little
sympathy for Americans as Seacole herself:
“[Y]ou’ll surely help me? you’ll surely tell the alcalde [magistrate] that the wound’s a slight one?”. . .
“What can I do or say, Dr. Casey? I must speak the truth, and the ball is still in the poor lad’s
hip,” I answered, for I enjoyed the fellow’s fear too much to help him. (54–55)
This scene is meant to amuse us; we assume the boy recovers and we know that Casey
is able to buy his freedom from the alcalde. However, the tale offers more than comic relief;
it establishes Seacole as someone who plays with the truth, both for her own pleasure and in
order to teach the cocky American – who assumes he can first command and then cajole her
aid – a lesson. She demonstrates her skill in this exchange, telling her interlocutor that she
“must speak the truth” even as she proceeds to produce an impression that is untrue. Here,
she solicits readers’ appreciation of the game she plays, showing us the differences between
what she thinks, what she knows, and what she says. We are her co-conspirators, and we
laugh with her as she shows up the presumptuous doctor. But we may conclude from this
scene that there are other instances in her text where Seacole plays with truth via silence –
for her own pleasure, to instruct the reader attentive enough to notice, and to extricate herself
from otherwise immobilizing binds. The scene not only shows us that Seacole’s confessions
should be read as considered rather than spontaneous; it reminds us that it is obvious, but
easy to forget, that there are truths she does not tell – even to her readers.
The nature of her relationship with the young woman identified by Soyer and Calder
as her daughter was among the truths Seacole chose not to tell. As far as we can gauge
from Seacole’s own and corroborative reports, she made no effort to conceal Sarah or her
relationship to Sarah from the people around her in the Crimea, yet she seems not to have
wanted her English readers to put the disparate elements of her identity together. Why did
her daughter appear as her daughter in the Crimea and figure precisely nowhere in Seacole’s
written account of her time there?
The events of the autobiography occurred at the Crimean front, in time of war, while the
text itself appeared in an England at peace. As Seacole explains, with perhaps more irony than
critics give her credit for, “you see war, like death, is a great leveller, and mutual suffering and
endurance had made us all friends” (191). A dichotomy that could be overlooked on the war-
torn peninsula would not be so readily countenanced in peacetime England. In the Crimea,
it was possible for Seacole, “who was at her door with her daughter Sarah,” to “call out, ‘Go
it, my sons!”’ to a group of riders flying by on the road (Soyer 334). There is no apparent
difficulty with the juxtaposition of a literal daughter on the one hand and “sons” on the other.
In her autobiography, however, Seacole shied away from maintaining both a literal and
a figurative claim to maternity. Any evidence of a particular child would have compromised
the indispensable illusion of a generally available maternal figure; moreover, for the text to
suggest a kinship, however metaphorical, between “the Dark, instead of Fair, Maid of the
Eastern War” (Soyer 436) and a host of British soldiers, would have violated racial taboos. To
represent her mixed-race daughter in the same pages in which she lay claim to white “sons”
would be to ask the British public that was Seacole’s audience to accept them as siblings.
Barbara Bush contrasts Jamaican and English attitudes toward interracial liaisons, noting that
while relationships between white men and black or mixed-race women were ubiquitous and
tacitly accepted in Jamaica, “concubinage . . . was heavily censured in England” (769), and
Sandra Gunning argues, “it is [Seacole’s] widowhood, as well as her presumed childlessness,
that make it possible for Seacole to claim her surrogacy as the mother to English soldiers far
from home” (956).
Seacole’s silence may be attributed to variations in the social codes governing Jamaica
and England, on the one hand, and a military society in the midst of war and a civil society
in peacetime, on the other. Yet another operative distinction is the difference between the
constraints that governed how Seacole could represent herself in her day-to-day existence
(her performance of her identity “in the flesh”) and those that governed how she could
represent herself in her autobiography (her performance on the page). The transgressions
that representation licenses are predicated on the representational – that is, figurative – nature
of those transgressions. They are permissible because they are carefully demarcated from
the realm of the literal. Seacole is able to play with the meaning of the signifier “mother”
because her text insists that such play is not to be taken literally. Such regulations imply that
it is the literal, not the figurative, that is dangerous, since one is “real,” the other only always
potential.
In Seacole’s case, however, the reverse was also true: what was permissible in life was
not permissible in representations of that life. Her decision to omit from her performance on
paper what she could play out in her performance in the flesh suggests that motherhood’s
importance is at least as much a function of its signifying power as of its literal existence.
It was as a figure that created meaning, not as a body that created babies, that Seacole
represented a threat.19
In reading Seacole’s relationship to the title “mother” today, it is tempting to grant the
information supplied by external sources – that is, the information that Seacole chose to omit
– more interpretive authority than her own text’s declarations about her maternal persona.
Such a reading is predicated on the belief that truth lies in that which is hidden and must
be revealed, an idea that posits an antagonistic relationship between reader and writer, who
fight for mastery over the meaning of the text. Reading this way, it is tempting to say that the
significance of Seacole’s self-chosen title, “mother,” is defined by what the memoir leaves
unsaid; the literal truth of the biological relation threatens to discredit the figurative truth of
metaphorical kinship. But ignoring the self Seacole chose to claim in favor of the self she
chose to conceal restricts our ability to appreciate the ways in which Wonderful Adventures
both played with and was bound by prevailing conceptions of what motherhood meant. I have
shown how a monolithic stereotype of motherhood fractures along class, racial, and cultural
lines in Seacole’s memoir. The full dimensions of the renovated maternal ideal she offers
in its place can only come into focus when, like her, we can acknowledge the simultaneous
influence exercised by seemingly incompatible ideals of maternity and womanhood.
Southern Connecticut State University
NOTES
I would like to thank Sandra Gunning for introducing me to Seacole’s memoir and for her generous
comments on early drafts of this essay.
1. As Seacole travels to the front, she alludes to two instances when men hail her as “Mother,” once at
Gibraltar and once in the hospital at Scutari, which she visits overnight. In the former incident, she is
accosted thus: “Why, bless my soul . . . if this is not our good old Mother Seacole!” When she explains
her presence in Gibraltar and her intentions to the two men, whom she knew in Jamaica, the following
exchange ensues:
“And you are going to the front . . .?”

