The Wondrous Body of Mary Seacole: Mobility, Subjectivity and Display in a Transatlantic Life

Home , First Maroon War, Mary Seacole, Women in the Caribbean

by Alison Elizabeth McMonagle

B.A. in English, George Washington University, May 2003

M.A. in English, University of York, March 2005

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

January 31 2011

Dissertation directed by

Maria Frawley

Professor of English

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Alison Elizabeth McMonagle has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of 10 December 2010. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

The Wondrous Body of Mary Seacole: Mobility, Subjectivity and Display in a Transatlantic Life

By Alison Elizabeth McMonagle

Dissertation Research Committee:

Maria Frawley, Professor of English, Dissertation Director

Jennifer James, Associate Professor of English, Committee Member

Dane Kennedy, Professor of History, Committee Member

iii

Abstract of Dissertation

Wondrous Body of Mary Seacole: Mobility, Subjectivity and Display in a Transatlantic Life

This dissertation explores the fashioning of Mary Seacole’s public image as seen in

Seacole’s narrative, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, and the periodical press in the British mainland and the Jamaican colony. Central to my examination is a contextualization of the precise historical moments Seacole details in her narrative as well as those moments during which Seacole achieves her greatest celebrity: the South American Republic of New Granada in the early 1850s; the Crimean War and its aftermath (1853-1860); Seacole’s death (1881); the death of Seacole’s sister Louisa

Grant (1905); and Seacole’s modern rise to fame in Jamaica and in the United Kingdom

(c1990 to the present day). Through this contextualization I argue that the fashioning of

Seacole’s public image reflects notions of race, nation, gender and colonial power throughout British history. The first chapter uses the language of Wonderful Adventures to explore the manner in which Seacole and the editor of her narrative construct Seacole’s early life in the Caribbean and South America so as to appeal to the prejudices of her

English audience and its fear of expanding American cultural and political imperialism.

Chapter 2 continues this examination of Wonderful Adventures reading it as a Crimean

War memoir that constructs Seacole’s image as a reflection of the current political climate and contemporary notions of gender, race and nationhood. Chapter 3 shifts to an analysis of the construction of Seacole image as seen in British periodicals. I place

Seacole in conversation with fellow black women who achieved some degree of fame in

England in the mid-nineteenth century, reading Seacole’s public image as a reflection of existing roles available to the public black woman. Chapter 4 continues an analysis of the periodical construction of Seacole’s public image, aligning Seacole with the Irish celebrities Lola Montez and Catherine Hayes and arguing that while all three women achieve a great degree of fame in England they are denied complete access to

Englishness. I conclude my work with an exploration of the continuing fashioning and consumption of Seacole’s public image in the modern United Kingdom and Jamaica.

Table of Contents

Abstract of Dissertation v

Table of Contents vi

Introduction: Theorizing Mary Seacole’s Life and Body 1

Chapter 1: Race and Identity in Mary Seacole’s Americas 41

Chapter 2: Mary Seacole the Crimean heroine 75

Chapter 3: Transatlantic Mobility and the Wondrous Body of the Free Black Woman in the Nineteenth Century Press 120

Chapter 4: Mary Seacole and the not quite English Victorian celebrity 154

Coda: The Modern Mary Seacole 183

Works Cited 195

Introduction: Theorizing Mary Seacole’s Mobile Body and Mobile Life

“[S]urprised, also, seemed the cunning-eyed Greeks who throng the streets of Pera, of the unprotected Creole woman who took Constantinople so coolly (it would require something more to surprise her); while the grave English raised their eyebrows wonderingly, and the more vivacious French shrugged their pliant shoulders into the strangest contortions. I accepted it all as a compliment to a stout female tourist, neatly dressed in a red or yellow dress, a plain shawl of some other colour, and a simple straw wide-awake, with bright red streamers. I flatter myself that I woke up the sundry sleepy-eyed Turks, who seemed to think that the great object of life was to avoid showing surprise at anything; while the Turkish woman gathered around me, and jabbered about me, in the most flattering manner.” ~ Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands

On the ground floor of St Thomas hospital in London, nor far from the Thames and the Westminster Bridge, visitors and locals can find the Florence Nightingale

Museum.i The museum dedicated to the Lady of the Lamp is relatively small in size, composed of one large room divided into smaller rooms and filled with pictures and placards explaining Nightingale’s inspiring personal history and dedication to the health of the British subjects in the nineteenth century.ii Visitors are lead through a series of dividers as they retrace Nightingale’s past from her childhood to her passing in 1910.

Approaching the portion of the museum dedicated to her service during the Crimean War, the visitor is presented with a brief and perfunctory history of Nightingale’s often overshadowed Crimean counterpart: Mary Seacole. Rejected by the War Office, Seacole, a seasoned medical aid and entrepreneur, traveled to the Crimea and established the

British Hotel near the battle lines. Seacole offered medical assistance to the suffering and neglected British soldiers while sustaining herself through the sale of goods and materials needed by the men in the Crimea. She fell under the gaze of William H. Russell, the

famous war correspondent, and received a great deal of attention in English newspapers during the war. Upon her return from the Crimea, Seacole found herself bankrupt and subsequently published her hybrid travel narrative and Crimean War memoir the

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands in order to capitalize on her lingering fame.

The few placards dedicated to Seacole’s life recount this history and are accompanied by a sketch of Seacole’s face, a sketch of the British Hotel composed by

Lady Alicia Blackwoodiii and a small mirror and hat stand where the visitor can try on various bonnets created specifically in the style of those Seacole donned with great care on the battlefront. A note placed above the hat stand reads, “Mary Seacole was a warm outgoing character. She wore colourful costumes and hats that matched her personality.

Her favourite outfit was a canary yellow dress and a blue bonnet with the brightest scarlet ribbons” (Florence Nightingale Museum). This description parallels contemporary periodical accounts of Seacole that stress her eccentric and outgoing nature. Her colorful clothes mark her as a non-English or ethnic body and also serve to separate Seacole from the iconic images of Florence Nightingale dressed in muted colors that can be found through the Museum. The note continues, “Have fun trying on some copies of Mary’s stylish hats. The hats are made specially by Veronica Wagner and are based on Seacole’s own descriptions” (FNM). I was able to don some of these special order bonnets and gaze at myself in a mirror, imaging what Seacole must have looked like lying in the mud of a Crimean War battlefield wearing such an elaborate hat. Almost 120 years after her death, the Florence Nightingale museum offers its visitors a chance to actively consume

Mary Seacole’s image. No section of the museum offers the public an opportunity to act

like or even become Florence Nightingale. Nightingale’s image is untouchable and kept in a proverbial glass case, while Seacole’s body and legend are open to the desiring public.

My first reaction to this small exhibit was disgust and alarm. In 2004, prompted by the BBC’s “Greatest Briton” debate – which produced a list of 100 men and woman none of whom were black – Mary Seacole was named the “Greatest Black Briton.”iv

Since then she has received increased attention from both educators and the media, making a large mark on mainstream culture in the UK. Yet despite this clear attempt to

‘right the wrongs’ of Britain’s past mistreatment and neglect of the black body, here was a clear disparity between the presentation of two female contemporaries whose public fame occurred at the same historical moment. In his work on blackface minstrelsy in

American culture Eric Lott claims that the racist exploitation and consumption of the black body continues, in subtle ways, into modern society. He writes, “Every time you hear an expansive white man drop into his version of black English, you are in the presence of blackface’s unconscious return” (5). Is Mary Seacole’s place in the British imagination merely another example of this modern “unconscious return” of blackface?

The museum appears to cater mostly to school groups and the occasional

Nightingale devotee. The information provided is instructive and easily accessible to a mass public interested in learning more about this powerful and brilliant women and her place in British history. Seacole’s inclusion in this story signals a nationwide push to bring Seacole back to her rightful place in both the history of Victorian England and that of modern nursing. I recognize and applaud these very noteworthy and important moves on behalf of the place of women and black subjects in British history; however, I believe

beneath and within this seemingly innocuous public memorial to one of the most famous women in British history lies another lesser-told tale of the manipulation and consumption of the ‘Black Florence Nightingale.’ My goal is to tell this story through charting the creation and reception of Mary Seacole’s public image. Scholars from various disciplines have worked to unearth the truth of Mary Seacole’s life, but some facts will always elude our grasp. My concern lies not with the real Mary Seacole, but rather the details of her public life. Her story is one of consumption and manipulation, but also unprecedented agency, ingenuity and heroics. The Florence Nightingale

Museum offers an image of an accessible heroine, one we can try on or become. In one small exhibit she is at once celebrated and consumed, and empowered and exploited.

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The 1850’s brought several events that changed the face of the political and cultural landscape of Britain. In March 1853 the English became embroiled in a local conflict between Russia and the Ottoman Empire over access to the Baltic Sea. This conflict soon escalated and grew to what is now known as the Crimean War. This war stands as one of the biggest blunders in English political and military history, as thousands of lives were lost due to mismanagement and inadequate support. The

Crimean conflict has also been identified as that which gave rise to modern war journalism. William H. Russell, the famous London Times journalist, is often labeled the

“world first real war correspondent” (Troubetzkoy 171). Russell’s vivid and frequent accounts of the impact of this conflict on the physical and mental state of English soldiers

exposed the public at home for the first time to the horror and brutality that accompanied the British quest for imperial domination. The Crimean conflict also resulted in a growth of nationalism, as the British public sought to define themselves against an uncivilized

Eastern enemy. A moment like the Crimean War brought about an increased interrogation of what it meant to be “English” and who exactly was “English.”

This decade in mid-Victorian history saw a second military conflict located physically outside of British borders that also shifted the course of British political and cultural history. On the 10th of May 1857, sepoys of the British East India Company began a rebellion that would last for over a year in certain areas of the colony. Historians of the British Empire often mark the Indian Rebellion of 1857, also known as the “Indian

Mutiny,” as a turning point in the relationship between England and her colonies.

Discussing the influence of the Rebellion on the British imagination, Gautum

Chakravarty suggests that its suppression brought new legitimacy to the British in India, and that the demonstration by the British of superior technology and physical force was read as a sign of essential superiority. This moment in British Imperial History underscored a great conflict not just between the British forces and rebelling soldiers, but also between two cultures, civilizations and races. The rebellion of the Indian sepoys both justified conquest and proved the impossibility of assimilation (Chakravarty 4). Robert

J.C. Young identifies the Rebellion of 1857 – along with the Morant Bay Insurrection of

1865 and the debates over slavery during the time of the American Civil War (1861-5) – as one of the three historical events that dramatically altered popular perceptions of race and racial difference in the Western consciousness. The Rebellion helped to usher in a shift in the political and cultural modes of thought that “formed the basis of wide-spread

acceptance of the new, and remarkably upfront, claims of permanent racial superiority”

(Young 92). This shift in thought brought forth racial theories with deliberately popular appeal that allowed them to develop strongly at the cultural as well as theoretical and political level (92).

While the “Mutiny” raged in India, back home mid-Victorian England was in the grips of what Punch in 1848 labeled “Deformitomania” or a new social disease characterized by an almost insatiable fascination with freaks (O’Conner 148). Caught in the grips of ever increasing industrialization and an expanding view of the world and their power in that world, the English – and their American neighbors – turned to the foreign, disfigured or disabled body both for affirmation of their own bodily normalcy and as a source of entertainment. In the year 1857, Julie Pastrana – billed on Broadway as the “Marvelous Hybrid or Bear Woman” – arrived in England from America. Pastrana suffered from a rare inherited disorder that resulted in the growth of considerable hair all over her body and possessed gums so overgrown that they appeared to be a second set of teeth. Joining the ranks of infamous figures such as Krao, a Siamese woman covered almost entirely in hair; Lalloo, the Indian boy with “two perfect bodies”; and General

Mite and Mille Edwards, married American midgets, the original Bearded Lady became a celebrity of the Freak Show circuit as well as a marvel of science and a battleground site for evolutionary debates. The black body also played a prominent role in the freak show circuit in the United States. P.T. Barnum exhibited African Americans in his American

Museum who suffered from vitiligo, albinism and microcephaly, proposing that they were the missing links between black and whites (Reiss 41). Barnum also made his debut in the business of itinerant displays through exhibiting the body of Joice Heth, an

African-American woman billed as the 161 year-old nurse of the late George

Washington.v

At the same time Barnum was displaying black bodies to U.S. audiences, the staged U.S. performance of the minstrel show was finding a thriving audience across the ocean. In 1837, T.D. Rice brought the famous Jim Crow and the Ethiopian operas to the

English public. Although there were pre-existing notions of black face entertainment,vi through the form of worldwide tours, the Americans brought their own version of the minstrel show complete with their own unique slant to a British audience. Rice’s entertainers performed in music halls, often drawing a large audience, but these performers inevitably inspired amateur imitators who truly brought the art form to the mainstream through showings at workman’s clubs and village fetes (Rehin 2-3).

Through this art form the transatlantic black body was exploited for entertainment while also being afforded a new sense of agency and empowerment. These men could use their body to gain access to white culture as well as an unprecedented degree of mobility that brought them back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean.

But while the minstrel show held the agenda of exploiting the black body for public consumption and amusement, black abolitionist lecturers and former slaves engaged in the display of the black body with a larger political agenda in mind. English men and women lined up to hear the speeches of former slaves, purchase their narratives and gaze at their often scarred bodies. The speeches of formerly enslaved men and women on the abolitionist lecture tour offered the English public the chance to witness first hand the horrors of slavery. As Audrey Fisch suggests, abolitionism became central to the “campaign of Englishness” that emerged in the 1850s out of the hungry forties (5).

The stress was placed on conceiving England as a prosperous nation and a moral center of the world. The display and consumption of the black body became entangled in this emerging definition of Englishness. However, men like Henry Box Brownvii – the man who escaped to his freedom by mailing himself in a box – were able to capitalize on this cultural phenomenon to create an increased agency and economic freedom for themselves.

The body of the ethnic, physical and cultural other was consumed by white,

Western culture, but these bodies were not passively consumed: empowerment and exploitation functioned simultaneously. Despite the fact that the men and women of the freak and minstrel shows and the abolitionist lecture tour were ultimately subject to the desires of a white public, they were lifted to a social status that allowed them to compromise that very game; the forces of oppression led to liberation. The collision of the public display of the Othered body and of foreign conflicts such as the Crimean War and the “Indian Mutiny” highlight how questions of race, gender and bodily normalcy played out on the English stage. Both fascinated and threatened by the outside body, mid-Victorian England struggled to formulate a new definition of self. Onto this stage stepped Mary Seacole, a woman whose own notions of self-identity were constantly in flux. The first edition of Mary Jane Seacole’s The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands – an action-packed account of a mixed-raced Jamaican woman’s globe- trotting exploits – was published in 1857. The publication of Seacole’s memoir marked the solidification of Seacole’s status as an English celebrity. Although Seacole was previously known through William H. Russell’s accounts of the Crimean War, her image did not become fully stamped on the English imagination until she declared bankruptcy

and published her dual travel narrative and autobiography in order to cash in on the booming Crimean War memoir market. Following her return from the Crimean and her subsequent financial troubles, Seacole saw a meteoric rise to fame as her name was splashed across newspapers and gossip columns while the public scrambled to help the

Crimean heroine in her time of financial need. Tracing the reception of Seacole’s body through the historical and cultural moments that accompanied this rise to fame while charting the physical path she carved through the Caribbean, Central America and Europe illuminates the packaging and reception of her public image.

*****

Discussing the construction of physical disability in American literature and culture, Rosemarie Garland Thomson argues that disability functions as a particularly problematic cultural marker because unlike other marginal identities – such as those tied to sexuality, race or gender – the physical impairments that make someone disabled are almost never static or absolute (13). Disability is often contingent upon external factors and the fluctuations of time. When seen alongside other marginal identities, Thomson suggests that disability is more fluid and this lack of stability may, in fact, make it more threatening. The case of Mary Seacole shows how this dangerous fluidity reserved in

Thomson’s text for the physically disabled body can likewise be applied a marginalized figure such as Seacole who’s status as an extra-ordinary woman continually remained in flux, depending on both her location and whims of the social circles in which she moved.

If, as Thomson suggests, the meanings attached to extraordinary bodies reside in social

relationships rather than inherent flaws (7) any reading of a wondrous body such as

Seacole’s must consider how the packaging, reception and consumption of her marginal identity fluctuated as she moved across the Atlantic and through several continents complete with their own perceptions of gender and race.

Seacole’s body and its status as wondrous, extraordinary or out of place is not a fixed idea. As a member of the transatlantic community Seacole’s position as an outsider or physical and ethnic other is fluid and reflects the increasing mobility of peoples and cultures in mid-Victorian Britain. In a discussion of antebellum white and black women's travel narratives, Cheryl Fish offers the term "mobile subjectivity" to explain how the subject position of the female traveler is dependent upon her relationship to "specific persons, incidents, ideologies, locations, time and space" (6). Exploring the travel narratives of Seacole, Nancy Prince and Margaret Fuller, Fish argues that when the domesticity of the female traveler enters into the field of colonial expansion it must shift according to the various contexts of racial and gendered politics it encounters. The subject position of the female traveler moving through the geographical and cultural margins is never static. Bringing together Fish's work on women's travels to the colonial margins and Garland Thomson's theories about the subject position of the disabled body allows for an appreciation of the multiple ways that the portability and mobility of

Seacole, and her wondrous body were inextricably linked to precise historical and cultural moments.

When looking at the public perception of the racialized and colonial body at this historical moment it is imperative to consider that Wonderful Adventures was published the same year as the aforementioned Indian Rebellion of 1857. The English language

accounts of the event often framed the rebellion as a savage attack on British women and children who were allegedly raped and murdered by mutinous soldiers. As the news of the Kanpur massacre began to filter into the English public by the late summer of 1857, shortly following the publication of Wonderful Adventures, Heather Streets suggests “the

Rebellion metamorphosed from a military conflict on the imperial periphery to a popular national struggle in which even ordinary Britons felt invested. The specter of British women and children being murdered by colonial men proved to be a catalyst by which ideologies of gender and race became both inseparable and central to the British cause in

India."

The publication of Seacole’s narrative in the summer of 1857 propelled her to the forefront of the English imagination at a moment of great transformation in the realm of colonial policy. This racial hybrid woman became a symbol for the modernizing forces of the West and is fashioned through public opinion in a manner that often works to confirm the supremacy of the British Imperial Mission. On the other hand, scholars like Sandra

Gunning, Evelyn Hawthorne and Amy Robinson seek to identify ways in which Seacole writes against this pro-imperial stance.viii Through exploiting what Mikhail Bakhtin identifies as the hybridization or heteroglossia of language, Seacole uses her voice to support English expansion and domination, while simultaneously drawing attention to its flaws. In fact, the very presence of Seacole’s mixed raced body at the warfront and her name in the English papers can be seen to undermine English domination. Victorian travel writers from the periphery of English society inherently question imperial values.

Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson theorize on the presence of Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia in women’s autobiography, suggesting that Bakhtin’s work

has been particularly illuminating for discussions of women’s autobiographical voices.

The text of a woman’s autobiography is multivocal because it is a “site for the contestation of meaning” (30). The voice of the narrator is a “dialogical voice through which heterogeneous discourses of identity cross the tongue” (31). As such Wonderful

Adventures should not be read as a completely “authentic” recollection of an extraordinary woman’s life, nor should Seacole be seen as a mouth piece for a the British imperial agenda.

Calling for increased attention on the nature of the colonial encounter in the

Victorian metropole, Antoinette Burton reminds us that Victorian England not only produced imperial policy and attitudes directed outward, but was also a site of colonial encounters within. Struggles for power between the colonizer and the colonized were, at times, played out on English soil. The presence of a foreign body in the Victorian metropole could often unsettle the boundaries of empire and shift the balance in that struggle for power (Burton 11). The elevation of a colonial subject, such as Seacole or in

Burton’s discussion the Indian theist Rammahun Roy, to such widespread celebrity could easily be read as a threat to the status quo of imperial relations. It therefore, became necessary for the English public to focus on the “wondrous” aspects of these figures, pushing the attention away from concrete achievement toward the carnivalesque or the spectacle-like nature of the body of the colonial celebrity.

Seacole’s wondrous body must also be grounded in the cultural space of the

Caribbean and in her mixed- raced and Afro-Caribbean identity. There is an essential

Caribbeaness at the heart of the Crimean heroine’s life and work, and the direction of her life and the shape of her public image should be seen as firmly rooted in the physical and

cultural space of the Caribbean. In her text Consuming the Caribbean, Mimi Sheller suggests that the Caribbean’s association with the West now and throughout modern history can best be understood through the lens of consumption, writing “it was not only goods that circulated in the transatlantic world economy but also people, texts, images, desires, and attachments” (14). Seacole’s mixed-raced, female body can be conceived as a product of the Caribbean caught in this continual web of consumption as different times, places and people – including, of course, Seacole herself – present and manipulate her character in order to fulfill their own desires and construct and confirm their own national, imperial and corporeal identities.

As her mixed-raced ethnicity is one of the primary physical markers of her wondrous body, my project will consider the centrality of contemporary conceptions of race to the making of Seacole’s public image. Writing on what she labels “Black

Cosmopolitanism,” Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo argues that people of African descent in the nineteenth century were faced with the task of writing, constructing and imagining themselves into modern and useful beings. After the Haitian Revolution, members of the

African Diaspora were forced to reconsider their relationship to each other as well as their national and racial identities (10, 19). Seen throughout Seacole’s text and the public records of her life is a struggle to reconcile the duality, or as W.E.B. Du Bois has labeled it, the “double consciousness,”ix of her mixed-raced, colonized existence, by continually skirting the question: How can a Crimean heroine and Victorian celebrity be both black and British?

Seacole writes herself into a modern existence by stressing the usefulness of her body and the extraordinary nature of that usefulness. Work and usefulness were central to

the Victorian era’s conception of modernity. In Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle writes, “[T]here is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness in Work…. [I]n Idlenes alone is there perpetual despair” (235). But within this quest to “be useful all [her] life,” she is also able to exploit – and be exploited by – the public via its fascination with the unexplainable foreign body. Considering the public image of the Cuban poet Placido in the context of pro and anti-slavery debates, Nwankwo speculates on how a symbolic value can be attached to a racial identity, demonstrating how race becomes fluid in the hands of those who want to use it to achieve their own ends (25). Applying these ideas to

Seacole, race becomes a fluid social marker in the hands of both the public that loved her and Seacole and her editor who strategically called forth or minimized her racial background to serve their own ends.

*****

Crucial to positioning Seacole’s wondrous body in a particular mid-nineteenth century cultural moment is an exploration of the development of the idea of wonder in

Western consciousness. It is my contention that Seacole, as well as the people who adored her, carefully packaged and sold an image of wonder and eccentricity that fed her contemporary public’s insatiable appetite for the unexplainable or foreign body. With this project, I do not aim to conflate Seacole’s body with those displayed within the contemporary freak show circuit. However, in understanding the tastes and desires of

Seacole’s audience, the modern reader can better understand the choices Seacole, her editor and the contemporary press made when fashioning Seacole’s image as well as

further understand the manner in which Seacole was presented by the contemporary press. Found continually within her narrative and the pages of contemporary periodicals is the construction – both self and editorial – of Seacole as a traveling spectacle, a unique body carving out a place in the public eye. Central to this idea of Seacole as a spectacle is the cultural role of wonder and its place in nineteenth century society. In order to understand the impact of wonder on Seacole’s celebrity and her life it is necessary to trace its development in Western consciousness. Writing on early modern travelers to the

New World, Stephen Greenblatt discusses wonder and its relationship to the act of travel and exploration, suggesting that wonder is the “central figure in the European response to the New World, the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the presence of radical difference” (14). Indifferent to or at least silent concerning the responses of those foreign peoples encountered, the early modern travel narrative is characterized by the traveling subject expressing awe and wonder while the (typically male) traveler takes in his surroundings.

This use of a language of wonder or awe to express an emotional reaction to one’s surroundings continues into the Romantic era, where the idea of the sublime takes a central role in the intellectual consciousness of the age. In A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke suggests that the “passion caused by the great and the sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (72). References to the sublime were most often found in discussions of nature and landscapes but could also be found applied to “mysterious phenomena of all sorts that are irrational, inexplicable,

powerful, vast, and mostly destructive” (Gaull 232). Closely associated with the romantic sublime were the emotions of terror or fear. The prominence of the sublime in the intellectual world brought with it a nearly obsessive desire to analyze and regulate aesthetic experience (232). This need to classify and define emotional reactions to objects outside oneself takes on a new and perhaps greater cultural role with the rise of scientific forms of classification in the nineteenth century. When the powers of aesthetic and scientific classification combined with the increasing mobility of an industrialized age, the intellectual was faced with the task of assigning meaning to foreign and aesthetically abnormal bodies. It is at this particular cultural moment that Mary Seacole rose to fame.

In Wonderful Adventures there exists a reversal of the typical relationship between the traveling or viewing subject and his or her surroundings found in both the early modern travel narrative and the work of Romantic figures. Moving Burke’s sublime onto the human form and reversing the direction of the astonished gaze, it is Seacole who is the source of wonder and it is those in her surroundings that take her in with a sense of amazement and awe. For instance she recounts with pride the surprise the locals of

Constantinople exhibit on seeing an “unprotected Creole woman take their town so coolly” (78). She writes, “I flatter myself that I woke up the sundry, sleepy eyed Turks, who seemed to think that the great object of life was to avoid showing surprise at anything; while the Turkish women gathered around me, and jabbered about me, in the most flattering way” (79). Seacole’s narrative is sprinkled with these little anecdotes regarding the latest stir she raised or scene she caused. Creating and maintaining an aura of this nineteenth century notion of wonder surrounding her figure and her actions was an

essential element of Seacole’s public image.

In his 1859 text Emotions and the Will the Scottish philosopher and utilitarian

Alexander Bain defines wonder as “anything that very much surpasses or deviates from our habitual experience” (67). It is a rupture from accustomed events that can be either agreeable or unpleasant. In an assessment that resonates with the contemporary popularity of the freak show, Bain attaches a great social value to wonder, citing the historic place of the conjuror or the showman in all communities and the attention paid to contemporary listings of amusements and new marvels in newspaper columns. Bain references Carlyle’s Lectures on Heroes in which Carlyle suggests that there is a decline in the public fascination with wonder that can be tied to the rise of scientific analysis and classification. In his musings on the Hero as a divinity Carlyle asserts that one could feel better and worship more purely the divinity in both man and nature before the appearance of those men who thought that they had "finished all things in Heaven and Earth by merely giving them scientific names" (Heroes 192). Bain, however, counters that there will always be a place for wonder in society, regardless of the seemingly oppressive force of scientific discovery. Carlyle fails to recognize that the rise of science served to classify, not limit, the function of this new manifestation of wonder in society that Mary

Seacole came to represent.

There is also a particular link between this unique nineteenth-century concept of wonder and the public display of the black female body that should be considered when providing a reading of Mary Seacole’s body. As Carla Peterson suggests, “Nineteenth- century black women were conceptualized by the dominant culture chiefly in bodily terms, in contrast to middle-class white women whose femininity, as defined by the cult

of true womanhood, cohered around notions of the self-effacing body” (19). Society forced the white woman to hide her body and her sexuality from the public view. Her body was something to be protected and celebrated only within the private space. In contrast, the continuing physical and cultural presence of New World slavery created a society that saw the black woman primarily as a body – a body to pleasure, labor and produce for the white man. The black woman’s body was envisioned as public and exposed (Peterson 20). As a black, female body moving freely in the public space, Mary

Seacole immediately created a reversal of the travel writer’s gaze as described in

Greenblatt’s writing. A free black woman’s very presence produced wonder.

In the epigraph to this Chapter Seacole actively constructs herself as spectacle or a sight of wonder. She becomes the sight of the gaze as she gazes at those she encounters.

In this brief passage Seacole labels each of the various ethnic groups she observes, placing a descriptive adjective before each of their names: the Greeks are “cunning- eyed,” the English “grave,” the French “vivacious” and the Turks “sleepy-eyed” (Seacole

79). In the traditions of Western travel writing outlined by Greenblatt, Seacole classifies and categorizes those various peoples she encounters. However, she also further develops the traditional subject position of the traveler and asks her audience to consider that she too was the subject of the gaze. Although she indulges briefly in the taxonomic classification of those she observes, she claims “it would require something more to surprise her” (Seacole 79). She, as the “unprotected Creole woman who took

Constantinople so coolly,” structures herself as the primary subject of the gaze as she becomes the cause of “surprise,” “raised eyebrows” and “shrugged shoulders.” These reactions become a source of pride and flattery and demonstrate the claim Seacole lays to

the attention of the English public.

A reversal of the typical early-modern traveler’s relationship to wonder exemplified by the above passage can be linked to the Victorian obsession with the classification of the unknown body. This presentation of Seacole as a spectacle and source of wonder moved beyond the pages of her narrative to include how she was fashioned in public opinion. Mary Seacole was the “Black Florence Nightingale” – a

Crimean heroine, but also a figure defined, almost entirely, by difference. She was presented through the lens of theatricality and eccentricity, and displayed on the stage of

English empire. In an examination of her public image, Sandra Gunning discusses the presentation of Seacole in Punch. In the 30 May 1857 issue a darkly shaded Seacole is depicted as walking among beds of soldiers passing out issues of the magazine as a wounded white man reaches out to her and clasps her hand. In this cartoon her medical service to the troops is overlooked entirely and instead she serves as a source of entertainment or diversion (Gunning 958). This is in contrast to contemporary images of a porcelain skinned Nightingale walking among the wounded with a lamp and tending to their medical needs. In truth, Seacole played a far more hands-on role in caring for

British soldiers than Nightingale. However, when fashioned for the public in the pages of

Punch, Seacole becomes a lighthearted comical figure – a jolly, plump, dark-skinned woman, handing out English goods for consumption.x Her entertainment value subsumes her practical worth.

Seacole's name continued to be found among the headlines after her return from

Crimea. An examination of nineteenth century periodicals from both England and

America plays an important role in my project. Archival work has revealed Seacole’s

presence in popular imagination throughout the 1850s, a revival of her fame in England around the time of her own death in 1881, and in Jamaican periodicals following the passing of her sister Louisa Grant in 1910. These articles maintain a commitment to celebrating Seacole’s heroics and dedication to the British soldiers and all those that needed her help. However, her triumphs (and financial failures) are continually presented in a language that emphasizes Seacole’s eccentricity and the spectacle that her extraordinary body never fails to create.

*****

Before embarking on an in depth analysis of the public presentation, reception and manipulation of Seacole’s life and body it is imperative to address the issue of authorial authenticity as it relates to Wonderful Adventures. Although it is impossible to determine the exact role Seacole played in the construction of her narrative and the packaging of her public image for an English audience, any reading of her work must consider the final product as a delicate mix of Seacole’s own life story and the hand of an English editor committed to seeing her text become popular and profitable. Two reviews of Wonderful

Adventures from July of 1857 draw attention to the need to consider the role Seacole played in the composition of her narrative. A review appearing in the Literary Gazette begins, “The Autobiography of Mrs. Seacole, well known in Crimean annals, is a work that needs little recommendation. A clever editor has put her recollections into a readable shape, and her story has many points of singular interest...” (“Review of Wonderful

Adventures”). This “clever editor” is only identified as “W.J.S.” and he is again given

credit for the ultimate composition of Wonderful Adventures in a 15 July 1857 review in the Critic. The Critic’s review identifies the work as “pleasant and readable” and something that may be taken up “for a couple of hours’ amusement.” But before paying the narrative this fleeting compliment the reviewer criticizes the brief and emotionless

“Preface” written by William H. Russell, the famous Times war correspondent, and suggests “It may, indeed, be said that Mrs. Seacole has not written a line of [Wonderful

Adventures]; but then it is equally clear that she furnished the materials to the editor: and we see no reason to deny the application of the old maxim: ‘Qui qui facet per alum facet per se’ [He who does through another does through himself]” (“Review of Wonderful

Adventures”).

This questioning of Seacole’s role in the creation of Wonderful Adventures may be a reflection of popular nineteenth-century conceptions of black-authored texts. In the epigraph to their 1985 collection The Slave’s Narrative Charles T. Davis and Henry

Louis Gates, Jr quote the words of nineteenth-century abolitionists, highlighting the role abolitionists played in the dissemination of black voices. The epigraph quotes “Things for the Abolitionists to Do” as found in The New England Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1841, listing among them the need to “Speak for the Slave” and “Write for the Slave.”xi

Seacole is a black woman writing to a white public at least somewhat familiar with the heavy hand of white editors who crafted black-authored texts. Perhaps these words from

Seacole’s reviewers can be traced back to this history and legacy, or perhaps Seacole’s

English reviewers were merely hesitant attribute such a fascinating and entertaining text entirely to a black woman. Regardless of these reviewers’ motivations, this questioning of authenticity found in contemporary reviews of Wonderful Adventures highlights the

need to be conscious of the various factors that contributed to publication of Wonderful

Adventures.

The London house of James Blackwood published Wonderful Adventures in 1857.

Blackwood published works out of London and Edinburgh throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A random sampling of Blackwood’s publications in the mid to late nineteenth century suggests that Wonderful Adventures would have been a natural choice for the publisher. Texts such as the anonymous 1855 narrative Adventures with my Stick and Carpet Bag; or what I saw in Austria and the East and the 1858 Lorimer Littlegood

Esq, a young gentleman who wished to see society, and saw it accordingly by Alfred

Whaley Cole signal Blackwood’s interest in biographical or fictional texts that share themes with the travel narrative. A.B. Blackie’s 1858 The Bank Parlour; or, Experiences in the life of a late banker and W.H. Davenport Adams’ Famous regiments of the British army; their origin and services, for which there is no available publishing date, demonstrate a related interest in texts that focus on the history of exemplary individuals or groups. A search by publisher of the British Library’s catalogue reveals that in addition to stories of adventure and intrigue James Blackwood published lighthearted romance novels such as C.A. Cuthbert’s A Blot on his Escutcheon: A Romance (1874) and general interest works like James MacGrigor Allan’s Grins and Wrinkles; or, Food for thought and laughter (1858). A review of James Blackwood’s publishing history reveals no overt political bias or agenda and supports my assertion that Seacole is writing to a mainstream English reading publicxii hungry for tales of adventure and insight into the recent conflict in the Crimea.

When examining the subject position of the author of Seacole’s narrative the

reader must remember that although Wonderful Adventures may have been published in order to capitalize on the existing Crimean War memoir market, the text can and should – due both to its content and the cultural background of its author – be placed alongside several other disparate genres enjoying great contemporary popularity. Seacole’s text is entering the pre-existing travel narrative market, complicating the conventions of the

Euro-centric male-authored travel narrative. Seacole and several of her female contemporaries see the liberating possibilities in this genre and, as discussed throughout this dissertation, recreate and refashion the travel narrative to reflect women’s increasing agency and mobility. Travel narratives such as Seacole’s from the eighteenth and nineteenth century have been identified as largely nationalistic and Eurocentric (Pratt 7).

In Wonderful Adventures Seacole appropriates and alters the conventions of the travel narrative so as to create a “self-empowering story founded on alterity and creolity”

(Hawthorne 313). Seacole stretches the boundaries of this genre, creating a social biography that opened a space for the hybrid, Caribbean subject within the imperial war memoir (Hawthorne 316). Seacole’s life and work can be placed within what Jennifer

Bernhardt Steadman identifies as “ragged edge travel,” which she defines as “work motivated trips that capitalized on new, inexpensive mass transit that risked inconvenience or even danger without the benefits of chaperones, first class accommodations, or guided tours” (26). Writing into a pre-existing largely male dominated genre, women like Seacole are able to demonstrate the “risks and possibilities travel offered to women who held an uncertain status on the ragged edges of middle-class prosperity” (Peterson 26).

Reading Wonderful Adventures alongside the traditions of the existing travel-

writing genre, it is clear that Seacole functions as an anomaly in the world of the nineteenth century travel writing (Mercer 2). She is a black, colonial subject staking her claim to an English identity within the confines of a largely European literary genre.

Additionally, she produces a public account of self that challenged literary conventions about private sphere or true womanhood (Paquet 654). This rogue status can be seen, as

Hawthorne suggests, as an empowering move through which she reclaims the travel narrative on behalf of the colonial, black, female body. However, I believe that there is more to this manipulation. The inclusion of the phrase “Wonderful Adventures” in the title of Seacole’s narrative anticipates a text that will outline various travels and particular moments of daring or excitement, yet Seacole’s text makes very deliberate value judgments about which adventures are worthy of recollection. Her upbringing and travels throughout the Caribbean as a young adult are brushed past quickly in the first chapter of the text; however, she devotes seven chapters to her life in Central America. Similarly,

Seacole visited England at least once as a child and presumably resided there upon her return from the Crimea. However, Seacole takes only a passing interest in her “Mother

Country,” choosing instead to tease out the idea of “Englishness” and English nationalism at the Crimean Warfront. These value judgments speak to the unique political climate of the mid-nineteenth century that determined how race and the legacy of Empire could be presented to a broad, English, reading public. The reader of an autobiography, such as Seacole’s, must remember that recollection and memory function as a creative faculty, and that events in an autobiography are not simply recalled chronologically, but are purposefully placed in a significant pattern. Memory is “immensely creative” in that it creates the “significance of events” and acts out the “interplay of past and present”

(Olney 149). Seacole’s recollection of her past is influenced by the realities of her present.

As a rare travel narrative produced by a black woman in the nineteenth century,

Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures finds itself placed alongside Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave in exploration of black Caribbean women’s autobiography. Prince, a Bermudian woman, was born into slavery and remained a slave until she left her owner, who at the time was living in London, and took shelter in a church. From this church she became involved in the anti-slavery movement and came under the watch of the famous abolitionist Thomas Pringle. With her 1831 narrative she became the first black woman to be published in England. As a black woman publishing a text in England for a white, middle-class audience, Seacole was writing into the same tradition as Prince. Prince’s narrative received great attention upon its publication and it rightfully took its place as a sounding board for contemporary debates over the morality of the slave trade and the veracity of slave narratives. While Prince’s body was offered up for public consumption through the pages of her narrative, her body was never physically displayed. No pictures or portraits of Prince exist and, outside of the narrative, no specific attention is paid to Prince’s body. So unlike Seacole, the consumption of

Prince’s body was and is confined to the pages of her narrative. This is not to say that her body was not consumed. As Mario Cesareo suggests, “the reception and framing of a slave’s experience [within a slave narrative] constitutes that experiences as spectacle”

(117). Instead of being the subject that travels, “she becomes that which is traveled upon” (117) as pre-existing debates over slavery are played out on her body. She is open to the penetrating gaze of a white, middle-class audience and like Seacole her body

becomes consumed and used by her audience to meet their own ends. However, the images of Mary Prince herself do not move beyond her story and, more importantly, the mainstream press does not latch on to her body in the same manner with which it did

Seacole’s. Prince, her editor and the abolitionist movement did not offer up Prince’s body for public consumptions and this marks a clear distinction between Seacole and Prince’s celebrity and the public’s use of their figures and their narratives.

Seacole’s narrative is also paired with the publications of Nancy Prince in order to demonstrate the precarious mobility of the free black subject, and how the black female body on the move in the nineteenth century was constantly on display. A black woman’s travel narrative opened up a portal to Otherness. The reader of these narratives could travel through an “otherness that seemed to make itself visible and willingly available for the reader’s gaze” (Cesareo 111). As previously stated, intrinsically bound in the experience of mobile Otherness was an element of display and with the passing of the

1850 Fugitive Slave Law in the United States, the display of the free black body carried with it some element of danger. Prince recounts such an incident in her A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs Nancy Prince. Traveling back from her philanthropic work on behalf of the newly emancipated black population in Jamaica, Prince’s steamer stopped over in Key West, Florida. Prince recounts a potential abduction at the hands of her fellow American passengers. The captain of the ship informed Prince that had she stepped on shore some of the white passengers intended to “beat” her and presumably sell her into slavery. The captain states, “John and Lucy Davenport, of Salem, laid down the first ten dollars towards a hundred for that person who should get you there” (Prince 81).

In the nineteenth century the “unofficial crime of black mobility” (Fish, “Journey’s and

Warnings” 237) carried with it certain implications and dangers that could not be avoided.

In spite of the danger of a black woman’s mobility, the travels of women like

Prince suggest a greater degree of choice than was possible in the lives of the nineteenth century black woman. But it must be remembered that Prince, like Seacole, wrote her life story out of financial necessity, and as explored throughout this dissertation there was always a degree of self-censorship involved in the selling of a black story to a white audience (Mason 339). Mary G. Mason suggests that there are two voices that can be heard in Afro-American women’s narratives, the hidden self and the autobiographical self

(341). Despite her lack of such widespread fame, Nancy Prince still had to consider her target audience. Her narrative was reprinted in three editions implying that her writing did have some degree of popularity, but this small degree of success was unlikely to alleviate her financial needs (Steadman 12). Prince was writing to a literate, black public and a white abolitionist audience, a readership that crossed gender and cultural boundaries. Therefore, she had to speak to the aforementioned anxieties over the movement of the free-black body and represent the experience of the free black woman positively (Fish, Travel Narratives 26). Like Seacole, Prince could ultimately not rely on the financial support of a largely black leadership and had to fall back on the patronage of white authors, publishers and public figures (Peterson 13). The experience of the free black woman had to be presented in this light.

Wonderful Adventures should also be examined in conjunction with the abolitionist driven slave narrative that was the subject of immense popular appeal in both

England and the US in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Beyond the

obvious shared African heritage and superficial bodily appearance linking Seacole to the authors of these narratives, the actual structure and language of Seacole’s text align it with this popular nineteenth-century American form. Seacole takes pains to establish the authenticity of her experiences and the validity of her claims to heroine status through the confirmation of outside, white and, with the exception of her contemporary Florence

Nightingale, male voices. Chapter XIII of her narrative, titled “My Work in the Crimea” is devoted to reprinting letters and testimonials from military figures and other white men who speak to her bravery and self-sacrifice. She opens this chapter with sentences that attempt to justify this move:

I hope my reader will give me credit for the assertion that I was about to make,

viz, that I enter upon the particularities of this chapter with great reluctance; but I

cannot omit them, for the simple reason that they strengthen my one and only

claim to interest the public, viz., my services to the British army in the Crimea.

But fortunately, I can follow a course which will not only render it unnecessary

for me to sound my own trumpet, but will be more satisfactory to the reader.

(Seacole 110)

The original 1857 publication Wonderful Adventures also includes a Preface written by

W.H. Russell testifying to Seacole’s “singleness of heart, true charity and Christian works” (qtd in Seacole 5). Chapter XIII and Russell’s Preface have striking similarities with the editorial molding of the nineteenth century slave narratives. Outlining the essential components of this genre, James Olney identifies a required testimonial, preface or introduction written by a white abolitionist friend of the narrator or the white editor of the text that testifies to the veracity of the tales that will follow (152).

Olney outlines two other components found in Wonderful Adventures that further speak to the need to read Seacole’s text through this lens. Olney suggests that slave narratives typically begin with the phrase “I was born…” and then specify a place of birth but not a year (153) Wonderful Adventures begins “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” (Seacole 11). The narrator then provides a sketchy account of parentage, usually identifying a white father

(Olney 153). Seacole identifies a mother who ran a boarding house, a trade typically associated with mixed race women in Jamaica, and father of “good Scotch blood” and a soldier, making her a Creole – a culturally and politically loaded term that takes on multiple meanings through Seacole’s text. Although these similarities can be identified, as a mixed-raced woman, born free and equipped with the financial and political freedoms to move through the Caribbean, Central America and Europe, Seacole is not writing from the same subject position as that of a formerly enslaved man or woman.

However, locating these overlaps allows the critic to evaluate the role of authorial authenticity in Seacole’s text as well as her role in the production of her own public image. In order for a work to appear authentic it had to fall within pre-established rubric of what an abolitionist audience already knew to be true about slavery (Bowder 14). The truth of the formerly enslaved author’s experiences was subsumed by the need to write to a particular audience within a set market. Seacole’s need to write to a particular audience and into a particular literary market is explored throughout each Chapter and I argue that, like the formerly enslaved author, each moment of Seacole’s public life was ultimately controlled by forces of a nineteenth century consumer society.

The existence of this predictability in combination with the comments of contemporary reviewers has led me to conclude that the self-fashioning of Seacole’s identity should be read and interpreted with an eye to the markets into which she was writing and the hand of a white, male English editor intent on producing a best-selling

Crimean War memoir. With this internal and external molding, Seacole follows in the footsteps of famous black Britons such as Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince, both of whom were formerly enslaved and produced popular memoirs for a white English audience. After being stolen from his African home, Equiano eventually purchased his own freedom and published the Interesting Narrative of the Life of Equiano, or Gustavas

Vassa, the African. Written by Himself in 1789. Joseph Fichtelberg explores how

Equiano’s presentation of his African homeland is caught between a desire to debunk racist stereotypes of the barbarous and lazy black and the need consider the commercial attitudes of his reading public. Driven by the rise of capitalism and its stress on progress

Equiano must negotiate capitalism’s common held “perspective of bourgeois individualism” and the communal life of the Igbo people from which he came (467-8).

Mary Prince, a Bermudian woman most famous for her narrative The History of Mary

Prince, a West Indian Slave, also complicates the idea of authorial “authenticity.”