“Why not, my sons? – won’t they be glad to have me there?”
“By Jove! yes, mother. . . .” (84)
She cites “the remark, often repeated by the officers, that you might get everything at Mother Seacole’s”
(114), refers to herself as “Mother Seacole” (118), and quotes officers who call out to her “Mother
Seacole!” (88, 119).
In an 1857 letter to Punch, Seacole claims the journal itself as a figurative son:
Mother Seacole loves to acknowledge the kindness shown her by her sons, whether in black or red
coats, and hastens to assure Punch that she has long felt a mother’s affection for him. For she remembers a
time when a word of cheer and encouragement broke like a ray of golden sunlight through the gloom of a
suffering army, and that word Punch never failed to give her soldier sons. (“Our Own Vivandière”)
Finally, published memoirs (Soyer’s Culinary Campaign) and private papers (Calder’s diary,
Cattell’s unpublished memoir) confirm that Seacole was known as “Mother.”
2. Hawthorne and Gunning are the exceptions.
3. Alexander and Dewjee (1984) and Andrews (1988), respectively, edited and wrote introductions to
British and American editions of Seacole’s text. Since 1992, it has been the subject of essays by
Paquet, Robinson, Smith, Fish, McKenna, Hawthorne, and Gunning, and of chapters in books by
Judd, Gikandi, Paravisini-Gebert, and Paquet. Paquet, Robinson, Gunning, and Fish pay particular
attention to the question of Seacole’s maternal persona, and Hawthorne and Gunning discuss Sarah.
4. An unsigned article in the Illustrated London News asserts, “[Florence Nightingale] has gracefully
bent her mind to the education and amusement of – we had almost written it, the troops committed to
her care;’ but more properly – the ‘sons of her adoption”’ (“Nightingale Fund”).
5. Paravisini-Gebert notes that “Seacole . . . cleverly weaves Nightingale into her text, creating a mirror
image that in many ways subverts Nightingale and allows Seacole, if not to displace Nightingale . . . at
least to share her Crimean space” (77). Seacole might well have boasted that she was better qualified
to care for the soldiers than Nightingale and her nurses. Alexander and Dewjee write
the facts of Mrs. Seacole’s knowledge and field training cannot be over-stressed. For it was out of this
experience, and confident that she could help the troops in the Crimea, that she volunteered her services to
the army when she arrived in England in October 1854. It is doubtful whether there were any white women
who could equal her expertise and training, since at that time in Great Britain few females of any class had
the opportunity of acquiring such extensive practical experience. (17)
Seacole had acquired this experience treating tropical diseases in Cruces, Gorgona, and Escribanos,
as well as Jamaica.
6. Punch devoted at least three items to Seacole, a poem entitled “A Stir for Seacole” (6 December 1856),
and “Our Own Vivandière” (30 May 1857).
7. Seacole’s account of Mrs. Bracebridge’s insolence is supported by F. B. Smith, who notes that she
“was especially haughty to the candidates [for nursing positions in the Crimea] she inspected. . . .
She lined the postulants along a wall and fired ‘sudden questions’ at them. If the questions were
not answered immediately and to her satisfaction, she barked, ‘She won’t do; send her out”’
(33).
8. In an interesting echo of Seacole’s effort to authorize her work by comparing herself to Nightingale,
the Florence Nightingale Museum has this to say about Seacole:
Florence Nightingale had already left for the Crimea by the time Mrs. Seacole arrived in London to
volunteer as a nurse [that is, it was not Nightingale’s fault Seacole’s petition was rejected]. . . . Unable to
make any headway with British officials, she traveled to the Crimea at her own expense . . . and helped
the wounded to embark for Scutari and Florence Nightingale. The two women met in Scutari and later at
Balaclava, and respected each other’s work. (“Mrs. Seacole.” June 1998)
Taking care to distance Nightingale – and “British officials” – from charges of racism, the Museum