Simmons suggests, “[Prince’s] migration—both on and of the body—strategically and productively disallows an “authentic” diasporic woman’s experience” (76). Like

Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures, the various voices and dynamics within Prince’s text prevent Prince’s History from being read separately from her target market.

In Telling Sexual Stories Ken Plummer identifies three kinds of subjects who contribute to every story: the autobiographical subject who tells the story, the audience or

the consumer of the story, and what he identifies as the “coaxer” or the person(s) or institution that elicits the story from the speaker (qtd in Smith and Watson, Reading

Autobiography 50). Smith and Watson further develop this idea of the coaxer identifying a commercial component in the autobiographical subjects compulsion to confess. They identify publishers who invite celebrities to tell their story to a “public hungry for vicarious fame” (Reading Autobiography 51). The publisher is a source of “invisible intervention” that insures that the celebrity’s story be “rewritten and shaped for special audiences” (Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography 53). Wonderful Adventures and

Mary Seacole’s public life are at various times and in various manners shaped by Seacole desires, the needs of her audience and the influence of her editor. The editor Seacole mentions within Wonderful Adventures serves as an invisible force in Seacole’s text performing a sort of balancing act between Seacole’s desire to “tell [her] story [her] way or not at all” (Seacole 128) and an audience’s desires and prejudices. I do not suggest that

Seacole lacked agency or the power to tell her own life story, but rather that Wonderful

Adventures is full of many voices, voices rising from particular historical and cultural circumstances and existing and developing nineteenth-century literary traditions.

*****

Using the historiographic model presented by Linda Colley in her work on the life of Elizabeth Marsh, I explore how Seacole’s meteoric rise can be tied to market, social and political forces unique to mid-Victorian England. The entirety of Seacole’s life – from the aforementioned contemporary periodicals to that presented in Wonderful

Adventures – is a public one. As Sandra Paquet suggests, “[E]verything she mentions emanates from and reinforces that performed, public character (659). While I acknowledge her own desire to recount the story of her exceptional life, scholars must recognize that Mary Seacole’s literary body was, at least in part, created for public consumption, and in order to save herself from the clutches of bankruptcy she had to

“perform the conditions which would authorize her voice” (Robinson 542). As she moves through the various geographies that she makes home, she crafts an image of self specific to her current location, and one that will ultimately sell the most books and save her from the clutches of bankruptcy. The reception of Seacole's wondrous body acts as a jumping point for unpacking the historical context of nineteenth century market, social and political forces, and allows the modern reader to fully interrogate how Seacole functioned in her transatlantic world. Like Marsh in her own times, Seacole is emblematic of a mid- nineteenth century transatlantic world. Through exploring Seacole’s life and tracing her movements, significant light can be shed on the convergence of people and cultures in the

Victorian world. I hope to present a study of Seacole that “crosses boundaries” and tells

“connected stories” while charting a “world in a life and a life in a world” (Colley xix).

I structure the following chapters so as to break down Seacole’s life chronologically and thematically in order to fully explore the world that created her figure, and examine how her image functioned in that world. The chapters are organized in a way that charts her movement away from her original home, Jamaica, to her adopted one, England. I stress the mobility of Seacole’s body and subject position, using the concept of wonder and the forces of a consumer society to interrogate that movement.

Sandra Paquet suggests that in Wonderful Adventures “selfhood is reduced to the

verification of a public image” (659). In other words, Seacole’s identity is continually in flux as it is established and reinvented through the public fashioning of her life and work. Her body becomes a “British social text” (Robinson 550) on which, I believe, the needs and desires of our heroine and those of a particular geographical and temporal space are written. My goal is to provide the first thorough and comprehensive reading of that text.

After the 1981 publication of Ziggi Alexander and Audrey Dewjee’s edition of

Wonderful Adventures, Mary Seacole has become an increasingly popular subject for scholarly debate. With this dissertation I join a developing debate over the various and most productive ways to read Seacole’s text. I pull heavily from the work of Sandra

Pouchet Paquet and Amy Robinson both of whom highlight Seacole’s deliberate cultivation of a public image and the role her audience played in Seacole’s self- fashioning. Paquet suggests that the purposeful skewing of her life to match the expectations and desires of her audience can compromise the strength of certain elements of her identity and cultural background, stating that Seacole’s life story is “skewed to public approval and public patronage” to the extent that she “erases [her] interior core” including her Jamaica identity (659). Although I believe this “interior core” is strategically hidden rather than completely erased, I use this assertion as a starting point for my reading of the manipulation of Seacole’s public image.

The first seven chapters of Wonderful Adventures are dedicated to the time

Seacole spent in the Caribbean and Central America. Although there has been a great deal of speculation surrounding the silences in Seacole’s biography concerning her early life, there has been little scholarly work on the need to interrogate the reasons for those

silences, and how those silences reflect the deliberate cultivation of the public image identified by Robinson and Paquet. I aim to provide the most detailed reading to date of these silences in her biography. Recent work on Seacole has begun to take a closer look at her life in Central America. In 2006 Maria McGarrity asked readers of Wonderful

Adventures to consider how Seacole’s negative depiction of the Americans she encountered in New Granada reflects a contemporary English concern with an expansion of the United States’ political and cultural sphere of influence. In the same year Anita

Rupprecht suggests that Central America, like the Crimea and Jamaica, should be read as site of historical and cultural flux that allowed Seacole to effectively highlight the extraordinary nature of her life and work. I expand on this recent scholarship in my exploration of why Central America, and not Jamaica or any of the other Caribbean

Islands she visited before traveling to the Crimea, offered her the most compelling opportunity to explore her at times contradictory identities.

Scholars such as Sandra Gunning, Catherine Judd and Cheryl Fish interrogate

Seacole’s deployment of Mother image and her use of a language of domesticity within

Wonderful Adventures particularly while in the Crimea. Although Seacole’s self- fashioning as “Mother Seacole” is not at the forefront of my analysis, throughout my work I consider how Seacole forms her maternal self around contemporary conversations about domesticity. Caribbean Studies scholars Ivette Romero-Cesareo, Evelyn

Hawthorne, Rhonda and Curdella Forbes ask Seacole’s modern readers to consider the role the Caribbean played in the development of Seacole’s sense of self. I use this scholarship to illuminate my attempt to read the balancing act Seacole and the contemporary periodical press perform as both parties highlight and minimize certain

aspects of her Jamaican heritage to fit the needs of a particular audience or historical moment. I expand this existing scholarship on the self-fashioning of Seacole identity as I trace her public persona as it is fashioned through the contemporary press through to the revival of her celebrity in the modern UK and Jamaica. I believe I am the first scholar to provide an in depth analysis of the development of Seacole’s public image as reflected in the contemporary press in both Great Britain and Jamaica.

*****

The first chapter situates Seacole within the geographic space of the Caribbean and the Americas by examining what is known of her life before her time in the Crimea. I contend that Seacole and her editor construct an image of Seacole’s blackness and its relation to a transnational idea of race across the African Diaspora that allows Seacole to critique the U.S. treatment of the black body from the perspective of a British colored woman. Yet while waging a critique of the contemporary treatment of the black body,

Seacole also distances herself from the more controversial subjects that clung to her black skin, for instance the legacy of the Haitian Revolution and the subject position of the black woman under slavery. This chapter establishes the basis for understanding Seacole as transatlantic figure, who uses her race and her relationship to the larger black community as well as her gender to play up her status as an extraordinary woman, a wondrous and noteworthy exception to stereotypes. Seacole’s actions during this temporal and geographical period can also be seen as the staging ground for her construction – self and editorial – as a woman who travels not to discover but to be

discovered. Sandra Pouchet Paquet identifies Seacole’s time in Central America and the

Caribbean, before she traveled to the Crimea, as a moment where she develops her sense of rugged individualism (656). Seacole is free to more fully develop her complex and strong identity, playing with the fluidity of her gender and race, before she must submit herself to the mission of British military machine and its accompanying patronage. I explore how Seacole's presentation of her time here establishes the basis for presenting herself, throughout her public life, as an eccentric other and an exception to the rule. I question how, at this moment, the ‘wonder’ of Seacole’s life and travels begin to take shape.

The second chapter places Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures in the Crimean War memoir market for which it was originally produced. Using the traditional markers of race, class and gender Seacole’s text is read alongside such works as those composed by

Alexis Soyer, Sir Frances Duberly and Lady Alicia Blackwood, among others. Again,

Seacole and her editor construct an image of race, gender and national and cultural identities that titillate the interest of the reader without alienating the audience on which

Seacole relied for financial assistance. I also take this time to explore Seacole’s relationship with her most famous contemporary, Florence Nightingale. Scholars read

Seacole’s depiction of her time in the Crimea as the height of the pro-imperial stance of

Wonderful Adventures. Trapped in the web of patronage and support required by a mixed-raced, colonial woman at the battlefront of an English War, Seacole, in many ways, is forced to shelve her individuality in a previously unforeseen way. On the other hand, she is able to simultaneously redefine what it means to be both British and a servant of Empire, and a black, Jamaican woman in a white, English masculine war.

With Chapter 3 I begin my interrogation of Seacole’s public image as seen in contemporary periodicals in the British mainland and the Jamaican colony. By working with the language of contemporary periodicals I analyze the connections between

Seacole’s literal and metaphoric mobilities. Just as her body moved across cultures and geographies, Seacole’s figure was circulated in the public sphere through British periodicals. I tie the public display of Seacole’s body through contemporary gossip columns – tracking her bankruptcy and the fundraising efforts that followed – back to the conceptions non-white, non-English body held by her mid-Victorian audience. Chapter 3 places Seacole alongside popular images of black women circulating in the mid- nineteenth century. The public lives and writing of Seacole, and the abolitionists figures

Ellen Craft and Sojourner Truth and the mammy, the popular trope of female blackness popularized by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, are read as bodies contributing to the web of empowerment and consumption offered to the publically displayed non-white body at mid-century. These Victorian women complicated the normal image of the Victorian woman traveler either through their skin color, their cultural backgrounds or their chosen movements. As Lorraine Mercer suggests, Seacole is unique in that she reverses the traditional trajectory of the nineteenth century travel writer by moving from the margins to the center (4). Through their own written works and the reception of their bodies, I further illuminate the anxieties surrounding race, class, sex and gender that allowed Seacole to live such an extraordinary life and propelled a mixed-raced, colonized, female body toward such meteoric rise in fame.

Chapter 4 borrows from language Homi Bhabha in interrogating Seacole’s public image in the context of her status as an English celebrity who is almost English, but not

quite. This chapter also interrogates the machinations of nineteenth century celebrity and

Seacole’s fashioning, self and otherwise, as an eccentric figure worthy of the attention of the consumer public in England. I place Seacole alongside Lola Montez and Catherine

Hayes, other non-English women who enjoyed great celebrity in England during the mid- nineteenth century. In Wonderful Adventures Seacole claims to have crossed paths with

Lola Montez, the infamous “Spanish dancer” and breaker of men’s hearts across Europe and America, and Catherine Hayes, an well-known opera singer in route to California to tour under the management of P.T. Barnum. Both Montez and Hayes were born in

Ireland and not of the Anglo-Irish elite placed in power in Ireland by the English.

Although both Hayes and Montez were of full European descent, Montez olive skin and exotic looks led to speculation over her ethnic background and ultimately earned her the name the “Spanish dancer.” Although Seacole, Montez and Hayes gained their celebrity through very different means and under very different circumstances, all three women became English celebrities who were almost English, but not quite. It is my contention that, however Seacole may have seen herself in relation to Montez and Hayes, all three women were presented in the same language of wonder and eccentricity. These women shed light on the question of why certain bodies and certain figures enjoyed the public fame that they did in Victorian England.

I conclude my exploration of the reception of Seacole’s public body with a consideration of the modern packaging of the Jamaican doctress. I incorporate British popular culture representations of Seacole like those found in contemporary periodicals, the exhibit about her work in the Crimea at the Florence Nightingale Museum in London and her new place in the core curriculum of English grammar schools. Alongside this I

place her immense popularity in her birthplace, Jamaica, as seen in the many buildings and societies named in her honor and the plaque of Seacole that graces the entrance to the

National Library of Jamaica in Kingston. Also central to exploring the modern Mary

Seacole is interrogating her place in academia. As previously addressed, as a product of the Caribbean, Seacole is caught in the continuous, circulation of consumption that characterized both the history and present realities of the Caribbean and its subjects

(Sheller 14). Cordella Forbes suggests that this web of consumption still impacts the manner in which the Caribbean voice is manipulated in the world of academia to serve the needs of the marketplace (7). Seacole’s colonial, ethnic or female background is highlighted or minimized to serve the needs of the market. Through taking a look at both mainstream and scholarly representations of Seacole, we can discover how the elements of consumption, mobility and display still apply to her immortalized body.

i http://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk/ ii I visited the Florence Nightingale Museum in July of 08, before the recent renovations. My comments about the structure of the space and Mary Seacole’s inclusion reflect the Museum’s appearance before these renovations. iii Blackwood was the author of her own Crimean War memoir A Narrative of a Personal Experience and Impressions during a Residence in the Bosphorous throughout the Crimean War published in 1881. iv For the full list of the poll organized by the black heritage website Every Generation see http://www.100greatblackbritons.com/home.html v For more on Heth see Benjamin Reiss. The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America. London: Harvard University Press, 2001 or http://www.lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archives/joice.htm for links to contemporary discussions of Heth. vi See John Gay’s 1728 ballad opera Polly, written as the second part of The Beggar’s Opera and John Fawcett’s much more successful 1800 pantomime, Obi, or, Three-Finger’d Jack. According to Peter P. Reed’s article “Conquer or Die: Staging Circum-Atlantic Revolt in Polly and Three-Finger’d Jack” both works explore issues of race, class and performance as they relate to emergent Caribbean colonialism. vii Author of the Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself. (1851), Brown was a popular figure on the abolitionist lecture tour in English for 25 years. Brown’s life will be discussed briefly in Chapter 3. viii see Evelyn Hawthorne, “Self-Writing, Literary Traditions, and Post-Emancipation Identity: The Case of Mary Seacole.” Biography. 23.2 (Spring 2000), Sandra Gunning, “Traveling with her Mothers Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race and Location in The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole on Many Lands.” Signs. 26.4 Globalization and Gender (Summer 2001): 949-981 and Amy Robinson, “Authority and the Public Display of Identity: Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole on Many Lands.” Feminist Studies. 20.3 (Autumn 1994): 537-557. ix See Du Bois’ essay “Our Spiritual Strivings” in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

x After a report in the London Times referred to Nightingale’s work in the Crimea and her habit of moving through the beds of wounded soldiers after sunset, Nightingale was awarded the popular nickname “The Lady of the Lamp.” This image of her became one of the most popular and enduring elements of her public figure. Plug in some pictures here. xi See Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates’ The Slave Narrative. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. xii Throughout this dissertation I make repeated reference to an “English public” or “English audience” as the primary consumers of Seacole’s text and a force that determined, in part, the content of Wonderful Adventures. In my use of “English” and not “British” I follow the methodology of Catherine Hall in Civilizing Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (2002). Hall believes that although the term “British” was often used in relation to the empire, “English was constituted as a hegemonic cultural identity” (22) in the mid-nineteenth century and, as such, uses the term “English” to label the cultural notion of national identity at this time.

Chapter 1: Race and Identity in Mary Seacole’s Americas

If [my skin] had been as dark as any nigger’s. I should have been just as happy and useful, and my much respected by those whose respect I value; and to his offer of bleaching me, I should, even if it were practicable, decline it without any thanks. As to the society with which the process might gain me admission into, all I can say is, that, judging from the specimens I have met here and elsewhere, I don’t think I shall lose much by being excluded from it. So, gentleman, I drink to you and the general reformation of American manners. ~ Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands

The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world – a world that yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

Finding herself bankrupt in London in 1857, Mary Seacole, with the help of a white, male, English editor authored her only piece of writing, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. In order to save herself from bankruptcy, she had to

“perform the conditions which would authorize her voice” (Robinson 542) and refashion her exceptional life story so as to gain the attention and approval of the English audience reading her text. The modern reader of Wonderful Adventures must consider the text in this light. Seacole’s text is more than simply a work of creative expression or the result of a desire to tell her exceptional story; it also grew from a need to survive. Financially motivated travel and/or the production of a narrative outlining that travel was not a situation unique to Mary Seacole. Many women in the nineteenth century found themselves forced out of the domestic space by financial necessity.i For the nineteenth century woman or color living under the direct rule or shadow of New World slavery and its institutionalization of racism, home was not always a safe or natural place. The very

movement away from home could rewrite the terms of the domestic and the proper, feminine, social space, creating a new, often mobile, home. Through a “particular form of hybridity” women like Seacole carved out a discourse that both borrowed from and challenged the boundaries of the dominant discourse and its conceptions of femininity and blackness (Peterson 8, 14, 15).

In the above quote from The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois suggests that

American subjects of African descent are given a “second sight” that forces them to step outside their bodies and look at themselves through the “eyes of others.” However,

DuBois writes that the subject is gifted with this “second sight” through which he or she is given what Jim Perkinson identifies as a “shamanistic ability to see beyond the ordinary” (19). The African-American subject’s “second sight” is both a curse and a gift.

Seacole, too, is repeatedly forced to see herself through her reading public’s eyes; however, beneath this public perception lies an exceptional woman whose multiple, and often competing identities, gave her a unique insight into the various geographies and cultures through which she moved. DuBois’ black man is “born with a veil,” through which he must view the world. Seacole too wears her veil; in order to connect with her

English reading public she views her life and her purpose through the lens of the English imperial machine, shifting identities according to its needs. My goal with this project is not to determine Seacole’s “true self-consciousness” or analyze her multi-layered consciousness; Seacole’s complicated subject position cannot be reduced to the binaries of black and white, or simply a “doubled” existence or consciousness. Rather, I aim to interrogate the forces behind the construction of her public image and the “veil” through which Seacole viewed her world.

A number of texts – from scholarly critiques to popular histories to children’s books – have been written on Mary Jane Seacole’s life. These include a great deal of speculation on the missing details of her childhood and young adult life spent working as a doctress and inn or hotelkeeper.ii My intention is not to recount or piece together the vague pieces of her past. Instead, I would like to focus on the significance of deliberate silences in addition to moments of her life that were presented to the public through

Wonderful Adventures. I draw from the public Mary Seacole as presented in and fashioned by the first seven chapters of Wonderful Adventures – those that focus on her early life and the time she spent in Central and South America working as a doctress and business woman. This time in the Caribbean and various locations in the Republic of

New Granada (comprised of present day Panama, Columbia, Ecuador and Venezuela) establishes the foundations of Seacole’s public persona, a persona that reaches its most symbolic value during her service to the British soldiers during the Crimean conflict. In

1805, Seacole was born a free woman, of dark complexion, into a society that legally enslaved those of African descent. In spite of this glaring fact, she does not make a single mention of the social stigma attached to her “yellow” skin when moving throughout her native Jamaica and the surrounding Caribbean Islands. Yet once safely within the geographical space of South America, Seacole openly voices her often- contradictory views of the black body, unleashing a scathing review of the manners and politics of the United States. This rhetorical strategy has implications that can be traced back to Seacole’s subject position as both a woman of color in the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as a colonial subject forced to financially support herself through the publication of Wonderful Adventures within the vast shadow of the British

Empire.

Writing on the development in the nineteenth century of what she labels “black cosmopolitanism,” Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo suggests that members of the African

Diaspora, confronted with the notion that they stood as the antithesis of the modern, were forced to consider how to write, construct or imagine themselves into modern, useful beings (9-10). Running through the entirety of Seacole’s narrative is a stress on the notion of “usefulness.” Stating “I wish to be useful all my life” (138), Seacole employs this notion of her “useful” body as both a justification and explanation for her desire to travel to these borderlands of civilization and various cultural melting pots, where notions of national, social and racial identity were not as fixed as those prescribed by mid-century

English society. However, complications arise when trying to place Seacole’s stress on usefulness within the context of her socially stigmatized, black, female body. Seacole’s attempts to establish her relationship to the larger community of the African Diaspora are plagued by a desire to simultaneously be “useful” – and demonstrate the potential of the black body – while separating herself from the stereotype of the uncivilized, ‘backward’ subject that clings to her black skin. Seacole’s relationship to those that shared her

African heritage is complicated and often contradictory. Like the other markers of her identity, the meanings and associations tied to the color of her skin often shift throughout her narrative and the other public presentations of her body.

*****

As she grew into adulthood, Seacole writes that she “was never weary of tracing

upon an old map the route to England” and that under “circumstances, which [she] need not explain” (Seacole 13) she was given the opportunity to visit England while she was still a young woman. Seacole details this first journey to the ‘motherland’ in one brief paragraph, focusing the story on the “rude wit” of the London street-boys who made her darker complexioned friend the subject of ridicule. Seacole writes, “I am only a little brown – a few shades duskier than the brunettes whom you all admire so much; but my companion was very dark, and a fair (if I can apply the term to her) subject for their rude wit” (13). She then states that she remained in England for one year and then returned to the Jamaican colony. This is the full length of her discussion of her first trip out of the country. Seacole uses this moment to raise the issue of race but quickly moves on. The

English space is immediately identified as unsuitable for these issues. She establishes and claims her African identity and its accompanying social status early in the text, but saves a full exploration of the implications of this identity for her time in New Granada, a more reader-friendly geography. By using the geographical space of New Granada to critique the degradation of the black body, Seacole can distance herself from potentially racist sentiment in England. Seacole acknowledges potential racism in England without asking her audience to confront their own moral failings.

Seacole chooses to dedicate merely one chapter to the first several decades of her life. During this time, she tells the reader that she acquired the doctressing skills that would earn her fame; mourned the deaths of her mother, her patroness and her husband; traveled to England twice as well as to Cuba, the Bahamas and Haiti; and forged a close relationship with the members of the British military that came to call her “Mother” in

Crimea. I am not the first critic to observe that her choice to brush past this time in her

life so quickly as well as omit portions of her personal history is certainly curious. Amy

Robinson links this omission to an act of erasure, reading this silence has an attempt to dismiss her West Indian identity in favor of a more acceptable “British” one (537).

Sandra Paquet believes that Seacole’s decision not to elaborate on her childhood and young adulthood in Jamaica should be read as Seacole’s active avoidance of the lived reality of colonialism in Jamaica (658).iii

To this critical conversation, I add my belief that through my reading of

Wonderful Adventures as a Crimean War memoir – an account of the failures and triumphs of the British Army and its followers at the front of the Crimean War – all moments leading up to her time in the Crimea can be seen as purposefully constructed as space used to create and develop the public image of “Mother Seacole” that would win her lasting fame. Seacole actively reconstructs her past in order to tell a specific story about her life. Scholars should consider her omissions in this context and ask themselves why Seacole’s early travels were not considered an asset in the construction of this image. Speaking particularly of her travels in and around the Caribbean, Seacole writes,

“Thus I spent some time in New Providence, bringing home with me a large collection of handsome shells and rare shell-work, which created quite a sensation in Kingston, and had a rapid sale; I visited also Hayti and Cuba. But I hasten onward in my narrative”

(14). In merely two sentences, Seacole dismisses these travels. The islands of the

Caribbean, particularly Haiti and Cuba, were sites of great racial tension and conflict in the first half of the nineteenth century and would have provided ample opportunity for

Seacole to tease out the complexity of both her mixed raced and colonial identities. Haiti, known previously as the French colony of Saint-Domingue, was the recent site of the

most calculated and violent slave revolt in the history of the New World. Cuba, its close neighbor had, like Seacole’s Jamaica, a rich and active history of maroonage. Maroonage can be defined as both the flight from slavery and the establishment of free communities.

Maroon communities emerged when those who fled from slavery stopped running and adapted their African culture to the forces of New World slavery and the physical and social environments into which they were thrust (Thompson 1, 7). Seacole’s omission of her “adventures” in Haiti and Cuba along with these “circumstances which [she] need not explain” (Seacole 13) can be most properly read through the perspective of her English editor and the English reading public she hoped to win over.

I soon turn to a discussion of how Seacole used her time in Central America to establish her complex and mobile racial identity. The language of these first seven chapters, in addition to select moments throughout the remainder of her text, makes it clear that she did not actively shy away from the issues and problems that accompanied her “yellow” skin. Why then, was her trip to Haiti, the recent site of the greatest slave revolt in the history of New World slavery, brushed past in two short sentences? Why is her effort to establish her ties to and relationship with the greater black community confined only to her time in Central America? Wouldn’t her travels to Cuba, a nation with a large number of free men and women of color and a strong history of maroonage, have provided her with ample opportunity to tease out her complex relationship to her

African and European ancestry? I present a reading of Wonderful Adventures that ties these silences to the purposeful marketing of Seacole’s public image to a nineteenth- century, English reading public. As James Olney asserts the narrator of an autobiographical work is “[e]xercising memory, in order that he may recollect and

narrate” events. As such the autobiographer is “not a neutral and passive recorder but rather a create and active shaper” (149). Seacole actively shaped the events of the early years of her life with a direct eye to the tastes and desires of a mainstream English public.

*****

Beginning in 1791 and coming to a close in 1803 with the establishment of the free Haitian state, the Saint-Domingue Revolution, also known as the Haitian Revolution, was a complicated and often violent series of events during which people of color, including the enslaved, rose up against colonial white rule. The Revolution was ultimately a “struggle of classes” that ended in the reconstruction of society on the

Caribbean island (C. James 128). During a speech at the Haitian pavilion at the Chicago

World’s Fair on 2 Jan 1893, Frederick Douglass said that Americans of African descent, as well as the greater black community, indeed owed much to antislavery societies and abolitionists in Britain and America. But he also suggested that they may indeed owe

“comparably more” to Haiti because of its role as the “original pioneer emancipator of the nineteenth century” (Davis 3). iv Almost a hundred years after the start of the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, the American ambassador to Haiti and one of the most powerful and well known voices in the struggle for African-American freedom and rights, publically drew attention to the impact of this particular moment on the current state of the African Diaspora in the New World. However, as David Brion Davis suggests, this violent moment in the history of the Caribbean was curiously absent from

Douglass’ interviews, speeches and debates from around 1841-63.v Although other

figures in the abolitionist, black rights and repatriation movements openly discussed the

Haitian Saint-Domingue Revolution, Douglass’ avoidance of a potentially divisive topic in his speeches speaks to a contemporary transatlantic uneasiness with this violent moment in history. Seacole had to negotiate this uneasiness.

Davis speculates that for “numerous whites the Haitian Revolution reinforced the conviction that emancipation in any form would lead to economic ruin and to the indiscriminate massacre of the white population” (4). Published in 1802, William

Wordsworth’s sonnet “Toussaint L'Ouverture” celebrates the heroic struggles and imprisonment of L’Ouverture, a former slave and primary figure in the Saint-Domingue

Revolution. However, as England moved toward mid-century and left behind the revolutionary poetics of voices like Wordsworth and William Blake and the violence of the French Revolution, the English people grew uneasy with foreign and colonial conflict and violence. Harriet Martineau’s novel The Hour and the Man (1840), based on the life of L’Ouverture, reflects this uneasy interest in the bloody conflict. For a mid-nineteenth century English reading public, the Haitian Revolution was not considered a liberating moment for the oppressed African Diaspora, or a triumphant and unifying declaration for the rights of the black men and women, a declaration around which abolitionist minds could gather. Although the Revolution was a powerful image in the minds of slaves and may have worked to inspire subsequent slave revolts, it was an “unforgettable and unrepeatable event,” and slavery remained as economically viable in the Caribbean as it had before the revolt (Drescher 12-13). Slavery may have become an increasingly volatile subject for European politicians and leaders as memory of the violent Revolution haunted slave holding nations, but it continued to thrive as the greed of the West Indian

planters eventually prevailed and increasing numbers of slaves were brought to neighboring islands such as Cuba to supplement the loss to the sugar trade (Davis 5).

The Saint-Domingue Revolution should not be read as the lone act that ended hundreds of years of the enslavement of Africans or a clear choice for the abolitionist seeking to promote the intelligence and nobility of the “black race.” As Nwankwo suggests, “In the wake of the uprising, people of African descent had to decide whether to define themselves as citizens of the world, specifically of the Black world that included the revolutionaries” (7). Facing the Haitian Revolution head on would have forced

Seacole to identify a relationship to a “transnational idea of Black community”

(Nwankwo 7), to decide whether she was English or Black, and that was never a choice she was prepared to make. The Revolution was also a divisive and controversial event for white audiences, and it may have proved itself to be a topic that was better ignored than celebrated. Commenting in 1933 on the 1805 massacre of the white population of

Saint-Domingue under the orders of Jean-Jacques Dessalines – one of the leaders of the

Revolution and the first ruler of an independent Haiti under the 1801 constitution – the

Trinidadian social theorist and writer, C.L.R. James observes that this horrific act at the beginning of Haiti’s independent rule was perhaps a greater tragedy for the black population of Haiti than it was for the white:

The massacre of the whites was a tragedy; not for the whites. For these old

slave-owners, those who burnt a little powder in the arse of a Negro, who buried

him alive for insects to eat, who were well treated by Toussaint, and who, as

soon as they got the chance, began their old cruelties again; for these there is no

need to waste one tear or one drop of ink. The tragedy was for the blacks and the

Mulattoes. It was not policy but revenge, and revenge has no place in politics.

The whites were no longer to be feared, and such purposeless massacres

degrade and brutalise a population, especially one which was just beginning as a

nation and had had such a bitter past. (373)

James’ comments on the impact of this legacy of violence on the contemporary and future assessments of the Haitian government and its people speak to Seacole and

Douglass’s choice to avoid this controversial subject and in Seacole’s case the history of

Caribbean slavery in general. The political and racial turmoil of Saint-Domingue at this time also held a shameful hold over the psyche of the English public. During the first five years of the French Revolution, William Pitt’s government sent upwards of 15,000

British soldiers to their deaths and spent close to ten million pounds in a fruitless attempt to take control of the island from the French. This failed military campaign stands as one of the greatest disasters in British Imperial history (Geggus 285). The Revolution hurt the British abolitionist movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as white English men and women in the Caribbean feared for their safety and the stability of their slave economy and sought to muzzle criticism of their society.

The early nineteenth century was also a time of great turmoil and restiveness among Cuban men and women of color, both free and enslaved. Cuba and Jamaica were home to powerful Maroon communities. Perhaps the most famous of all maroon communities developed in Jamaica. Nanny, a leader of the Windward Rebels during the

18th century in the eastern part of Jamaica’s interior, is one of most legendary figures in the history of Maroonage and a matriarchal hero in Afro-Caribbean history. She commanded nearly 5000 rebels during the First Maroon War in 1730. Nanny is a

legendary figure who represents a strong and thriving Maroon community in Jamaican that still exists today (“Maroonage”). Jamaica and Cuba’s shared histories of maroonage are entirely absent from Seacole’s narrative.

Ventura Sanchez, nicknamed Coba, was an infamous maroon leader from Cuba.

His influence was so strong that an English language newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, reported in 1819 that he and his followers demanded and were given property rights by the Governor. However, although Coba did demand these rights and delegates were sent to negotiate with the community, the Cuban government used this moment of lax security to surprise Coba and his fellow maroons with slave hunters. Faced with the prospect of returning to slavery, Coba took his own life (Franco 42). As further explored in my discussion of Seacole’s time in Central America, Wonderful Adventures addresses the presence of runaway slaves in New Granada. Seacole lavishes great praise upon these men and women and uses them as a model for the black man’s inherent nobility and democratic tendencies, suggesting that “self-liberated negroes” were generally “superior men” as shown in their “successful flight” from slavery (Seacole 51). Her later celebration of the men and women who freed themselves from enslavement makes

Seacole’s decision to avoid the subject of maroon communities in both Jamaica and Cuba all the more striking.

Cuba was also the site of several famous slave revolts and subsequent witch hunts in the 1840s. Slave revolts took place in March and November of 1843 and around

Christmas of that year, and several men were executed for their alleged involvement with a planned attempt to raise the slaves in the sugar district of Sabanilla. Unconvinced that they had rooted out the source of this increasing racial turmoil, Cuban officials launched

a campaign of persecution and terror in 1844. Implicated were men of all ethnic and national backgrounds – free people of color, slaves, Cuban born whites and foreigners.

During this time, Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdes, also known by the alias Placido, a free mulatto and one of Cuba’s most renowned poets, was executed as a the head of conspiratorial faction of people of color (Paquette 3-4). Placido has since taken on a prominent place in the history of the transatlantic black community. Nwankwo labels

Placido a “race man” who can be seen as a symbol of the black cosmopolitanism she seeks to describe. He stands as a figure whose racial identity rose above his national identity. The colonial government of Cuba denied Placido access to Cubanness, constructing Cuba as white (Nwankwo 27). In this way, Placido and the Haitian

Revolution took on a meaning larger themselves, becoming both a figure and a moment around which the transnational black community could organize itself. Although the revolutionary nationalist Jose Marti, also killed while fighting for his beliefs in 1895, receives more attention than his 1844 counterpart, Placido remains a both celebrated and controversial figure in the history of Cuba and the African Diaspora (Paquette 4).

Although the exact dates of Seacole’s visits to Haiti and Cuba are unknown, by using her travels to New Granada and the Crimea as a guide it can be speculated that

Seacole visited the Caribbean nations in the 1840s, about 40 years after the Saint-

Domingue Revolution and either during or shortly after Cuba’s violent racial conflicts.

Although some time had passed since 1857 publication of Wonderful Adventures the

British military defeat in Haiti, perhaps Seacole and her editor realized that a blemish in a legacy of imperial triumph as well as the controversial, racial driven political and social unrest in both Cuba and Haiti, were subjects that the English reading public would prefer

to leave in the past. As Davis suggests, the image the West Indies held in British consciousness was already “tarnished by years of antislavery literature and iconography” and the view of the Caribbean as a site of great imperial prosperity for the mother country never completely recovered from Britain’s defeat in Saint-Domingue (6). Using the background of the most infamous slave revolt in history as the means to tease out the political and cultural meaning of her mixed raced identity would not have helped Mary

Seacole sell many books and recover financially from the bankruptcy she incurred in the

Crimea. Once in Central America, physically removed from the shadow of the British

Empire, Seacole had more freedom to play with and debate the prejudices attached to her yellow skin.

Although Parliament outlawed the slave trade in 1807, 50 years prior to the publication of Wonderful Adventures, at mid-century the British government and white officials were still struggling with the legacy of New World slavery in the West Indies and how exactly to incorporate the newly freed slaves into a white society. Although the

Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833 legally emancipated slaves in the British colonies, the systems of Apprenticeship established by the Act left a large percentage of enslaved men, women and children over the age of six in a state of quasi-bondage until 1840.vi Even after the collapse of the Apprenticeship system, the formerly enslaved still entered into a society where their cultural relationship to the white man was basically unaltered

(Braithwaite 295). It was important for Seacole, both personally and for the success of her narrative, to confront the complexity of her colonial and racial identity within the pages of Wonderful Adventures. But, as demonstrated throughout her text and her public life, Seacole remained aware of just how fashioning herself at a particular historical and

geographical moment would impact her financial and career success. New Granada in the 1840s and 1850s proved itself to be the perfect moment for the confrontation of her complex racial background.

*****

The white man is trapped in his whiteness. The black man in his blackness.

- Franz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks

Seacole purposefully constructs her time in New Granada as a lead in to the larger event of the Crimean War (Romero-Cesareo 146), the time during which she carves out her space as an English celebrity. Wonderful Adventures is not just a “conscious articulation” of Seacole’s many mobile identities, but also a “conscious elaboration of a place of arrival” (Paravisini-Gebert 73). The “place” in question is the Crimea and her status as an English heroine. Behind Seacole’s autobiographical voice is that of her coaxer, her English audience influencing her narrative and impacting the type of heroine she writes herself into becoming. While the language of Wonderful Adventures and contemporary British periodicals celebrates and labels her as “Mother Seacole,” Seacole does not adopt the label “Mother” until she enters the Crimea. Throughout the first seven chapters of Wonderful Adventures, she is referred to as the “yellow doctress” by most, and “Aunty Seacole” by certain white American men wishing to display their regard.

“Yellow” is a term used to refer to black men and women with visible European heritage; this mixed racial parentage often resulted in very light brown or yellow skin. “Aunty,” an affectionate term assigned by white men and woman in the United States to slave

women, reflects both her visible link to her African heritage and the slave body, and the high regard with which American travelers in the region held her. Both of these titles reflect the respected position she held in society while directly verbally linking her to her

African heritage.

Outside the Crimea, Seacole is not yet a mother, but rather an aunt or a doctress, and this lesser status allows her greater freedom to explore the treatment of the free, black body without intruding on English customs or standards. While in New Granada, in the shadow of the American and Spanish empires and far from British soil, Seacole’s status as a walking contradiction is less threatening to English morals and ideals. For this reason, Seacole and her editor are able to take more chances and liberties with her hybrid or bifurcated identity. Seacole’s status as a marginalized, colonial subject moving through a geographical site on the borderlands of civilization offers her the perfect opportunity to explore what it means to be a free black woman in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Sandra Paquet suggests that Seacole’s time on the Isthmus of Panama is characterized by a rugged individualism that gives way to a language of patronage and service of Empire when she finds herself alongside the British soldiers in the Crimea

(656). Placing herself within this geographical borderland, a newly established state free from the direct rule of a colonial power and one that is both physically distanced from the motherland and largely off the radar of British colonial ambitionsvii allows Seacole the discursive space to explore her complex colonial and racial identity and carve out a notion of self unique to that background and a nineteenth century, transatlantic society.

Seacole creates a definition of self based not only upon her career and financial

ambitions, but also largely defined by what she is not: she is not a “nigger;” she is not a

“lazy Creole;” she is not a morally loose American woman. Seacole’s narrative as a whole, and particularly her time in Central America, can be read as a continued attempt to straddle two often contradictory identities; she is the “mother and the adventurer, the white and the black, the colonizer and the colonized” (Romero-Cesareo 136, 149). The potential motivations for and public consequences of Seacole’s decision to simultaneously align herself with and distance herself from her African roots are significant. I contend that this particular discursive move, during which she emphasizes and minimizes her African roots as the moment required, lays the basis for her racial identification throughout her narrative.

The Isthmus of Panama and the surrounding area was a great cultural melting pot throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and had a reputation for lawlessness.

New Granada was a newly formed democratic state, a self-ruled republic, created, in part, by the liberating efforts of Simon Bolivar. In July of 1810, New Granada declared itself free from Spanish rule, and in 1831, along with present-day Venezuela and Ecuador, became the Republic of New Granada (Currier 367). The same gold that drew Seacole to the region in the 1850s brought an influx of colonialists and African slave labor to New

Granada in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Klein and Vinson 78). After liberating itself from Spanish rule, these same men and women remained in the region intermingling with indigenous peoples. This meeting of various cultures created the unique social environment that Seacole notes in her narrative.

Seacole comments, “civilization does not rule at Panama” (18). With her deployment of the word “civilization” to describe New Granada, Seacole reflects the

prejudices of her English audience and the value that audience places on propriety and order. With this terminology, New Granada is being framed as a non-English space.

New Granada brought together a mix of Spanish colonizers, indigenous peoples or

“natives,” as Seacole labels them, Americans traveling to gold rich California, runaway slaves, and entrepreneurs and adventure seekers from throughout the Americas and

Europe. In short, there gathered the “refuse of every nation” (Seacole 18). The Isthmus was a stopping ground for North Americans traveling to California. These travelers attracted merchants and peddlers, like Seacole, who catered to the needs of the weary travelers. These travelers and peddlers were joined by “freed slaves, laborers, artisans, and newly arrived immigrants” who all found cheap accommodation and labor created by an increasingly American presence in the region tied to both the Gold Rush in California and the construction of the Panama Railway (Daley 86).viii New Granada served as a borderland, a “Wild West” like place where morals, races and nations clashed.

Discussing the present day physical and cultural intersection of Mexico and the United

States, Gloria Anzaldua suggests that a borderland is a “vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants… in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’”(25).

Reading New Granada through Anzaldua’s conception of a borderland helps explain both the open malleability of Seacole’s identity and Seacole’s decision to use this geographic region to explore her racial identity. As previously discussed, early nineteenth century Cuba and Haiti were still living under the scope, if not direct political rule, of their colonial motherlands. Aligning or separating herself from the black bodies

she encounters throughout her Caribbean travels would be, by extension, entering, to some degree, the debate over the morality of European colonization. The reader must remember that Seacole is addressing an English audience and courting English approval and recognition. Although Seacole does not challenge the idea of Empire directly, she does struggle to define her place in it (Paquet 652) and New Granada allows her to do this. Free from the direct political control of the great powers of the Western world, the newly created state gave Seacole the space to speak openly about the subjugation of those who shared her African roots and wage verbal attacks on the American or Spanish presence in the area. The Americans and the Spanish represent the potentially destructive forces of cultural imperialism and, in the case of the Americans, the threat of renewed political imperialism. She frequently presents the native inhabitants of New Granada as inactive and lazy. Although Seacole elevates their minds to an equal, if not superior, state than the white Americans and Europeans she encounters, the stereotype of the lazy,

Non-Western body clings to the Central Americans. Writing of the customs of the

“natives” of New Granada, she states, “Central Americans should adopt the hammock as the national badge; for out of sheer necessity they would never leave it” (21). In the face of a cholera outbreak the “people of Cruces” are said to bow down to the plague with

“slavish despair.” The “Americans and other foreigners in the place showed a brave front, but the natives, constitutionally cowardly, made not the feeblest show of resistance” (Seacole 31). As previously addressed, the idea of usefulness was central to

Seacole’s conception of herself as a modern subject and she made a continued, explicit effort to separate herself from stigma of uselessness attached to people of color. The most often cited trait of the colonized body is laziness, and industry is a powerful marker of a

position of privilege (Memmi 79). Seacole’s seemingly good natured ribbing of the

Central American subject’s passion for passivity, both in the face of potential labor and a deadly disease, brings with it a history of racial stereotypes that work to keep non-

Western, uncivilized subjects in their proper place.

While Seacole displays a general distaste for the indigenous people of the region and their uncivilized and lazy ways, her depiction of the African body is more complicated. The majority of black bodies Seacole encounters throughout Wonderful

Adventures, and particularly in New Granada, are men. Seacole speaks particularly of the presence of runaway slaves in Central America and recounts an encounter with a formerly enslaved man now in a position of power. Carlos Alexander was the alcaldeix of

Escribanos, who made money off of the gold rush in the region and currently stood as the ruler of a small gold mining town of about 200. Seacole writes,

He was a black man; was fond of talking of his early life in slavery, and how he

had escaped; and possessed no ordinary intellect. He possessed, also, a house,

which in England a well-bred hound would not have accepted as a kennel; a

white wife, a pretty daughter, with a whitey-brown complexion and a pleasant

name – Juliana.” (63)

Seacole’s use of the word “possess” to describe the alcalde’s dog, his house, his wife and his child echoes a language of subjugation deployed by imperialist and slave owners.

The black man has risen to a position of power but it is power in the white man’s terms.

Once he gains this power he takes a white wife and is depicted as a pseudo-laughable figure, living in a house not fit for an English dog. In Black Skin, White Masks, Franz

Fanon claims that images of a black man physically desiring a white woman demonstrate

the black man’s deeper longing to be white. If a black man is worthy of white love, he is loved like a white man. If a black man is loved like a white man he is, by proxy, white

(Fanon 45). Carlos Alexander is a black man shown performing the identity of a white man. The reader is given a portrait of an individual who boldly escaped the bonds of slavery, only to take on a life that Seacole reads as a poor attempt to be civilized – civilized here meaning English and white.

The body of the runaway slave is a means to implicitly place American moral values against those of the English. As will be discussed in greater detail in the next section, Seacole uses the geographical space of Central America to deliver Anti-

American propaganda of both the cultural and political variety. One of the clearest targets was the institution of slavery that was still legal and regularly practiced in the

Southern United States. The U.S had passed its first Fugitive Slave Law – compelling the return of all runaway slaves who escaped from one state into another or into public territory – in 1793 and its second in 1850.x Although some Seacole’s time in New

Granada may have predated the U.S.’s 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, the presence of these legal measures indicated an existing debate over the fate of those enslaved men and women who fled from captivity. Central America was a popular place for American slaves seeking refuge. In fact, Colombia was famous for its “palenques,” where groups of maroons formed communities with strong African traditions in the thick, tropical forests of the region (Escalante 74). British Guiana (now Guyana), and French Guiana and Suriname, all three of which lie on the north coast of South America just east of the

Republic of New Granada, were home to a large group of maroons known as the “Bush

Negroes.” The Bush Negroes, who still thrive in Suriname, have long been one of the

largest maroon populations in the Western Hemisphere and boast of the “most highly developed independent societies and cultures in the history of Afro-America” (Price 293).

Seacole comments specifically on American attitudes towards escaped slaves and the local government’s response. When Americans traveled through the area on their way to California the locals were “restively anxious to whisper into [the slaves] ears offers of freedom and hints how easy escape would be” (52) and that those in charge were not “inclined” to aid in the recapture of a runaway. England, at the time of the publication of Wonderful Adventures, was a popular place for fugitive slaves to take refuge from the United States’ Fugitive Slave Lawsxi and to use their status as runaways to tour the abolitionist circuit and speak out against the horrors of slavery.xii This discussion of runaway slaves draws attention to England’s superior moral standards.