display insists on Seacole’s subordinate status (in “help[ing] the wounded to embark for Scutari and
Florence Nightingale,” she aids Nightingale’s work rather than doing her own). At the same time it
borrows Seacole’s newfound cachet to further burnish its hagiographic portrait of Nightingale.
9. However, Robinson herself points out that white Creoles in the early years of the nineteenth century
“reject[ed] their identification as British subjects” (540), which suggests that Seacole’s decision to
identify herself as British would have had the effect of distancing the autobiographer from Jamaica’s
white ruling class.
10. Paquet seems to endorse such a reading when she writes, “[Seacole] admits no conflict of interest;
to be Jamaican and to be a British subject are culturally interchangeable” (Caribbean Autobiography
64), yet she quotes with approval Gikandi’s claim that “Jamaica must fade into the distance . . . so
that England can be rewritten as the real place of identity” (278n 22). Yet Seacole herself
seems, as Paquet has just implied, to contest the notion that there must be one “real place of
identity.”
11. Alexander and Dewjee note that Seacole’s mother “was one of many [Jamaican] women who were
notable doctresses, familiar with the prognosis and treatment of tropical diseases, general ailments
and wounds. Their expertise was recognized throughout the island” (13).
12. I agree with Hawthorne that Seacole uses her mother to “present . . . a non-sentimentalized narrative
of womanly entrepreneurship,” but whereas Hawthorne contends that this renovated ideal constitutes
a rejection of “Victorian definitions of true womanhood” (322), I argue that Seacole assimilates these
radically different ideals to one another, constructing a hybrid self composed with reference to both
British and Jamaican models of motherhood.
13. The period to which Ross refers, the 1870s through 80s, was fifteen to twenty years after Seacole’s
memoir appeared; however, earlier accounts (for instance, Mayhew’s London Labour and the London
Poor) support Ross’ claim that working-class parents looked to their children to help maintain the
family.
14. Seacole invokes a sentimental middle-class model of motherhood with the soldiers as well as with the
officers, although as Gunning points out, “while [Seacole] treats common soldiers without a fee, she
openly demands money from their officers; by this method, as well as by stocking goods that would
attract those who were wealthy enough to pay for English food and clothing, she was able to subsidize
her humanitarian efforts and even prosper” (969). The memoir by no means disregards differences
of military rank and social class, and Seacole describes her relations with all members of the British
army, from working-class enlisted men to upper-class officers, in the same sentimental terms and thus
differentiates them from her other patients and customers.
15. Cattell’s endorsement of Seacole’s philanthropy is echoed by Russell, the Times reporter who has been
called the first war correspondent. His bulletins from the front, describing the atrocious conditions
there, were widely credited with prompting action at home. He introduced Seacole to the Times’s
readers in his dispatches and wrote an “Introductory Preface” to Wonderful Adventures in which he
asserted that “she is the first who has redeemed the name of ‘sutler’ from the suspicion of worthlessness,
mercenary baseness, and plunder” (viii).
16. Calder describes how
a man called in, (a labourer) to ask her advice, + to buy some camphor as a preventative against cholera; she
laughed him out of his fears + sent him away a different man . . . without his camphor + giving him sound
practical advice as regards a regimen of [drinking] + etc. her powders for diarrhoea + cholera . . . [They]
seem to have worked miracles; she used them with great benefit in Panama – I gained her favour by telling
her her fame was known in England, + she promised me some of the powders; they certainly cannot be
less efficacious than all our drugs + etc. for cholera, from all the varieties of which I have as yet seen little
benefit here. (114–15)