Seacole writes, “It is one of the maxims of the New Granada constitution – as it is, I believe, of the English – that on a slave touching its soil his chains fall from him” (52).

However, she laments that because of fears of irritating such a powerful neighbor as

America, these laws were rarely actively enforced. This reference to potential American retaliation reflects the fears of Seacole’s audience that American Imperialism and it’s presence in Central America and the Caribbean may begin to eclipse their own.

In addition to Carlos Alexander, Seacole presents another image of the black body in a position of power, this time in the context of being forced to resort to legal measures to protect her property. Seacole claims that she generally avoided seeking the protection of the law while in the Isthmus as it often proved to be an expensive luxury. She describes the following encounter with law enforcement in the area: “The court-house was a low bamboo shed, before which some dirty Spanish Indian soldiers were lounging;

and inside, the alcalde, a negro was reclining in a dirty hammock, smoking coolly, hearing evidence and pronouncing judgment upon the wretched culprits, who were trembling before his dusky majesty (Seacole 45). Seacole has previously cared for the alcalde when he was ill, so when he saw her, he “rose from his hammock” to greet her.

Like Carlos Alexander, he also had a “very pretty white wife.” The alcalde forced the captured criminal to pay Seacole for the stolen goods but not, of course, until she left the

“necessary fee in furtherance of justice” (Seacole 45). The black body in a position of power is corrupt, lazy, and again falls comically short of attaining the desired status of the civilized white man. Although there is no historical evidence to corroborate Seacole’s account of these black alcaldes, the presence of free black men in the area makes their existence very probable. Regardless of the veracity of Seacole’s account, her very decision to construct these images of black men in positions of power speaks to the deliberate value judgments concerning what to include in her story and how to write within her audience’s conceptions of the black body.

Despite these contradictory images of the black man in a position of power,

Seacole celebrates the humanity and nobility of the black body and its ability to raise itself up from the clutches of slavery. She writes that it was “wonderful to see how freedom and equality elevate men, and the same negro who perhaps in Tennessee would have cowered like a beaten child or dog beneath an American’s uplifted hand, would face him boldly here, and by equal courage and superior physical strength cow his old oppressor” (46). Seacole also explicitly aligns herself with the black body and even takes a small stab at England’s own past use of slaves. She speaks of her skin having a

“few of shades of deeper brown” that show she is related to “those poor mortals whom

[England] once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns” (Seacole 21). This particular moment in the text, spurred on by a rude encounter with some Americans, is also the first and only time Seacole speaks openly about her direct experience with slavery in two short sentences: “And having this bond, and knowing what slavery is; having seen it with my own eyes and heard with my ears proof positive enough of its horrors – let others affect doubt if they will – is it not surprising that I should be somewhat impatient of the airs of superiority which many Americans have endeavored to assume over me?” (Seacole 21). Here, the English are directly implicated in the history of New World slavery. As seen also in her comments on the potential racism of the War Department that refused her offer of aid during the Crimean War, the English were not free from racist contagion. However, they were not her primary target. The

American “airs of superiority” concerning black bodies both home and abroad overshadow England’s history of racial discrimination. Seacole forces her audience to look at its past, but, more importantly, places the brunt of her complaints on the racist

“manners” of the Americans she encounters.

Seacole concludes the discussion of her time in New Granada with a renewed general condemnation of “Spanish Indians” or “natives,” labeling them “treacherous, passionate and indolent, with no higher aim then to simply enjoy the present” (68). In

Seacole’s description, the non-Western or non-English body cannot envision a future; it cannot progress or move forward on a path to a more civilized life. As explored in the remaining chapters, Seacole writes to an audience with certain preconceived notions of the non-Western body. Throughout Wonderful Adventures, Seacole, a colonized subject, separates herself from these stereotypes while also using them to her advantage. In this

particular instance she places her own vitality and usefulness alongside stagnation of the non-Western body. She attributes the natives’ behavior, in part, to the fact that they are a

“fallen nation,” which I read as a reference to New Granada’s previously secure state as a

Spanish colony as well as a subtle nod in support of the civilizing forces of Empire. As a

“fallen nation” they may have gained their freedom but they lost their links to a Western notion of progress, and of possessing a “higher aim” than to “simply enjoy the present.”

She juxtaposes the image of the lazy native with that of the runaway slaves who settled in the region, describing the “black” as “enterprising” and suggesting that their

“opinions incline not unnaturally toward democracy” (68). In spite of this potential for civility, they are said to “gladly encourage” the trouble-making natives and “foster” the spirit of antagonism that exists between the various groups in the region. Here Seacole constructs a black body that falls short of its potential. This praise of the black body runs curiously alongside a degradation of her African roots by occasionally painting the black man in a comic light and using common racial stereotypes when describing the black body. She often refers to the black men she encounters as “niggers” and on several occasions both in New Granada and the Crimea refers to a “grinning black” or a “white toothed grin.” Although Seacole aligns herself with and celebrates her African ancestry, the text of Wonderful Adventures still maintains a clear divide between Seacole’s mixed raced origins and the black bodies she encounters. Seacole’s body, as both black and white, is trapped in an antagonistic relationship with itself. As Paul Gilroy suggests, there is a “special stress that goes with the effort of trying to face two ways at once” (3).

Throughout Wonderful Adventures Seacole negotiates this duality, trying to create a identity where she can be both black and English. Modern culture attempts to align race

with national belonging, and sees blackness and Englishness as mutually exclusive

(Gilroy 10). Seacole is faced with the task of stabilizing her colonial and mixed raced background in a society that sees these identities as fluid. Seacole attempts to neutralize stereotypes attached to her black and colonized body by displacing images such as the

“lazy Creole” or the uncivilized black body onto the bodies of the men of color she encounters. Yet there is an essential Caribbeaness at the heart of Wonderful Adventures and the reader must always consider Seacole’s West Indian heritage. A mixed-raced,

Caribbean identity was not just one thing, as variations of color and class caused complicated stratifications prohibiting a fixed identity (Gunning 962-963). To counter this pressure for fixity, Seacole exploits critical historical moments to construct a new social identity, one that allows her to move freely through various geographies and exploit the fluidity of her identity to gain notoriety. Seacole explicitly tries to dismantle images that come with her complex identity (Mercer 9), targeting Central America as the site most open to a negotiation of what it means to have brown or “yellow” skin in the nineteenth century.

Her unique subject position requires an acute awareness of when to highlight her

African roots and when to minimize them. This awareness of her mobile identities and her possession of what Gunning labels her “politics of adaptability” (964), lays the foundation for Seacole’s manipulation of her race to meet the needs of her audience as she moves towards her position as a Crimean heroine. Seacole is proud of her African roots, but they carry with them a legacy of shame and degradation that cling to her body.

Seacole demonstrates a longing to “merge the double self into a better, truer self”

(DuBois 6), but remains acutely aware of the impossibility of this merger and instead

chooses to exploit the hybridity of her identity to meet her own ends.

*****

Curdella Forbes suggests that Seacole’s intentional targeting of a British reading public can be seen clearly in her scathing criticism of the cultural and political force of the American Empire, and conversely in her praise of the British Empire (12). Although

Seacole’s presentation and support of the British Empire becomes complicated as her narrative advances, in the first seven chapters of Wonderful Adventures the United States is a source of racism, violence and destruction. On the other hand, the British men and women she encounters bring with them notions of peace and tolerance. Seacole’s fame and the appearance of her narrative have always been subject to market forces and the desires of her reading public (Forbes 12). Seacole’s choice to place the Americans she encounters in Central America in an antagonistic relationship with every available demographic, speaks to these forces. Seacole takes particular offense at the manner in which the American women she encounters carry themselves and represent their gender.

She suggests that the women must be “ashamed of their sex” (25), as it was often difficult to distinguish them from their male counterparts because of their chosen attire. She also takes this time to criticize what she labels the “French lady writers… [who] desire the privileges of a man, with the irresponsibility of the other sex”xiii (Seacole 26). As a self- labeled “unprotected female,” with masculine ambitions, Seacole must protect the purity of her femininity; she must function as a sort of man-woman who, while creating the appearance of a male-authored travel narrative, must actively mediate it through the

discourses of femininity (Forbes 11). Seacole’s narrative presents the opposing forces of the strong adventurous colonizer and the passive woman (Mercer 5). Her attempt to stabilize these two identities is explored further in my discussion in Chapter 2 of her time in the Crimea.

Seacole repeatedly records her efforts to maintain her femininity in such masculine sites as the gold mining town and, later, the Crimean warfront. Upon her first arrival in New Granada she speaks of losing her footing while climbing a steep hill, and suggests she had always viewed maintaining her appearance as a “duty” as well as a

“pleasure.” She “attired [herself] in a delicate light blue dress, a white bonnet prettily trimmed, and an equally chaste shawl” (Seacole 20), so the reader must sympathize with the distress she experienced when falling down a muddy hill. The explicit stress on her femininity takes a more prominent role in the text as Seacole moves into the Crimean

War zone, but this rhetorical strategy of placing her inherent femininity against the brazen, masculine American women she encounters as well as the French “feminists” she and her public have read about, allows her to both justify her own masculine behaviors and take some time to pay a compliment to the purity of the English feminine ideal. As explored throughout the remaining chapters, the editorial and periodical fashioning of

Seacole’s feminine identity is linked in various ways to her race and her national identity.

One of the most often cited moments in Wonderful Adventures, particularly in discussions of Seacole’s conception of her own racial identity, occurs in Chapter V at an

American Independence Day celebration held at her brother’s hotel. A white man from the United States offers a toast to “Aunty Seacole” – as she is not yet “Mother Seacole” – the “best yellow woman God ever made” (48). He states,

Well, gentleman, I expect there are only two things we’re vexed for - ; and that is

that she ain’t one of us - ; a citizen of the great United States - ; and the other

thing is, gentlemen - ; that Providence made her a yaller woman. I calculate

gentlemen, you’re all as vexed as I am that she’s not wholly white - , but I do

reckon on your rejoicing with me that she is so many shades removed from being

entirely black - ; and thus make her acceptable in any company she deserves to be

-. Gentlemen, I give you Aunty Seacole. (48-49)

She writes that she was “burning… to tell them my mind on the subject of colour” and responds that if her skin had been as “dark as any niggers” she “should have been just as happy and as useful” (49). She speculates that she does not think she will lose much being excluded from the society that her light skin would gain her admission to if it would be like the one she was in now and concludes by saying: “So, gentlemen, I drink to you and the general reformation of American manners” (49). She realizes that her speech must have caused quite a stir, but records that the Americans laughed at it good- naturedly.

This story can and should be read as a moment where Seacole celebrates her

African ancestry and aligns herself with enslaved and formerly enslaved men and women. However, a close reading of the language reveals a denunciation of American manners and customs as much as it does to a celebration of the black body. Seacole is not defending the black man, but rather simply herself: she should have been “just as happy and useful” regardless of the color of her skin. She also explicitly attacks the

Americans, for their attitudes toward race, but also more generally for their manners.

Seacole writes that she was anxious to speak her mind on the issue of color, but instead

appears to only want to debate her own value and comment on the rude Americans with which she must keep company. Here Seacole is implicitly placing her notions, as a

British subject, of polite behavior against those held by the rude Americans she encounters. She is giving her audience an image of self-embodied by graciousness and a respect for individual value, not limited by racial labels.

Seacole records another instance of “American politeness” she experienced when she was denied passage on an American steamer because of her color. The Americans on board refused to travel with a “yaller woman” and one woman even went as far as to spit in her maidservant’s face. She records the comments of one irate American passenger as the following: “If the Britishers is so took up with colored people, that’s their business; but it won’t do here” (Seacole 57). She is then forced to leave the steamer and seek passage on an English boat, which we are lead to assume gracefully accepts her company.

Here, Seacole’s recollection of the chain of events and the language of the Americans she encounters explicitly pits American racism against English tolerance. In Wonderful

Adventures, as seen especially in the first seven chapters, the United States is a clear source of racism. As Maria McGarrity suggests, “Seacole’s coy questioning of American racial prejudice and its attendant lack in British society privileges her London publishing enterprise, her British market, and her desire for profit” (129).

In these first seven Chapter of Wonderful Adventures Seacole purposefully courts her target audience’s existing anxiety over the rise of American political influence in the region. The British held several colonies in the region at mid century so an increasing

American presence could have been seen as a direct threat to the strength of British

Imperialism, and a fear of American contagion also extended into the political realm.

The British retained control over British Honduras or present day Belize from the seventeenth century until the colony was granted full independence in 1981. The British held control over present day Guyana from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

British interests throughout the nineteenth century also dominated the Mosquito Coast, which occupied the Caribbean coasts of parts of present-day Nicaragua and present-day

Honduras. These three British holdings lay above the Republic of New Granada.

On several occasions, Seacole writes of existing local fears of American expansion into the region and “dreaded [American] schemes for annexation” (Seacole 51). While making a journey to the interior of the country Seacole speaks of recent news that

America has made some excuse to annex the Isthmus of Panama. She writes, “To any one at all acquainted with American policy in Central America, this intelligence can give no surprise; our only wonder being that some such excuse was not made years ago” (67).

On 12 December 1846, a treaty between the US government and the Republic of New

Granada guaranteed the U.S. the right to free and safe passage over the Isthmus of

Panama. The US, in turn, confirmed the “perfect neutrality” of the Isthmus and New

Granada’s rights to the region (Tucker 44). Creole leaders of the newly formed republics from the Spanish Empire in this region saw their hopes of a greater spirit of freedom and a New World alliance dashed when it became clear that American interest in the area remained largely politically motivated and self-serving. In fact, in 1825 Venezuela’s

Simon Bolivar advocated an alliance with London rather than with the United States; the sentiment among Latin American leaders was that the US was set on destructive expansion and did not make a good ally (McPherson 10, 11).

In addition to being the source of national and international political turmoil,

Americans are identified as troublemakers for regional governments. Seacole writes of

“endless quarrels, often resulting in bloodshed” that took place between the “strangers,” or the Americans, and “natives” (62). One particular incident is recounted in which the locals became so incensed that they planned a “general uprising” against the “foreigners,” and had it not been for the “opportune arrival” of an English war steamer, the situation could have grown dire as the “native population” greatly outnumbered the Americans

(Seacole 62). Seacole’s recounting of the timely arrival of the English troops reflects a contemporary British uneasiness with an increasing American political presence in the area. An 1860 review of Julius Froebel’sxiv Seven Years Travel in Central America and the West Indies appearing in the British publication the New Monthly Magazine applauds

Frobel’s remarks on the “unjustifiable bombardment of [Central America] by the Anglo-

Americans” (“Central America and the West Indies” 88). Froebel, a German-American journalist and diplomat and a frequent commentator on the state of political affairs in

Central America, taps into a growing conflict between Britain and the United States over both direct political control and political influence in the region. Seacole capitalizes on the atmosphere of distrust to bolster the nationalistic sentiments of her English readers, painting the Americans as a source of disquiet and the British troops as vessels for peace.

Seacole extends this veiled critique of American imperialism to the continuing

Spanish presence in the region, calling the Spanish “papists” and ridiculing their Catholic values and morals. As cholera was a deadly disease, Seacole bore witness to several burials while in New Granada. The bodies were traditionally put into the ground quickly in order to avoid the spread of the disease, robbing the highly Catholic Spaniards of the religious practice of paying their last rights to the body. She writes of being called to the

house of a “New Granada grandee” who was away when his wife and newborn child took ill. While trying to aid the mother and her child she had the “greatest difficulty to rout the stupid priest and his stupid worshippers” (Seacole 36) and do what she could for the sick. When the authorities came for the body, the family and friends of the deceased barricaded the door in order to perform the mother’s last rites and clothe her in “rich white satin,” while completely oblivious to the dying child that Seacole held in her arms.

This absent husband widower is a Spanish businessman, a holdover from the days of the rule of the Spanish Empire. But unlike the direct attack on the forces of American

Imperial ambitions, Seacole’s criticism of the Spanish is based upon religious ideas and customs. Her comments about the Spanish “papist” allow her to place English Protestant restraint alongside Catholic superstitions.

As I further develop my analysis of the public persona of “Mother Seacole” the

“Crimean heroine,” my attention shifts slightly away from the language of Wonderful

Adventures, incorporating the works of fellow contemporary women writing from the margins and various authors of Crimean War memoirs. I also interrogate the language and images used to shape Seacole’s public figure in the nineteenth and twentieth century media. Wonderful Adventures gives Seacole the opportunity to write her body into the center of the British cultural imagination (Robinson 550). And in these first seven chapters, the reader is given a carefully crafted image of Mary Seacole, fashioned with the intention of gaining her access to that center. Through establishing the primacy of

English values and presenting a conception of her own racial background that is both mobile and utilitarian, Seacole establishes the foundation from which she will grow into

“Mary Seacole, the Crimean heroine:” the woman whose profile is found on a plaque at

the entrance to the Jamaican National Library in Kingston and whose portrait hangs in the

National Portrait Gallery in London.

i See Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman’s Traveling Economies: American Women’s Travel Writing. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2007 for a discussion of numerous women forced to leave their homes or birth places to support themselves financially. ii See Jane Robinson’s Mary Seacole: The Charismatic Black Nurse Who Became a Heroine of the Crimea. London: Robinson Publishing, 2006 or Ron Ramdin. Mary Seacole. London: Haus Publishing, 2006 or for a children’s story see J. Malam’s Mary Seacole. London: Evans Brothers Ltd, 1999. iii See Amy Robinson’s “Authority and the Public Display of Identity.” Feminist Studies. 20.3 (Autumn 1994): 537-557 and Sandra Paquet’s “The Enigma of Arrival: The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” African-American Review. 26.4 (Winter 1992): 651-663 iv The full text of the speech can be found courtesy of Webster University at http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/history/1844-1915/douglass.htm, v In spite of this silence Douglass work shows a great passion for Haiti and its people, giving his famous lecture on Haiti at the 1893 World’s Fair. The transcript for this speech can be found at http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/history/1844-1915/douglass.htm vi For further information on the Apprenticeship system in the British colonies see Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture edited by Kathleen E.A. Monteith and Glen Richards. (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2002). vii Although Britain did lay claim to British Honduras, or present day Belize, Seacole did not travel through this space. viii An American businessman began construction on the Panama Railway in 1850 and the first full trip was completed in 1855. Like the construction of the Panama Canal over 50 years later, the Railway brought foreign laborers to the region. For further information see the Central Pacific Railroad Photographic Museum (http://www.cprr.org/) and Freesenden Nott Otis’s Isthmus of Panama: History of the Panama railroad; and of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1867. ix An alcalde was the chief judicial head of a town or village. The title is a holdover from the times of Spanish colonization. x The full text of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law can be found courtesy of the National Center for Public Policy at http://www.nationalcenter.org/FugitiveSlaveAct.html xi Mary Prince, author of The History of Mary Prince: a West Indian Slave (1831) is one the most famous examples of a slave taking refugee on English soil. Prince’s life and relationship to Mary Seacole will be explored in detail in Chapter 2. xii Men such as William Box Brown and Frederick Douglass were popular figures on the Abolitionist lecture circuit in Victorian England. The implications of the presence of these figures on the public presentation of the black body in the English space will be explore in further detail in Chapters 3 and 4. xiii Here Seacole is presumably speaking of such French women as George Sand and Flora Tristan, both of whom were popular and controversial figures in nineteenth century France who championed female intelligence and personal rights. xiv Julius Frobel was a German-born journalist and diplomat who lived and worked in Germany, the United States and Central America. He covered Central America for the New York Tribune and in 1859 published the travel narrative Seven Years' Travel in Central America, Northern Mexico, and the Far West of the United States.

Chapter 2: Mary Seacole the Crimean heroine

“No memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections.” ~ Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory

In the first half of the nineteenth century England found one of its greatest imperial rivals in Russia. Growing tension surrounding Russia’s military role in Eastern

Europe resulted in increased attention to what had been labeled the “Eastern Question.”

In the midst of this tension, the then leader of the Russian Empire, Tsar Nicholas I – an often misunderstood historical figure – seeking access to the Mediterranean through the

Dardanelles approached the British about forming an alliance that would allow him to achieve his goal while avoiding a second bloody war with Turkey. The British refused to join him and what resulted was a series of political and diplomatic insults and snubs that eventually led to the British and French dispatching naval fleets to the region, the

Russians invading Turkish land on the 3rd of July 1853 and England and France declaring

War against the Russian Empire in March 1854 (Edgerton 11, 14-15). While the French seemed somewhat hesitant to support a military conflict, the English embraced the potential glories of war. The Crimean War had an exceptional impact on the psyche of the English who used the moment to redefine the meaning of an English national identity.

The war marked a movement towards a more modern way of life; the blunders of the government led to far-reaching military, medical and public health reforms and the press assumed an unprecedented power that continues to this day (Rappaport 2). As Stefanie

Markovits suggests, “[T]o an unprecedented degree, the experience of the Crimean War

was filtered through print—not just after the fact as with past wars, when poets, novelists, and historians took up their pens to memorialize the experience” but in “real time and by an extraordinary range of writers” (Markovits 560). This real time experience of the

Crimean War made it like no other the British had ever experienced.

Such a formative moment in the history of nineteenth century England quickly became a site for the production of a collective memory of British failures and triumph.

This collective memory needed an outlet. As explored in the Introduction, The

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands is a hybrid of various genres;

Seacole’s narrative borrows from and re-imagines the existing and emerging traditions of the female-authored travel narrative, the slave narrative and the Crimean War memoir.

The Crimean War offers a clear moment for Seacole to write herself into British Imperial history. By capitalizing on this resurgence of English nationalism Seacole inserts herself into English collective memory, and joins white men and women from across the British mainland in creating and maintaining a collective sense of self emerging from the

Crimean conflict. This specific historical moment also allows Seacole to blaze a trail for the voices of women of color to offer their experiences of the masculine event of war.

Seacole helps redefine the notion of the feminine and the maternal as it is impacted by the realities of war, while offering her English audience a much-desired inside view of the

Crimean War.

In his Preface to the first edition of Wonderful Adventures, William H. Russell, the London Times war correspondent, claims that the story that follows will be able to

“move curiosity” in its readers (qtd in Seacole 6). This statement immediately establishes the complex relationship Seacole had with her audience (Rupprecht 179). She will not

“inform,” “enlighten” or “instruct” the English public on the Crimean War; she will

“move” its “curiosity.” In her examination of Seacole’s self-fashioning as a modern day

Ulysses, Catherine Judd suggests that within Wonderful Adventures Seacole creates a

“heroic self that cannot be contained by the needs of her English audience” (101).

Seacole ambitions surpass the desires of her audience. Although her sense of individuality is certainly diminished in the shadow of the British army in the Crimean space, Seacole still maintains her unique sense of self. As Sandra Paquet suggests,

“[Seacole] exerts a powerful, muscular energy that forces new perimeters on the imperial center as a site of self-definition” (662). She contains many layers of self that extend beyond what her reception by an English audience required. While I fully acknowledge that Seacole is more than what her audience conceived of and needed her to be, my primary interest lies in examining the needs of this English audience, and how those needs were met. Within Wonderful Adventures Seacole creates a “heroic self” that transcends the needs of her audience, but she first ensures that those same needs were met. Seacole and her editor’s packaging of her image within the geographical space of the Crimea is impacted by her potential audience – a public hungry for first-hand accounts of the Crimean conflict and a public with certain expectations for and stereotypes of both the black and the female body. Seacole writes within existing, often contradictory, stereotypes of the black body as a useless, over-sexualized, source of amusement in a manner that maintains her strong sense of individuality and self-worth while still titillating the interests of her target audience.

Seacole’s is just one of many voices emerging from the war in the Crimea.

Scholars of Seacole’s life and work must then ask themselves what can be gained by a

close reading of Seacole’s narrative with an eye turned toward the market in which she was writing. In her analysis of Seacole’s deployment of the maternal image within

Wonderful Adventures Nicole Flur identifies a lack of critical attention paid to Seacole’s need to sell her story to a particular audience. Despite her claim to be unable to tell her life story in any manner but the one she chooses, Seacole was fashioning her story for the needs of a particular audience and market: white, English, middle-class readership at mid-century. Seacole, like many black female writers at this time, could not simply assume that she was writing to an audience like herself. As Flur suggests, “[Black] writers needed to pay special attention to gauging and responding to readers’ expectations” (107). Her audience, in a sense, predetermined exactly what type of heroine she was allowed to be. While the reader’s expectations are certainly present in the rhetoric and fashioning of the first seven chapters of Wonderful Adventures, those same expectations and limitations become heightened as Seacole moves into an English cultural space. Seacole structures her work in the Crimea as the fulfillment of a destiny

(Paquet 656). Once within this site of arrival, Seacole offers her readers an image of their countrymen at a time of great national crisis and recreates a sense of community between the English body at home and abroad.

As explored throughout this dissertation, Mary Seacole’s public life as written in her narrative and the pages of contemporary periodicals is a performance sprung from the nationalistic sentiments of the Crimean War, the history of the marginalization of the colonized and the female bodies and the legacy of New World slavery. Seacole’s self- fashioning and the performance of her public identity grows out of the memories linked to these histories. Her public image is a performance that speaks to the existing

memories and expectations of her reading public. Joseph Roach suggests that performance can be understood as that which is “seeking always to embody and replace”

(Cities of the Dead 3). Each performance is created in the image of that which came before, and as such, the idea of the original is constantly being recreated and reformed.

In this way performance is closely linked with memory; a memory, such as that linked to the Crimean War, is continually recreated. An interrogation of Seacole’s account of the

Crimean War reminds us that the idea of a “fixed and unified” culture complete with a set of “fixed and unified” memories exists only as a “convenient but dangerous fiction”

(Roach 5). Seacole offers a memory of the Crimean War that should not be read as a recollection of factual events but rather one that reflects her unique subject position and the expectations and desires of her audience.

*****

Virtually unknown at the beginning of the war, William H Russell, was a household name by the war’s conclusion as his columns were read by hundreds of thousands of Britons. Although Russell’s voice may have been the most prominent, he was supplemented by numerous voices from daily English newspapers. These papers provided a “public forum for the expression of private experience,” as the dispatches from the war were often printed alongside letters from soldiers (Markovits 561). Writing to a community hungry for news of its soldiers’ well being, these dispatches created a link between the English body at home and the English body at war. As the literate

English public picked up the London Times and other periodicals each morning, English

nationalism expanded and the notion of what it meant to belong to the community of

English men and women throughout the world underwent significant changes. With his creation of an imagined intimacy between the war and the home front, Russell laid the groundwork for an explosion of Crimean War memoirs in the 1850s, 60s and 70s. Given a taste of the action and the drama, the English public wanted more. The rise of mass journalism made the war a cultural as well as a political event, and the consumer public developed a hunger that needed to be satiated.

In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson explores the modern notion of

“simultaneity” and its link to the eighteenth century emergence of the novel and the newspaper. Defined as a “homogeneous, empty time” marked by “temporal coincidence” and “measured by clock and calendar,” this form of simultaneity provided a “technical means for re-presenting the kind of imagined community that is the nation” [italics in original] (Anderson 24-25). The novel and the newspaper create an imagined intimacy between the reader and the writer in which they come to believe they share a certain space of a “community.” The acts of reading and writing played major roles in the perceptions of the war held by both the public and those men and woman in the Crimea

(Markovits 560). In his seminal work On Collective Memory, Maurice Halbwachs suggests that the greatest number of memories that a man or woman experiences are evoked externally. He writes, “Most of the time, when I remember, it is others who spur me on; their memory comes to the aid of mine and mine relies on theirs” (38). The subject remembering is in a mutually dependent relationship with the society in which he or she lives and the two recollections must come together to produce the one memory.

The “groups” that people are a part of at any given time give them the means to

reconstruct their “memories.” It is within society that people normally acquire their memories and, as Halbwachs suggests, “we appeal to our memories only in order to answer questions others have asked us, or that we supposed they could have asked us”

(38). After the close of the Crimean War English society raised a question: Mary

Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures is a memory constructed as a response to that question.

Mary Seacole capitalized on a public need in order to pull herself out of her financial troubles. Wonderful Adventures reflects both the life of an independent, eccentric, career woman and the complexities of a nineteenth-century public and commercial market recovering from a war that jarred a country. Out of this moment came the treasured historical voices of Russell, Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole.

But in addition to these household names, men and women such as Alexis Soyer, the celebrity chef; Frances Duberly, wife of an English captain; and Adolphus Slade, a

British admiral, found a public hungry for their personal stories. The Crimean War brought the English public into the “the realm of the technologized spectacle;” the war became “a tourist destination for the curious” and an “avenue for displaced outpourings of a nationalist sentiment” (Rupprecht 200). The memoirs of these and other figures offer a continuing outlet for this sentiment. This cultural moment also created a market for fictional stories inspired by the Crimean conflict. Throughout 1855 Reynolds

Miscellany published a serialized account of Crimean heroics in the mid-nineteenth century. Titled “Omar: A Tale of War,” the story follows our hero Omar Pasha on his adventures in warfare in the Crimea. In a plot that echoes the real life Crimean conflict,

Pasha, a Turkish “Generalisimo,” joins forces with the English and the French and goes to war on behalf of Turkey against the Russians. Pasha is a fearless soldier and a great

warrior and the story is imbued with an element of Eastern exoticism, as Pasha visits seraglios and meets with Sultans. Although this tale does not align temporally with the

Crimean War, its publication reflects an increased interest in all things Crimean, specifically those related to the heroics of the warrior.

Notable non-fiction pieces were also published decades after the Crimean conflict came to a close. Elizabeth Evans, the wife of the British soldier Williams Evans, published her brief recollection of the war – titled “A Soldier’s Wife in the Crimea” – in the Royal Magazine in 1908. Lady Alicia Blackwood, author of A Narrative of Personal

Experiences and Impressions during my sojourn in the East throughout the Crimean

War, waited until 1891 to offer her account of life during the Crimean conflict. After witnessing the turmoil of the Scutari Barracks Hospital, Blackwood, the wife of the Rev.

James Stevenson Blackwood, offered her assistance to Nightingale who in turn placed her in charge of the health of the women and children making their home in the Hospital basement. Although some witnesses, like Evans and Blackwood, waited decades to tell their stories, many men and women capitalized on the excitement of the moment and the recent popularity of Russell’s detailed war dispatches and offered their version of the events to the public; the publication of these stories created a rich market of Crimean War memoirs.i

In Wonderful Adventures Seacole demonstrates a knowledge of this market and the fact that hers was merely one story among many. Some men and women, like

Nightingale, Blackwood and Russell, traveled to the Crimea in order to serve the British troops or the British cause in some fashion. However, there were those who appeared to be only interested in the war as a source of adventure. Seacole acknowledges these

adventurers in Wonderful Adventures, identifying them as “book-making tourists” as she avoids “wearying the reader” with a long account of the physical journey to the Crimea these “tourists” have “already worn threadbare” (76). Although she was ostensibly in the

Crimea to offer support to her husband, Frances Isabella Duberly arguably falls into this category. As explored later in this chapter, her 1856 narrative Journal Kept During The

Russian War often reflects more of a spirit of adventure than it does an undying commitment to her husband. Elizabeth Davis, a white, paid nurse who traveled with

Mary Stanley’s Anglican sisters,ii offers another example of a woman for whom a sense of duty or a passion for her work was likely overshadowed by the selfish motivations of a

“book-making tourist.” Davis never married and, like Seacole, traveled all over the world supporting herself with her work as a nurse and sometime domestic servant. In

1857 Davis published her two-volume work The Autobiography of Elizabeth Davis, a

Balaklava nurse, the second volume of which addresses her time in the Crimea. Her autobiography suggests that she was more motivated by a sense of wanderlust than anything else when it came to her work in the Crimea. In fact, she writes in her autobiography that after reading about the war she stated, “if I had wings, would I not go?” (qtd in Summer 39). Seacole, however, sets her story apart from the others.

Although she acknowledges that her “reader must have had more than enough of journals and chronicles of Crimean life,” her story is unique and she states “unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in my own way, I cannot tell it at all” (138).

In addition to these women who viewed their journey to the Crimea as a mix of work and pleasure, there were those who merely wanted a thrill; one such woman was

Ellen Palmer. Although she never published her diary herself, a 1985 biography by Betty

Askwith, A Crimean Courtship, recounts the life and adventures of Ellen Palmer, using

Palmer’s diary as a foundation. The daughter of a wealthy baronet, Palmer convinced her father to take her to the Crimean front. In her study of women in the Crimea, Helen

Rappaport identifies Palmer as “effectively the first lady war tourist” (146). In the

1850’s, as railroads and steamships began to offer relatively safe and clean travel, the number of women’s tourists increased from a barely negligible percentage to a majority of those who traveled for leisure (Gordan 2). Palmer was in the first wave of these new women tourists who wanted to experience the exciting advancements transportation began to offer. Seacole may have shared these “book-making tourists” love of travel, adventure and excitement, but these selfish motivations were overshadowed by the selfless devotion to the British soldiers that Seacole lays claim to in her narrative. For

Seacole, travel was an escape from traditional domestic obligations but not simply for the sake of adventure or education. Through her travels, Seacole was trying to find a “field of usefulness” through which to explore the wider world (Fish 3).

*****

Because of a lack of regular or prolonged contact with multiple black bodies,

Seacole was not forced to consider her own blackness while in the Crimea in the same manner or in the degree to which she was in Central America. However, she and her editor remain aware of the expectations for the black body and construct Seacole’s version of blackness within them. Wonderful Adventures offers an image of the British

Hotel as a place for the weary to come together to be fed and healed but also to relax and

experience a few laughs in their otherwise dreary lives. Within her narrative, Seacole and her editor never ask that the black body be taken completely seriously, or at least to the same degree as its white counterparts. Mary Seacole the Crimean heroine is an entertainer; she is a loud and amusing figure. With her hands on style of nursing and her well-stocked British Hotel, Seacole brings much needed assistance to the suffering

British troops. However, she also presents herself as a woman who offered them something they may have needed much more: fun. Without ignoring it, Wonderful

Adventures often downplays the graphic violence and physical horrors of war to settle on a more light-hearted and entertaining view of this great English military blunder. Seacole explicitly identifies this intention with Wonderful Adventures writing, “If I were to speak of all the nameless horrors of that spring a plainly as I could, I should really disgust you; but those I shall bring before your notice have all something of the humorous in them”

(119). In spite of this deliberate choice to associate the public, non-white body with the

“humorous” or entertaining, Wonderful Adventures asks its reader to consider the black body’s potential intelligence, usefulness and value. Seacole is an invaluable resource for the English army, but on the other she is a continued source of comic relief; Wonderful

Adventures asks its reader to consider that an English heroine can be both at once.

As explored in Chapter 3, with the publication of Wonderful Adventures Seacole joined a developing tradition of women of African descent publishing memoirs in

England and the United States. Seacole may have been the first woman of color to produce a detailed narrative of war, but it was not long before Wonderful Adventures was followed by the narratives of the cross-dressing, Cuban Confederate solider Loreta Janeta

Velazquez’iii and Susie King Taylor,iv an African-American woman who offered her

services to one of the Union army’s colored regiments. As explored in the Introduction, slave narratives and abolitionist texts authored by black women, like those of Nancy

Prince and Mary Prince, were highly popular in England and the United States. Although the texts of all of the above women were written for wide-range of reasons and to audiences varying in size and demographics, they all represent an increase in black, female voices in public life. Despite the growing tradition of these voices reaching mainstream Western audiences, Seacole was a trailblazer, and, as she was so deeply committed to demonstrating with Wonderful Adventures, her voice is unique and stands apart from the then increasingly commonplace tales of Crimean adventure.

Seacole had a complicated relationship with each of her identities and trying to pinpoint an exact motivation for her “self-fashioning” could prove to be limiting and perhaps impossible for the critic of her life and work. As scholars like Nicole Flur and

Evelyn Hawthorne suggest, Seacole’s association with and a longing for acceptance by her white audience should not be read as a simple desire to assume a white identity.

Seacole exploits a critical historical moment to construct a new social identity and authors a unique version of selfhood through her “textual and rhetorical strategies”

(Hawthorne 309, 310). The Crimean War offered an opportunity to transcend the pre- existing societal boundaries prescribed by Victorian English society. As Jennifer James suggests in her study of the African-American War literature, the “destabilizing effects of war… have the power to disrupt even the most deeply ensconced notions of national, racial and gender identity” (10). As a colored, Jamaican woman in a white, English masculine zone, Seacole’s experience in an English war and her recounting of that experience already marked her as unique. Wonderful Adventures was a “non-white

immigrant text” written by a female about a great English masculine event and the very act of Wonderful Adventures’ production can be seen to challenge the white English nationalist agenda enacted by the literature of the Crimean War (Gunning 961). Despite this challenge, Seacole’s time in the Crimea becomes a discourse of “exceptionality, rather than transgression” (Robinson 545). Seacole had to tactfully market her extraordinary or wondrous nature to titillate the interest of her audience; in this act she both conformed to prescribed gender and racial roles and exploited the uncertainty of war to carve out new roles for “useful” black woman like herself.

As seen in her descriptions of life in New Granada, Seacole had a complicated relationship with her own African heritage and the larger community of African Diaspora around the world. While in Central America, Seacole does not shy away from deploying racist stereotypes when describing the black body and this language continues in the

Crimea. Rats were a constant plague on Seacole during her stay in the Crimea and she recounts an encounter her “black cook” Francis had with one such rat. During the night, a rat began “nibbling” on Francis and he awoke enraged. Seacole paints a picture of this anger, describing his “eyes angrily rolling, and his white teeth gleaming.” In the same breath Seacole refers to the black cook’s hair as “wool” (109). These words echo

Seacole’s animalistic and exaggerated depictions of the black body while in New

Granada and speak to existing Western European and American racist stereotypes.

European intellectual thought held a link between bestiality and the black body that was supported by pseudo scientific writings of leaders of the Enlightenment like Thomas

Jefferson and David Hume. These great thinkers compared Africans to animals, denying them the tools of rational thought.v Through her deployment of the language and

stereotypes of scientific racism, Seacole can subtly further distance herself from the

African body and offer her readers a familiar image of blackness.

This racist language was not reserved for the African body. Seacole often labels the men she encounters in the Crimea according to their particular ethnic or religious backgrounds, drawing attention to their status as non-English bodies. This functions, in part, as a diversionary tactic in the text, pushing the reader’s attention away from

Seacole’s own status as a non-English, non-white subject. While in Constantinople,

Seacole took into her service a Greek Jewish boy named Johnny who eventually accompanied her to the Crimea, where he remained an industrious servant. Throughout her text Seacole only refers to the boy as “Jew Johnny” and he is never granted a classification that extends beyond his religion. Jew Johnny is not the only non-English body Seacole notes while in the Crimea. While constructing her British Hotel at Spring

Hill she receives the aid of a certain Turkish officer and christens him “Captain Ali

Baba.” The name Ali Baba references the medieval Arabic tale “Ali Baba and the Forty

Thieves” set in present day Iraq.vi Through the deployment of this racist labeling Seacole is appealing to her English readership that would have seen the “Eastern” bodies they encountered in light of contemporary Orientalist thought. Despite this useful Turkish man, the remaining Turks she encounters are described “deliberate,” “slow” and

“indolent” and are said to break into “endless interruptions for the sacred duty of eating and praying, and getting into out-of-the-way corners at all times of day in order to smoke themselves to sleep” (Seacole 97).

Seacole sets out clear limits between the English and the foreign bodies she encounters, establishing a distinctively English masculinity characterized by bravery. A

comparison of an Englishman and a Turkish man demonstrates this bravery:

But the Englishman cannot understand a coward – will scarcely take the trouble to

pity him; and even the craven Greek could lord it over the degenerate descendants

of the fierce Arabs, who – so they told me on the spot – had wrestled

Constantinople from the Christians in those old times of which I know so little.

Very often an injured Turk would run up to me where I sat, and stand there,

wildly telegraphing his complaints against some villainous-looking Greek, or

Italian, whom a stout English lad would have shaken out of his dirty skin in five

minutes. (Seacole 95)

In Seacole’s description, a Turk is a coward, who collapses under the aggressions of another, foreign man. Whereas a “stout English lad” would have faced his aggressor and “shaken” him out of his “dirty skin,” the cowardly Turk merely complains to a woman about his troubles.

Seacole marks out clear lines between the English and the non-English body, discursively placing herself in an in between space, in a category of which she is the only member. Seacole seems fully aware of the meanings attached to her “dusky” skin, but manages to avoid directly confronting the implications of those meanings. When introducing her desire to travel to the Crimea in aid of the British army, Seacole recounts certain difficulties that she faced, one of which was the very practical need of money that came in the way of a Mr. Day, a distant relation of her departed husband. The second roadblock she identifies is explicitly linked with her status as a non-English, non-white body. She comments that to “persuade the public that an unknown Creole woman

[could] be useful to their army… was too improbable an achievement to be thought for an

instant” (70). Her first thought was to travel to England and offer her services directly to the Government; however, her offers were speedily denied with no more of an explanation than that her help was not needed. As she was extremely confident in both her gifts and her value, Seacole began to question just why she was being turned away, writing, “Now I am not for a single instant going to blame the authorities who would not listen to the offer of a motherly yellow woman to go to the Crimea and nurse her ‘sons’ there, suffering from cholera, diarrhoeoa, and a host of lesser evils. In my country, where people know our use, it would have been different; but here it was natural enough” (72).

She goes on to speak of the extreme confidence she had in the selflessness of her motivations and ponders why she was rejected, wondering if “American prejudices against color had some root” in England (Seacole 73). Seacole’s language is purposefully vague. She refuses to blame anyone directly and claims that things would have been different in Jamaica where, as she writes, “people know our use” [italics mine]. She never directly identifies this “our” but implicitly links it to the “motherly yellow woman” in the preceding sentence. The reader is left to infer that Seacole is purposefully avoiding blaming English racism for her rejection but rather constructing it as only a slight with possible roots in racist thought but more likely nothing more than ignorance and a simple misunderstanding.

There are several potential explanations for Seacole’s rejection. Sidney Herbert, the Secretary at War during the Crimean conflict, sought to recruit solely middle-class nurses; therefore, experience like Seacole’s would not have been a criterion for acceptance (Rupperecht 178). However, Seacole’s instincts about the role of her race in her rejection may not have been far from the truth. Many nurses, both black and white,

found their services rejected by the government, but all black women known to have officially offered their services to aid soldiers in the Crimea were told, as Seacole phrases it, that their offers to aid the British cause “could not be entertained” (Seacole 73). Three black women were known to have applied to the War Office and all three women were rejected: Seacole, an Elizabeth Parcel and a Miss Belgrave. According to the records of the War Office’s nursing applications, Miss Belgrave was turned down on the basis of the belief that her West Indian constitution was not adequately suited to bear the “fatigue of nursing.” The language of the applications also suggests that both Parcell, the wife of a soldier, and Belgrave were rejected on the grounds that the were “almost black” or

“nearly a person of color” (qtd in Rappaport 103). Reading Belgrave’s and Parcel’s records alongside Seacole’s comments suggest that the color of her skin may have very well played a part in her rejection.

Shortly after contemplating the reasons for her rejection she writes of her decision to team up with the Mr. Day who eventually helps fund the British Hotel at

Spring Hill. Seacole and her partner traveled under the name “Seacole and Day” and

Seacole is “sorry to say, the camp wits dubbed it Day and Martin” (75). Sarah Salih, the editor of Penguin Edition of Wonderful Adventures, identifies this play on words as racist humor that would have been recognized by contemporary readers (Seacole 199).

Day and Martin were a popular “blacking firm,” perhaps another name for the contemporary “blacking factories” where factory workers applied polish to boots to make them black. This quick note, which she is “sorry” to have to mention in combination with her reflections on her rejection by the War Office, demonstrates that

Seacole was aware of the uphill battle she was facing as a black woman in a white

society, while also demonstrating the humor that her very presence in the Crimea brought with it. Seacole acknowledges this difference and the attention her blackness brings, and by refusing to ignore it, she can potentially use it to her advantage.

In her examination of female travelers in the nineteenth century, Jennifer

Bernhardt Steadman argues that the same gaze “eager audiences leveled at the displays of bearded ladies and African ‘savages’” presented on the Victorian Freak Show circuit was also directed at the “unexpected figure of the female traveler, with her disruption of emerging construction of femininity and domesticity” (8). Upon her arrival in the

Crimea Seacole notes the special attention she receives from the people she encounters.

This attention stems from her unique subject position as a mixed-raced, Jamaican woman at the battlefront of an English war. She writes, “I flatter myself that I woke up the sundry-eyed Turks, who seemed to think that the great object of life was to avoid showing surprise at anything; while Turkish women gathered around me, and jabbered about me, in the most flattering manner” (Seacole 79). With this language Seacole directly identifies her ability to “surprise” others as “flattering.” Seacole delights in the attention her otherness earns her and only feeds contemporary depictions of herself as a capable and worthy woman but always a source of entertainment and spectacle. Within

Wonderful Adventures Seacole articulates a conscious desire to achieve fame. The continued attention and eye of her public underscores her greater desire to become a modern subject and this attention is due, in large part, to her status as a black woman in a white, masculine, physical space. Fame and recognition become markers of the public space Seacole claimed for herself (Paravisini-Gebert 81) and she appears aware that it is her unfamiliar identity that wins her this fame and recognition.