17. Foster writes of Nancy Prince, another nineteenth-century female autobiographer of color from the
Caribbean, that, “As implied by her self-designation as ‘Mrs. Nancy Prince,’ . . . Prince was very careful
to establish herself as a respectable woman” (85). Seacole claims the designation in her autobiography’s
title and in her announcement that “Mrs. Mary Seacole (Late of Kingston Jamaica) will open the British
Hotel” (81). Russell uses the title in his introduction to Wonderful Adventures; and Punch’s and private
diaries’ references to Seacole (see Calder and Cattell) confirm that she was known by this title, and
not only to her face. Although Bush cites “an observer of early nineteenth-century Jamaican life”
for her claim that “even the most privileged coloured women were only ever ‘Miss’, never ‘Mrs.”’
(775), Seacole was not alone in her distinction. See Kerr for a list of female lodging-house keepers in
Jamaica, some of whose names are prefaced by “Mrs.” (200).
18. Kerr notes that, “in the establishment of these [lodging-]houses, [Jamaican women] chose strategic
locations, that is, land routes and . . . seaport towns. . . . They sought out the places where there were
no planters’ residences and only the houses of a few merchants. They met the demand for lodging
and food from a wide cross-section of travelers and became indispensable” (204). Seacole – who ran
hotels in Kingston as well as Black River – fits this profile; by the time she ventured forth to apply
what she had learned in Panama and the Crimea, she was well versed in deciding where to situate and
how to stock a store.
19. This point holds true whether Seacole’s reticence was her choice, as Hawthorne suggests when she
speculates that Seacole may not have wished “to make her daughter . . . into a literary spectacle” (324),
or whether, as one anonymous reader suggested, the decision to omit reference to Sarah was prompted
by Seacole’s editors.
WORKS CITED
Alexander, Ziggi, and Audrey Dewjee. Editors’ Introduction. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many
Lands. By Mary Seacole. Ed. Ziggi Alexander and Audrey Dewjee. Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1984.
9–45.
Andrews, William. Introduction. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. By Mary Seacole.
Ed. William Andrews. Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. Gen. ed.
Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. xxvii–xxxiv.
Bush, Barbara. “‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ or ‘Drudge’? British Slavery and the ‘Fabulous Fiction’ of Black
Women’s Identities, c. 1650–1838.” Women’s History Review 9 (2000): 761–89.
Calder, William Menzies. By courtesy of the Librarian, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.
RAMC Collection 701, box 56. Wellcome Institute Library, London.
Cattell, William Daverell. Bygone Days and Reminiscences by the Way. By courtesy of the Librarian,
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. RAMC Collection 391. Wellcome Institute Library,
London.
Fish, Cheryl. “Voices of Restless (Dis)continuity: The Significance of Travel for Free Black Women in the
Antebellum Americas.” Women’s Studies 26.5 (1997): 475–95.
Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. “My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women.”
The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Shari Benstock.
Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988. 63–89.
Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia
UP, 1996.
Goodman, Margaret. Experiences of an English Sister of Mercy. London: Smith Elder, 1867.
Gunning, Sandra. “Traveling with Her Mother’s Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race, and Location in
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Signs 26.4 (2001): 949–81.
Hall, Catherine. “White Visions, Black Lives: The Free Villages of Jamaica.” History Workshop Journal 36
(1993): 100–132.
Hawthorne, Evelyn J. “Self-Writing, Literary Traditions, and Post-Emancipation Identity: The Case of Mary
Seacole.” Biography 23.2 (2000): 309–31.
Judd, Catherine. “‘A Female Ulysses’: Mary Seacole, Homeric Epic, and the Trope of Heroic Nursing