Seacole delights in being the center of attention throughout her time in the

Crimea and recounts a particular occasion in which she had to ride over to the French camp only to realize her only available transport was a sickly looking gray mare. In order to save face, Seacole covered the mare with flour, reducing its diseased look.

However, the high winds blew the false coat onto her riding habit, covering her with flour. Seacole suggests that the French were highly amused by this display, writing

“but I never heard more hearty peals of laughter from any sides than those which conveyed to me the horrible assurance that my scheme unhappily failed” (Seacole 109).

In Wonderful Adventures, while traversing the Bosphorus, Seacole recalls almost falling into the water. This moment again serves as comic relief but also demonstrates the centrality of her body and its actions to her subject position in the Crimea. As with the incident with the diseased mare, it is Seacole’s body and its ridiculousness that serves as the source of comic relief while also threatening typically prescribed gender roles

(Steadman 127). Her body titillates the interest of the reader without pushing that same interest too far. She garners attention without trampling on the societal expectations of her readers.

Her encounters with one particular Frenchman, and his recollections thereof, demonstrate that this self-structuring of a source of comic relief was, at least to some degree, reflective of the reality of her situation. The nineteenth-century celebrity chef

Alexis Soyer found himself in the Crimea working with Florence Nightingale on the improvement of hospital kitchens. No stranger to the public eye, before his journey to the Crimea Soyer had produced several texts including The Gastronomic Regenerator

(1846) and A Shilling Cookery Book for the People (1855), and on his return from the

Crimea authored Soyer’s Culinary Campaign, being Historical Reminisces of the Late

War (1857). Both Seacole and Soyer cross reference mutual encounters they had throughout the war. Seacole recalls seeing Soyer often at Spring Hill and notes that he always appeared with the “most smiling of faces and in the most gorgeous of irregular uniforms” (130). This reference to his “irregular uniforms” is in keeping with contemporary depictions of Soyer’s elaborate and gregarious personal style often including elaborate clothing that stood in contrast to the traditional, plain kitchen garb of the chef (Garval 11). Seacole flattered herself that she was Soyer’s match in the kitchen and even claims to have challenged him to a cook off, which he refused citing the fact that it would cost him his “reputation for gallantry” to challenge a woman. Seacole saw this excuse as “nonsense” in light of the fact that she was “doing the work of half a dozen men” (Seacole 130).

Seacole groups all of her encounters with Soyer into one general notice while

Soyer spends considerably more time paying notice to “Mother Seacole.” Soyer first encounters Seacole at her British Hotel, describing her as an “old dame of a jovial appearance, but a few shades darker than the white lily” and claims Seacole knew of his famous “relished and sauces” (Soyer 231). During their conversation, Seacole calls

Soyer her “son” on several occasions. At his departure, Soyer expresses his gratitude his

Seacole’s hospitality by kissing her on her “deeply-shaded forehead,” a gesture at which

“everyone present laughed and joked” (Soyer 269). Seacole responds that it is “very natural” for a son to kiss his mother and he finishes his discussion of this encounter by saying that a “hearty laugh concluded this bit of fun” (Soyer 269). Seacole is a source of entertainment who, with a few words, makes those around her laugh. Soyer also had

nicknames for Seacole and Nightingale that reflect a link between Seacole and humor as well as the role both women played in the contemporary English psyche. Soyer identifies

Nightingale as the “Sister of the Brave” and Seacole as the “mere noire [italics in original]” (Soyer 434). Nightingale is associated with an abstract notion of bravery, a word central to the British conception of itself at this historical moment. She is also labeled a “sister,” which emphasizes her youth. Seacole becomes the “mere noire” or

Black Mother, a title that emphasize both Seacole’s age and race, while excluding recognition of her work (Fish 88). It is also significant to note that Soyer capitalizes

Nightingale’s nickname while writing Seacole’s in lower case and italics. With this,

Soyer implicitly pays Nightingale a greater degree of respect and recognition. Seacole is defined by both the color and age of her body, while Nightingale is defined by her bravery. Seacole’s service to the British cause is acknowledged and respected, but still tied to a certain degree of entertainment and spectacle, discursively linked to her status as an old “Creole” or black woman, surrounded by white European men. These nicknames reflect the place these women held in the contemporary English imagination. Nightingale struck a cold and serious figure while Seacole offered the public a comical and accessible hero defined largely in corporeal terms (Fish 86).

In the year 1857, having recently returned from her service in the Crimea, Seacole found herself placed alongside the legendary figure of Florence Nightingale. Nightingale stood as the most prominent example of the rise of saintly maternalism and a new heroic style of nursing characterized by strength of character, competence and dedication to her patients. This new nurse stood in contrast to the pre-existing negative image of a slovenly and negligent old woman. In both contemporary literature and images the

traditional Victorian nurse was pictured as “aged, corpulent, slovenly and unconscious due to drugs or alcohol” (Judd 6) and largely identified with character Sairy Gamp – a drunk, careless and disinterested nurse from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times.vii Seacole was charged with the task of separating her large, middle-aged body from this historically degraded position and finding her place within the new image of nursing embodied in

Nightingale’s pale and slender frame.

Seacole’s physical differences and her deviations from the Nightingale ‘norm’ make her a subject worthy of the attention of her public. There is evidence to suggest that

Seacole and her editor were acutely aware of the easy comparison to the famous

Nightingale. Upon her arrival in England and the rejection of her offer of aid to the War

Department, Seacole contemplates the role her “duskier skin” could have played in her dismissal. She asks herself if “American prejudices against colour had some root [in

England]” (Seacole 73). Seacole’s comments also signal her and/or her editor’s awareness of the delicate position of the black body in the English space and within the white world of Nightingale nurses. In Wonderful Adventures, Seacole makes several mentions of her introduction to Nightingale upon her arrival at Scutari Hospital. Alexis

Soyer also pokes fun at Seacole’s constant repetition of her pleasant introduction to

Nightingale stating that this was “about the twentieth time the old lady had told me the same tale” (435). Seacole pays due reverence to Nightingale in her narrative, but constructs herself as an alternate to Nightingale’s vision of a Crimean heroine (Judd 116).

Seacole’s repetition of her interaction with Nightingale “testifies to [Seacole’s] perception of Nightingale’s importance as a model with whom the public might compare her” (Flur 98).

In addition to her dark skin, Seacole’s large body clearly separated her from the rising phenomenon that was Florence Nightingale and her nurses. In keeping with her public image defined by eccentricity and difference, Seacole embraced this marker of difference and the role it played on others’ perceptions of her body while in the Crimea.

Perhaps in all respects the loud, colorful, fat, black Seacole was Nightingale’s physical and social opposite. As such, when faced with the pervasive image of Nightingale’s delicate physical frame, Seacole’s fatness had to become a desirable trait. Seacole addresses her fatness at several points within Wonderful Adventures. At the opening of

Chapter II she speculates on the pain of dealing with personal loss, suggesting that the world is not quite the bad place people make it out to be. At this point in the text she directly introduces her editor and she recalls how he identified her as a kind and gentle soul. Quoting Tennyson, her editor stated, “That gently comes to the world those / That are cast in gentle mould” (Seacole 15). Following this citation of her editor’s sentiments,

Seacole self-identifies as a fat woman writing, “And perhaps [my editor] is right, for although I was a hearty, strong woman – plain-spoken people might say stout – I think my heart is soft enough” (15). Seacole presents her fatness as a source of strength and a quality that bespeaks her independence, but that strength does not detract from her kind and motherly heart. As an unprotected female Seacole had to use her actions and her body to demonstrate that she could survive. On the other hand, Seacole and her editor remind the reader that her corporeal strength does not detract from her femininity. She may be “stout,” but she has a gentle, womanly heart. Through both her body and her actions, Seacole presents version of womanhood than can be both feminine and self- sufficient.

Seacole celebrates her fatness and the role it plays in her celebrity and the attention she receives in the Crimea. Upon her arrival in the Crimea Seacole comments,

“[t]ime and trouble combined have left me with a well-filled out, portly form – the envy of many an angular Yankee female” (Seacole 78). Her daily commute around the Turkish capitol in the “caicques” – the rowboats used by the Turkish army to travel around the capitol – was often hindered by her large size. Seacole suggests that the boats “might be made more safe and commodious for stout ladies, even if the process interfered a little with their ornament” (78). At this point in her narrative she also identifies herself as a

“stout female tourist” (79) who welcomed the increased attention her unlikely figure garnered. Seacole’s black skin, her “red or yellow” dresses with “bright red streamers,” and her large size all combined to make her the subject of a curious gaze, and Seacole welcomes this gaze as an excited and expected element of her adventure. Seacole lays direct claim to her “stout” body and discursively constructs fatness and its power to attract the gaze in the same space as her black skin and her Jamaican, Creole identity.

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As discussed in the previous chapter, while in New Granada Seacole confronts her own blackness as she asks herself and her readers to consider the implications of her

African heritage in certain geographic and social settings. In the Crimea, Seacole adopts a different approach to this same heritage. In New Granada, she was a “yellow” woman whose blackness linked her to African bodies she encountered. In the Crimea she continues to be “yellow” or “dusky” but this same skin color is structured as the result of

a very specific identity: a mixed-raced, Jamaican Creole. While her Creoleness is merely an after thought in Central America, it becomes a core element of her identity while she makes her home at Spring Hill. In Central America, a racial and cultural melting pot at mid-century, she was one among many; in the Crimea, far from any one who shared her racial or cultural heritage, she had the opportunity to fully embrace her Jamaican roots and was able to exploit the exceptionality of her body in a way that New Granada prevented.

Seacole’s Creoleness is represented in her clothing of choice. Helen Rappaport traces Seacole’s favoring of dresses in bold, primary colors back to both her childhood on the Black River in Jamaica and the blues of Scotland and the red of England. These colors would have signified a “fierce loyalty to Jamaica, Britain, Empire and Queen and would have signaled as much to her clientele” (Rappaport 190). These strong contemporary associations between Seacole and her West Indian identity extend beyond the words of Wonderful Adventures. A June 1856 letter written by Sir John Hall, the

Inspector General of Hospitals, offers praise of Seacole and the value of her work. Hall identifies her valuable skills, such as administering “appropriate remedies” and providing

“proper nourishment” as developing from the “knowledge she acquired in the West

Indies” (qtd in Seacole 114). Seacole grew up in a historical moment that saw the development and consolidation of a Creole identity with a sense of cultural confidence and a strong sense of both homeland and an imperial identity (Rupperecht 183). Seacole takes great pride in her complex heritage and uses the historical moment of the Crimean

War to write a new story about what it could mean to be of African descent.

Further removed from direct contact with black bodies, Seacole grants herself

greater leave to play with the meanings of her blackness, exploiting the element of wonder attached to her ethnicity but also leaving room to redefine blackness. Seacole placed a large emphasis on her “usefulness” and the degree to which the British soldiers needed her. In Chapter XVI of Wonderful Adventures Seacole proclaims, “I wish to be useful all my life” (138), and as explored in the Introduction, Seacole dedicated an entire chapter of Wonderful Adventures to the testimonials from largely white men she came in contact with at the warfront. Some of these men were well-known figures in the British military machine. Many of the men reference specific ailments or illnesses, from a jammed finger to diarrhea, which Seacole “cured.” A “Lt.-Gen. Comm. Of Sebastopal” certifies that Seacole is a “good and useful person” as well as “kind and charitable” (qtd in Seacole 116). By stressing the immensity of her usefulness Seacole can distance herself from the stereotypes of the “lazy Creole” she identifies in the opening pages of

Wonderful Adventures and the figure of the inactive black man as seen in her depiction of the alcaldes in New Granada.

The idea that the most valuable body was a useful or productive one was prevalent among Victorian intellectuals, reformers and public officials. In his essay “On

Labour,” Thomas Carlyle asserts, “In Idleness alone is there perpetual despair” (37).

Work and labor are constructed as a higher calling, and the man who has found his calling is “[b]lessed” and “let him ask no other blessedness” (Carlyle 38). The clear link between societal value and usefulness was in particular present in contemporary conversations concerning women’s expanding labor opportunities. Those who advocated the rights of women in the workforce during the Victorian era held sacred the women’s right to be of some use to her society. In her book A Woman’s Thoughts about Woman,

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Dinah Mulock Craik suggests that in setting aside their “pretty uselessness” and “petty idleness” women can become self-dependent creatures (641). In The Education and

Employment of Women, Josephine Butler speaks of the “dreariness” women experience because of their idleness. Contemporary women feel the “intense longing to be up and doing, helping in the world’s work which is God’s work, and know the depressing effect of that inaptitude, which is the want, not of capacity or faculty, but of training” (709). By placing a significant emphasis on the value and usefulness of her labor, Seacole writes herself into debates over not only race, but also prescribed gender roles. “Usefulness” was a word that her Victorian readership would have recognized, and she was able to use the associations the word brought with it to her advantage. Through her usefulness she was able to construct herself as a modern British citizen. Seacole reinforces this language of usefulness with assertions of nationalistic sentiment. When first speaking of her intentions to travel to the Crimea she writes, “if I could feel happy binding up the wounds of quarrelsome Americans or treacherous Spaniards, what delight should I not experience if I could be useful to my own ‘sons,’ suffering for a cause it was so glorious to fight and bleed for!” (71). By the time of Wonderful Adventures publication, the war in the Crimea was widely believed to be unsuccessful and full of military and governmental blunders, yet Seacole chooses to reconstruct the nationalistic sentiment that led to the glory of the British soldiers’ original departure for battle.

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Seacole’s use of a language of surrogacy or the maternal to describe her work in the Crimea has been the subject of much critical attention.viii To this conversation I

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would like to add an analysis that focuses on Seacole’s deployment of the maternal image to meet the needs of her audience. Seacole structures herself as a surrogate mother, stepping into the absent space in the life of English soldiers far from home. As she becomes a vehicle for domesticity, she redefines the middle-class white notion of home and neutralizes the potentially scandalous history of the mixing of white and black bodies. Although her role as “Mother Seacole” is not fully realized until her work in the

Crimea, this language of surrogacy is briefly introduced while she recounts her time in

Central America. She speaks of an English boy whom she had nursed on his sick bed.

She writes, “when he fell ill 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.” She goes on to refer to her “poor son” who “prepared himself to die” (98). She does not explicitly lay claim to the title of “Mother” but she does identify an English boy as her “son.” This language of standing in for an absentee white English mother soon becomes commonplace during her time in the Crimea. Within minutes of her arrival in the warzone she is greeted by two officers she recognized as frequent visitors at her house in

Kingston. They greet her as “Mother” and she responds in kind, calling them her “sons”

(Seacole 77). This brief encounter is only the first of many moments where the English men Seacole encounters address her as “Mother.”

In a fashion similar to the packaging of her mixed-raced identity both within and against common stereotypes, Seacole and her editor present a “Mother” her audience would recognize while also creating a new kind of motherhood around her specific set of talents and her Creole heritage. Steadman argues that Seacole joins a group of black women like Nancy Prince and the American abolitionist Mary Ann Shadd Caryix in

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contesting what she terms “exclusive domesticity.” These women demonstrate that their exclusion of a permanent and typically domesticated “home” is not a result of their deficient femininity, but rather the result of the rigid requirements of a middle class status that “virtually require white skin and a wealthy husband” (Steadman 14). While conforming to some of the standards set by this aforementioned “exclusive domesticity,”

Seacole also carves out a new version of the domestic founded on her unique mobility.

As a transatlantic “Mother” to the motherless, her home travels with her.

As previously discussed, Seacole and her editor demonstrate an awareness of an easy comparison of Seacole to Florence Nightingale. Seacole and her editor purposefully play off the existing popular image of Florence Nightingale as the maternal savior of the distressed British soldiers. Although Nightingale never fully embraced this ideology and was not an advocate of “domestic reformation” or the belief that “social reform should be based on the diffusion of maternal sympathy and that the model of middle-class domesticity should penetrate all realms of society” the image was widely associated with her work and ideology (Judd 135). Above all else, Nightingale was a social activist and her work as a nurse only comprised a small portion of her long career. This image of

Nightingale as a “housewifely woman” became a central component of the hagiography that surrounded her figure, a hagiography belittled in Lytton Strachey’s 1918 text

Eminent Victorian. In reality, throughout her writings Nightingale expressed disdain for domestic life and the limitations it put on women (136). Nightingale never married and bore no children. Although she infuses the maternal with elements of her Creole identity,

Seacole constructed her version of motherhood in the historical context of domestic reformation and the style of Nightingale’s growing maternal hagiography. Seacole’s

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domestic identity, although refigured and mobile, solidifies her “femininity” to some degree (Fish, Black Women’s Travel Narratives 8). Stressing that femininity and its links with the maternal makes her maternal presence in the Crimea recognizable and comforting for her English audience.

Seacole’s version of Motherhood also reflects her Creole heritage. The trope of the nurturing mother who gives her life for her white sons was a familiar one for women of color (Romero-Cesareo 137). Seacole’s selfless devotion to the white soldiers can be read as an assumption of the classic Mammy role that emerged out of American slavery and its surrounding narratives in the nineteenth century. Romero-Cesareo suggests that

Seacole’s assumption of the role of black mother to her white sons can be read two ways:

Seacole was readily assuming the gender roles put in place by slavery (137). First, in doing so, she was catering to her readers, giving them a version of “saintly maternalism” and black motherhood they could appreciate and understand. On the other hand,

Seacole’s adaptation of the traditional mammy role can be read as a deliberate act on

Seacole’s part to negotiate physical and social boundaries; motherhood became a strategy for mobility (137). In fact, her ability to “travel and recreate home, or the domestic in any location” is a mark of her Creole heritage (Gunning 962). With the frequent use of the language of “Mother” and “Son,” Seacole and her editor create a mobile domesticity with roots in her Jamaican identity and use the warzone and Seacole’s extraordinary life to redefine what it means to be an English Mother.

Seacole discursively structures herself as a replacement for missing wives and mothers. Arriving on the sick wharf in Balaklava she immediately saw injured men and leapt into action, writing that the “old impulse” in her was too “strong” to ignore (Seacole

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87). Identifying her need to help as an “impulse” that can’t be ignored transforms her work in the Crimea into a vocation or calling and links it to the idea of a maternal impulse. As she leans over an injured soldier, he states “this is surely a woman’s hand” and as he lays dying Seacole speculates that her feminine touch “brought to his poor mind memories of his home, and the loving ones there, who would ask no greater favor than the privilege of helping him thus” (Seacole 88). On the same wharf another man took her for his wife, curiously also named Mary, and called out “Mary, Mary” many times, asking Seacole “how it was that he got home so quickly, and why he did not see the children” (Seacole 89). Again, Seacole likes to think that the touch of a woman soothed his dying hour. These moments should not be read as Seacole seeing herself as an exact replacement for the white mothers, but rather that Seacole is “indifferent to the differences” between herself and the absentee mothers. Seacole lays claim to an English subjecthood that does not require the exact replication of an English identity (Flur 101).

Whiteness is not a requirement for surrogacy. All that is needed is that selfless “impulse” to aid her dying sons.

Seacole also rhetorically deployed the trope of motherhood in an attempt to neutralize the contentious sexuality implied by the comingling of black and white bodies.

As a part of her “West Indian luggage” Seacole carried the sexuality associated with the mixed-raced woman (Gunning 962). The body of the mulatto woman brought with it an inherent image of sexuality, as she was, more than likely, the product of an illicit sexual encounter between a white man and a black woman. Seacole was born of such a union and in the Crimea found herself as a mulatto woman in direct contact with white men who were living without their white wives and mothers. Evelyn Hawthorne suggests that

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Seacole sought to diminish the tradition of the sexual mulatto by stressing the dignity of her lineage (318). Her mother was an independent and successful businesswoman and her father was of “good Scotch” blood.

By stressing her status as a once married widow and referring to herself as “Mrs

Seacole,” Seacole could deflect attention away from her body and the negative implications of an “unprotected female” mingling so freely with men who were, most likely, far from their wives and mothers. Only once does she note even the opportunity to be anything more than a ‘Mother’ to the men she encounters in the Crimea, and this moment is presented in a characteristically humorous fashion. She writes of a “Turkish

Pacha” who came to Spring Hill frequently, for what some soldiers believed to be more than the entertainment. Seacole writes, “Indeed, the wits of Spring Hill used to laugh, and say that the crafty Pacha was throwing his pocket handkerchief at Madame Seacole, widow; but as the honest fellow candidly confessed he had three wives already at home,

I acquit him of any desire to add to their number” (98). This moment reflects Seacole’s commitment to being a source of amusement amidst the serious business of war and allows her to subtly assert her sexuality purity.

However, there is one curious and serious omission from Wonderful Adventures that calls into question the complete veracity of Seacole’s account of the life at Spring

Hill and sheds significant light on my interrogation of how Wonderful Adventures reflects both Seacole’s amazing life and the needs of her audience. As previously discussed,

Seacole had several encounters with the celebrity chef Alexis Soyer and Soyer makes significant note of Seacole in his narrative of the Crimean War. Soyer’s account of the first encounter between the two celebrities is largely innocuous. Soyer confirms

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Seacole’s reputation as a loud and commanding figure and also contemporary depictions of her as a not black, yet not white middle-aged woman who self-identifies as a surrogate mother to the British troops. Soyer, of course, also uses the occasion to plug his own celebrity and success in the culinary world, noting that Seacole uses his sauces in her own cooking. In his remaining notices of Seacole Soyer cites a potential point of contention or controversy.

Some time after his first encounter with Seacole, Soyer notes that he has received word that his stolen horse has evidently been found by Mrs. Seacole’s aide. He writes:

“Upon making inquiries, we heard the animal had been sent directly to head-quarters.

Thus terminated the adventures connected with my first interview with the good and benevolent Mrs Seacole, whom I have ever since Christened La Mere Noire, although she has a fair daughter” (252). Playing on Seacole’s self-labeling as a mother and her status as a non-white body among her white soldiers, Soyer gives Seacole the nickname, the

Black Mother. What makes these lines significant, however, is Soyer’s note of Seacole’s supposed “fair” skinned daughter. Although Seacole was briefly married, at no point in

Wonderful Adventures does she make note of an offspring of that marriage, let alone a daughter that traveled across the world with her.

Soyer makes note of this daughter, called Sally or Sarah several times throughout

Culinary Campaign. Upon visiting the British Hotel to thank Seacole for her assistance he writes of seeing “Miss Sally Seacole (her daughter, whose name I have not yet introduced)” who then cries out for her mother yelling “Mother, mother, here is Monsieur

Soyer!” (qtd in Soyer 269). About 200 pages later Soyer recounts another visit with

Seacole during which her alleged daughter makes an appearance. Soyer identifies her as

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both “Sarah” and “Sally” and calls her an “Egyptian beauty” with “blue eyes and black hair” (435). The relatively non-dramatic ease with which Soyer introduces and discusses

Seacole’s daughter does not suggest an attempt on Soyer’s part to court controversy or start wild rumors about the purity of this Crimean heroine. After all, Seacole was once a married woman and could very well have brought a child into this world under standards which would meet the scrutiny of her morally upright reading public. Why then does

Seacole remain silent about her daughter?