(1854–1857).” Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830–1880. By Catherine
Judd. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. 101–22.
Kerr, Paulette. “Victims or Strategists? Female lodging-house keepers in Jamaica.” Engendering History:
Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. Ed. Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara
Bailey. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. 197–212.
Leaves from the Annals of the Sisters of Mercy in 3 vols. Vol. 2 By a Member of the Order of Mercy. New
York: Catholic Publication Society, 1883.
McKenna, Bernard. “‘Fancies of Exclusive Possession’: Validation and Dissociation in Mary Seacole’s
England and Caribbean.” Philological Quarterly 76.2 (1997): 219–39.
“Mrs. Seacole.” Exhibit. Florence Nightingale Museum, London. June 1998.
“The Nightingale Fund.” Illustrated London News 29 March 1856.
“Our Own Vivandière.” Punch 30 May 1857: 221.
Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation. Wisconsin
Studies in Autobiography. Gen. ed. William L. Andrews. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002.
———. “The Enigma of Arrival: The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” African
American Review 26.4 (1992): 651–63.
Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “Mrs. Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures in Many Lands and the Consciousness of
Transit.” Black Victorians/Black Victoriana. Ed. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. New Brunswick: Rutgers
UP, 2003.
Reid, Douglas Arthur. Memoirs of the Crimean War: January 1855–June 1856. London: St. Catherine P,
1911.
Robinson, Amy. “Authority and the Public Display of Identity: Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in
Many Lands.” Feminist Studies 20.3 (1994): 537–57.
Ross, Ellen. Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.
Russell, W. H. “To The Reader.” Andrews vii–viii.
Seacole, Mary. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. Ed. William Andrews. Schomburg
Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. Gen. ed. Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. New York:
Oxford UP, 1988.
Smith, F. B. Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power. London: Croom Helm, 1982.
Smith, Faith L. “Coming Home to the Real Thing: Gender and Intellectual Life in the Anglophone
Caribbean.” South Atlantic Quarterly 93.4 (1994): 895–923.
Soyer, Alexis. Soyer’s Culinary Campaign: Being Historical Reminiscences of the Late War, with the Plain
Art of Cookery, for Military and Civil Institutions, the Army, Navy, Public, Etc., Etc. London: Routledge,
1857.
“Stir for Seacole, A.” Punch 31 (6 December 1856): 221.
Trollope, Anthony. The West Indies and the Spanish Main. London: Chapman and Hall, 1867.

Fluhr, Nicole - Mary Seacole's Maternal Personae

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Fluhr, Nicole - Mary Seacole's Maternal Personae

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Victorian Literature and Culture (2006), 34, 95–113. Printed in the United States of America.

Copyright C 2006 Cambridge University Press. 1060-1503/06 $9.50

“THEIR CALLING ME ‘MOTHER’ WAS NOT, I

Middle-class formulations of motherhood are sentimental, Ross suggests, because they

Southern Connecticut State University

“And you are going to the front . . .?”

You might also like

Fluhr, Nicole - Mary Seacole&#39;s Maternal Personae

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Fluhr, Nicole - Mary Seacole&#39;s Maternal Personae

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Victorian Literature and Culture (2006), 34, 95–113. Printed in the United States of America.

Copyright C 2006 Cambridge University Press. 1060-1503/06 $9.50

“THEIR CALLING ME ‘MOTHER’ WAS NOT, I

Middle-class formulations of motherhood are sentimental, Ross suggests, because they

Southern Connecticut State University

“And you are going to the front . . .?”

You might also like

Fluhr, Nicole - Mary Seacole's Maternal Personae

Fluhr, Nicole - Mary Seacole's Maternal Personae