Critics such as Sandra Gunning and Nicole Flur have also noted Soyer’s discussion of Sally Seacole and Seacole’s curious omission. Flur draws attention to

Seacole’s investment in enacting a middle class notion of motherhood; she gives selflessly to her “sons” and they receive. Her relationship with her alleged daughter would have bucked this image of the selfless middle-class mother her audience was familiar with. As seen in Soyer’s descriptions of Sally Seacole, Mary Seacole and her daughter’s relationship would have reflected her working-class status – her daughter worked with and for her mother, much like Seacole did for her own mother in Jamaica

(Flur 103). Perhaps if Seacole was a real mother to a mixed-raced daughter, who ostensibly worked as her servant, her ability to market herself as a selfless surrogate to white men in the Crimea would be less effective. Seacole may have felt as if she had to choose one version of motherhood in order to successfully market her life story and the version that included a biological child that became apprenticed to her mother – much in the West Indian tradition that Seacole first learned her trade – was the less lucrative of the two.

The aforementioned Susie King Taylor, also a wife and mother, similarly

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overlooks these two roles in her biography and narrative of the American Civil War. In fact, like Seacole, Taylor avoids the subject of her own sexuality entirely, avoiding any topics that might lend themselves to reading her body in terms of prescribed gender roles.

As Jennifer James observes, “Not only does it appear that Taylor is unwilling to position herself as a de facto sexualized subject with the hypermasculine space of an army camp, she is equally unwilling to position herself as a wife, mother or homemaker” (111).

James suggests that by avoiding these specifically gendered subjects Taylor is fashioning her body as one that will perform the public work of serving the troops, not the private work of wife, mother and homemaker (112). As we have seen, Seacole was highly dedicated to proving the value of her public use and deploys the metaphor of the maternal exactly to those ends. Unlike Taylor, Seacole attaches herself to certain elements of prescribed nineteenth-century gender roles. But like Taylor, Seacole packages her own feminine identity with an implicit goal: the demonstration of her public use and value to her reading public.

While moving through historically masculine spaces – such as the Central

American pioneer zone and the Crimean warfront – Seacole had to use her strong body and her capable mind to support herself without the protection of a man. In fact, it was

Seacole’s status as a black, Jamaican woman that encouraged this independent spirit and rejection of available roles. The oppressive forces of colonialism and slavery encouraged an active woman, and free ‘colored’ women in the colonial space were often entrepreneurs that were forced to support themselves (Hawthorne 322). While Seacole's career as a transatlantic doctress and proprietor was unique, this work grew out of a tradition of independent, entrepreneurial, free-colored women in Jamaica (Brereton 83).

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Because of this history, the Caribbean market woman carried with it certain cultural associations, both positive and negative: an innkeeper was a woman; she was more than likely of mixed racial origin; she was probably a prostitute (or at least kept a brothel) and she was fat. Although there is little concrete evidence to suggest that the wider Caribbean link between prostitution and inn-keeping was a historical fact in Jamaica, it is most certain that lodging houses were established by white men who maintained them, and that the black or mixed raced women who ran them were most likely involved in informal sexual liaisons or concubinage with these men (Kerr 199). White colonizers’ relationships with black women offered the possibility of financial power and the creation of a certain class of free, independent, colored women, but this possibility was inextricably linked to a history of exploitation (Gunning 957). The physical contact of the white man and the black woman was a reminder of the sexual exploitation of the black body during slavery. As Robert J.C. Young suggests, “sexuality was the spearhead of racial contact” and scholars must, therefore, consider the importance of sex when discussing colonialism and the body of the colonized subject (5). As a product of this contact, Seacole’s mulatto body brought with it an image of intrinsic sexuality.

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Russell’s dispatches from the Crimea made the horrors of war and the blunders of the British military machine public knowledge, but there were many stories from the

Crimea that went untold. It is unknown exactly how many women traveled to the Crimea but the number is estimated at upwards of 1500. Six per every hundred soldier’s wives,

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estimated anywhere from 750 to 1200 in total, were permitted to accompany their husbands on the campaign. These supposedly lucky women had won the ballot and were spared the fate of being left behind, penniless and often charged with the lives of small children. Another 250 women traveled on as nurses or other military aids (Rappaport 9,

30). Once they arrived in the Crimea these women were largely abandoned by their husbands and became the same women, destitute and diseased, that Lady Alicia

Blackwood committed herself to caring for. Blackwood, who waited until 1881 to compose her Crimean narrative, offered her services to Nightingale who placed her in charge of the wives living the basement of the barracks. Blackwood describes the “dens” or “large cellars” with only one small window for ventilation where she finds “260 or so poor women and babies” (Blackwood 50). A large part of Blackwood’s narrative is dedicated to recalling the horrors of living conditions for women, as well as their husbands and children, in the Crimea. She writes that it is “difficult or impossible for an

English imagination to realize the terrible demoralization” of seeing married couples sleep next to each other with no divisions” and that some women went so far as to hang rags on cords (Blackwood 52). Nightingale brought with her 46 nurses and Mary Stanley, with whom Nightingale often butted heads, also traveled to the Crimea with a small team of nurses. In addition to these soldier’s wives and the official nurses, several officer’s wives – ladies of a much higher social status – made an appearance in the Crimea, often sleeping in tents with their high ranking husbands.

In spite of the presence of these wives and the nurses traveling with official parties, women like Mary Seacole and Frances Duberly often went out of their way to construct themselves as sole female bodies in a sea of masculinity. Duberly, who makes

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no mention of Seacole in her memoir, fashioned herself, for her readers, as a lone woman in a dangerous land surrounded by a bevy of admirers (Rappaport 33). After making camp with her husband’s regiment outside of Varna, Duberly notes the presence of only one other woman in the camp, Lady Errol, the wife of Lord Errol. Duberly writes, “Lady

Errol is here with the Rifles. She and I the only ladies. She always goes about with some brace of loaded revolvers in her belt! Very cocktail and no occasion for it…” (22). Here

Duberly presents herself as not only a female anomaly but also brave and not as affected by the dangers of war as her counterpart Lady Errol. Seacole made use of a similar language of singularity and bravery. As touched on in my discussion of her deployment of the maternal image, Seacole placed great stock in being able to offer the “woman’s touch” that was so hard to come by at the warfront. The only women noted in Wonderful

Adventures are Florence Nightingale and those she encountered at Scutari Hospital as she, too, constructs herself as a solitary woman in the masculine space of the warfront.

The narratives of both of these women also display a deep investment in the idea of spectacle, of the ability to capture the attention of those they encounter. As the ‘only’ women in the masculine space of War, the stories of Duberly and Seacole immediately became more interesting.

Neither Duberly nor Seacole ever acknowledge the presence of the other within their narratives. Helen Rappaport suggests that this fact “not only confirms the social and racial barriers that prevented fraternization, but also reinforces the determined objective both women had in their post-war memoirs of creating mythology about themselves as a gutsy lone woman in a violent man’s world” (Rappaport 200). Women in nineteenth century military situations came to see themselves as rivals on all levels (Fish, Black and

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White Women’s Travel Narratives 84). As the conflict between Nightingale and the

Anglican Sisterhood of Mary Stanley reflects, there was often only room for one daring female savior. Duberly and Seacole’s decisions to fashion themselves as exceptional cases can also be seen as a move to make their stories stand out against the stream of memoirs produced after the close of the war. The fearlessness and bravery that this status as a lone female hero implies were certainly central to both women’s public images.

Like Seacole, Duberly’s investment in presenting herself as spectacle may not have been that far from the reality of her situation. Frances “Fanny” Duberly, nicknamed

“Mrs Jubilee” outgrew her own reality and became a myth that emerged from the war.

Duberly was widely believed to have flirted her way through the army, shocking people with her outspoken behavior. She was even parodied in the 1968 film The Charge of the

Light Brigade where she is portrayed as the “raucous, randy mistress of Lord Cardigan, cavorting aboard his yacht while her compliant husband slinks away” (Kelly qtd in

Duberly xi). Duberly was widely criticized for her unwomanly behavior. She was a married woman who was openly flirtatious with the men she encountered and was rumored to have carried on an affair with Lord Cardigan. Deeply devoted to her horses,

Duberly rode straight saddle and openly spurred those who mocked her unconventional ways.

Seacole chose to present herself as a different type of womanly spectacle and continually stressed the maintenance of her femininity while at the warfront. Seacole maintains this dedication to proper womanly behavior throughout Wonderful Adventures.

While in New Granada she writes that her “present life was not agreeable for a woman with the least delicacy or refinement” (51) and she openly criticized the dress and

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manners of the American women, influenced by the “French lady writers” who dressed like men and, like Duberly, rode straight saddle. While in the Crimea, Seacole works hard to maintain her ladylike appearance amid all the forces of dirt and contamination working against her. Seacole claims that she had “not neglected [her] personal appearance” (88), spurning the more practical trousers in favor of brightly colored dresses, even when visiting the battlefields to nurse the wounded soldiers. She recalls having to “embrace the earth” with an “undignified and ladylike haste” when she came “under fire” of the enemy (Seacole 136).

Seacole was vocal about her belief that women should maintain traditionally female dress regardless of their present situation. In Culinary Campaign, Alexis Soyer recounts an instance during which Seacole derides Soyer for mistakenly telling others that she was dressed as a Scotchman at a French ball. Seacole proclaims, “Indeed, do you think your mother or myself would go to such a place, where the women wear soldier’s clothes? Not likely” (qtd in Soyer 435). Seacole finds the very idea that she would dress as a man laughable and insulting. In an interesting twist, Seacole sees no potential scandal in aiding men in the assumption of women’s attire. Although she had no immediate role in the amateur theatrical productions staged in the Crimea she claims to have “lent [the men] plenty of dresses” (Seacole 155). She even opened her kitchen up as a rehearsal space for the “ladies of the company of the 1st Royals” (155). Although these men are stepping outside of their prescribed gender roles, they are doing so merely for entertainment, and all order will be restored once the show comes to an end.

In spite of this clear denunciation, many women in the nineteenth century, like the

American women Seacole encountered in New Granada, were known to assume male

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attire in situations where it was deemed physically necessary. One such group of women were the French vivandieres that joined Seacole on the front lines of Crimea. The word vivandiere plays on the French term vivandier meaning a male subtler or someone who supplies victuals to troops in the field (“Vivandiere”). By definition a vivandiere was a female subtler who sold needed items to troops at the battlefront. Roger Fenton, a photographer who documented the Crimean War took an 1855 photograph titled

“Vivandiere” or “French cantinière.” The black and white photograph features a sharply dressed woman in a fitted military style jacket that flattered her figure. She wears a full shirt with a white apron over a plain pair of trousers. The woman’s hair is fitted neatly into a bonnet (Fenton). The physical appearance of these vivandieres – also called cantinieres – provided a stark contrast to the skinny and physically diminished British women who had managed to make their way to the Crimea. Despite this clear disparity between the health and utility of these French women and the wives of the British soldiers, the sight of these women in trousers outraged the latter and polite English ladies were said to turn their heads in horror if they encountered them. However, while the

British wives were often looked down upon as an unnecessary burden, the French vivandieres, like Seacole, were respected by the men they served and seen as both useful and a welcome distraction from the dirty business of war (Rappaport 56, 58). The aforementioned Susie King Taylor was known, by her own admission, to sacrifice feminine propriety for utilitarian measures. During the Civil War many women chose to assume male attire in order to serve in the military capacities not open to their gender

(James 107). Although her work required a great deal of manual labor and, like the vivandieres, trousers may have been better suited to this labor, Seacole maintained the

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feminine dress of her English female counterparts in the war zone.

In spite of the clear opportunities war offered the nineteenth century woman to leave behind the bodily restrictions of a dress, Seacole chose not only to continue to wear a dress but also to wear the brightly colored fabrics of her native Jamaica and to publically deride those women who saw fit to leave behind the traditions of their gender and, in her unique case, their ethnic heritage. She was a Jamaica Creole woman and she would dress and act the part. Stressing the primacy of her continued femininity against all odds aligns her with contemporary expectations for proper feminine behavior and, like her self-fashioning as a mother, pulls some of the attention away from the negative implications of her blackness. Whiteness could bring with it certain restrictions in the form of heightened expectations of feminine behavior. Black women could use these expectations to their advantage, deflecting attention away from their own blackness by focusing on their feminine attire (Steadman 10).

Victorian women at mid-century were expected to dress and act the part and contemporary conventions held that women should wear dresses in public and ride with both legs on the same side of her saddle. By stressing her commitment to these feminine ideals, Seacole constructed herself as a supporter of these basic tenets of feminine behavior. As a woman working in a masculine geographic space these short expressions of femininity became invaluable in maintaining a unique yet approachable brand of womanhood. She couldn’t escape her mixed-raced, female and colonized identities, but she could work to rewrite the meanings attached to her multiple, marginalized identities.

As Evelyn Hawthorne suggests, her textual and rhetorical strategies enabled her to authorize herself and to critique and unsettle Victorian ideology (310). Seacole and her

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editor do not attempt to hide her identity as a Jamaican woman of African descent and often, whether purposefully or unknowingly, feed the stereotypes the English pubic at midcentury attached to these marginalized identities. But Seacole and her editor also ask the public to reconsider the value of such a body and the place it could rightfully take in

English society.

Emerging from a history of slavery, segregation and persistent racism, the strong black woman becomes an almost superhuman character recognized primarily for her relation to others rather than her relationship to herself (Beauboeuf-Lafontant 106).

Seacole rejects this role. Although she ultimately gains fame for her service to the British

Empire, she claims ownership over her own life and story writing “unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life my own way, I cannot tell it at all” (Seacole 128). By claiming rights to her story she is insisting upon control and power (Mercer 4), she longs for the fame and attention she believes she has earned; and once that attention is received, she appears to delight in it. Although Seacole spends her life largely in service of the white man and his cause, she does not want to live a life of self-sacrifice.

In a series of lectures given in 1840, Thomas Carlyle explores the role of the hero in nineteenth century society. Discussing what he labels “Hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs,” Carlyle explores the role the Great man played in society and states that the “soul of the world’s history” can be seen in the action of a Great man (Carlyle).

This sentiment reflects the Victorian fascination with the individual man’s greatness and the place of the National hero. The contemporary fascination with Crimean war heroes such as Nightingale, Russell, Lord Rokeby and Seacole reflects this tendency toward hero worship. However, Seacole was not a Great Man; she was a Great Mixed-Raced

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Woman, an image that had certain cultural associations, both positive and negative, that had to be negotiated and handled.

I contend that the force standing between Seacole and the stoic and reverential treatment reserved for fellow Crimea war heroes such as Florence Nightingale and

William H. Russell is her African heritage. Seacole is a heroine and she is a treasured

British symbol, but, as will be explored in the remaining chapters, the African body on public display was inherently tied to the idea of amusement. Within the public space, the black body was represented as savage, grotesque, freakish, comical, exotic and uncivilized, while alternately the “implication was that to be white was to be clean about the body, physically and mentally able, polite, and otherwise ‘normal’” (Reiss 9).

Despite her heroics, Mary Seacole simply could not escape her own body. As Amy

Robinson suggests, Seacole had to “perform the conditions which would authorize her voice” (542). She had to place herself, complete with her race, her gender and her national identity, in the center of English public opinion in order to save herself from bankruptcy. Mary Seacole used the English public to gain economic independence. In turn, the English public used Mary Seacole’s exceptional story and memoir as a way to reconstruct and live an experience they were excluded from. The writings of women like

Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole and Frances Duberly allowed the English public to create a distinct memory of the Crimean War. Wonderful Adventures allows a story of failure and death to be rewritten as one of bravery and thriving against all odds.

i During a June 2008 visit to the British Library I discovered a large number of Crimean War memoirs either published or reviewed in contemporary periodicals dating from around 1853 to 1860. Among these were the works of Seacole, Frances Duberly, Frances Magdelan Taylor’s Eastern hospitals and English nurses the narrative of twelve months' experience in the hospitals of Koulali and Scutari, by a lady volunteer (1857) published independently, T. Hodgson’s The Camp and the Cutter (1856) published in

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the Literary Gazette, Captain R. Hodasevich’s A Voice from within the Walls of Sebastopal: a Narrative of Campaigns in the Crimea, and of the Events of the Siege (1857) reviewed in the London Quarterly Review and George William Swanton’s The Cottage Hero: a Tale of the Crimean War (1856) reviewed in the Critic. ii Mary Stanley and her team of 46 nurse were sent to the Crimea to supplement Nightingale’s work. Nightingale and Stanley continually butted heads as Stanley refused to accept Nightingale authority and shunned the thought of nurses performing the unpleasant labor that nursing wounded soldiers required. For more information see Anne Summers, “Pride and Prejudice: Ladies and Nurses in the Crimean War.” History Workshop. 16 (Autumn 1983): 32-56. iii Disguised as a man with the name of Henry T. Buford, Velazquez fought with the Confederate Army in several historic battles, including the Battle of Bull Run. In 1876, Velazquez published her memoir The Woman in Battle, recounting these seemingly impossible feats. (See Loreta Janeta Velazquez. The Woman in Battle: The Civil War Narrative of Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Cuban Woman and Confederate Soldier. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). iv Taylor, born Susie Bakers, served with the 33rd Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops in South Carolina. Originally assigned to the role of laundress, Taylor’s teaching and nurses skills soon earned her more duties. Like Lady Alicia Blackwood, Taylor waited almost half a decade to outline her experiences in her text Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers, becoming the only African-American woman to publish her experiences of the Civil War. v For further information on the notions of scientific racism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries see texts such as Alan Rice Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (2003) and Douglas A. Lorimer’s Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1978). vi The tale of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” from the text One Thousand and One Nights, also known as Arabian Nights was translated into English several times during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The English Orientalist Edward William Lane published his translation of the text over the years 1838-40, excluding pieces from the original that he found immoral. With this reference to “Captain Ali Baba” Seacole aligns herself with the English cultural consumption of the East. vii For more information about the stereotype of the “Sairey Gamp” nurse see Arlene Young’s “ ‘Entirely a Woman Question’: Class, Gender and the Victorian Nurse.” Journal of Victorian Culture. 13.1 (Spring 2008): 18-41 and Catherine Judd’s _Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830- 1880. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998.

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Chapter 3: Transatlantic Mobility and the Wondrous Body of the Free Black Woman in the Nineteenth Century Press

“When the press gets hold of a child or man, quietness for the child or man is imperiled forever. Who then can say whether that child or man shall ever repose again in the bosom of the unforgotten and unknown?” ~ Edward Jenkins, Little Hodge

The chapter interrogates the role the periodical press in both the British mainland and the Jamaican colony played in the production and dissemination of Mary Seacole’s public image. Although Mary Seacole first came to the attention of the British public through William H. Russell’s wartime dispatches, she did not reach the height of her celebrity until 1856, when her bankruptcy – the filing of which was announced in

London papers on 29 October 1856 – brought well-known figures from the military, the press and public office to her aid. Her financial troubles were a popular topic in the gossip columns of English periodicals throughout 1856-57 and contributed to the success of the initial publication of Wonderful Adventures in the summer of 1857. The language of the periodical press aligns with that found in Wonderful Adventures in its characterization of both Seacole’s potential subversion of gender roles and her African heritage, including the stress placed on Seacole’s black body as being both “useful” yet a source of entertainment. One could conclude that Seacole and her editor fashioned

Seacole’s public image so as to align with that seen in these periodicals. However, one could counter that these periodicals merely reflected the public image Seacole had cultivated at the Crimean warfront and then displayed to the readers of popular English

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periodicals that traced her movement.i With this chapter I suggest that Seacole and the contemporary press in England – and after her death the press in the Jamaican colony – established a symbiotic relationship in which both parties developed and then reinforced the famous image of “Mother Seacole” in the reflection of circulating images of the mixed-raced woman, the colonial subject and the value of the black body in the public space.

By placing Seacole alongside Ellen Craft and Sojourner Truth, fellow women of

African descent who enjoyed some level of celebrity and the attendant attention of the periodical press, I interrogate how the woman of color in the public eye at midcentury was intimately linked with her body. Into this conversation I introduce the popular

American figure of the mammy, presented to the English public through the London publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in May of 1852. The self, editorial and periodical fashioning of Seacole overlaps with the well-known image of the fat, grinning, matriarch birthed from American slavery’s imagination suggesting that

Seacole’s public image as the maternal caretaker of white men grew out of an existing dialogue of the roles available to the black woman at this time. As explored in the previous chapter, Seacole and her editor are charged with finding the value or the use of the extraordinary black body in the public space. The periodical press also takes on this challenge and all three forces converge to produce the image of Mother Seacole.

To cultivate and maintain her fame Seacole highlights and minimizes certain aspects of her ethnic, racial, cultural and gender identity as the situation requires.

Seacole sacrifices part of her agency in order access to her extraordinary geographic and social mobility and gain her celebrity. In this chapter’s epigraph, Edward Jenkins,

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a late-Victorian writer originally born in India, comments on strength of the contemporary press and the large role it played lives of public figures. In his novel

Little Hodge, Jenkins suggests that when the press “gets a hold” of a figure, “quietness” for that figure is “imperiled forever” while “repose” in the “bosom of the unforgotten and unknown” may be lost (7). Seacole offers modern readers an example of just such a figure in the “hold” of the Victorian press: “quietness” for her is lost, but she gains fame, fame allowed, in part, by contemporary conceptions of the black, female body in the public eye.

In her discussion of the consumption of Caribbean culture, geography and voices throughout history, Curdella Forbes uses the metaphor of New World slavery’s trading post as a way to interrogate the transformative power of the eye of the consumer public. Forbes reading of the significance of the trading post is a useful tool for imaging the loss of agency and subsequent attainment of mobility Seacole experienced when she found herself cast out from the “bosom of the unforgotten and unknown.”

Forbes defines the trading post first as the “contacts points where African voices were bought and sold, and the commodities that sustained slave trade and trader alike, bought, sold and exchanged” (3). However, she also notes that the trading post

“transcended its physical location to shape economic networks and confluences that were concrete yet metaphysical in their reach and implications” (2). Read in a contemporary context, Forbes suggests that the “trading post” continues to transcend its function as a place of “domination and subjection” to become one of “negotiation,” and a site for “mutual if unequal trade off.” The “trading post” moves beyond, a simple, historically locked, geographic location created for the buying and selling of African

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bodies: it transform to represent mobility and portability among the African Diaspora as well as a “site of border crossings, enculturation, cultural penetration and exchange, and ultimately the mutation of identities” (Forbes 3).

Oluadah Equiano offers modern readers a vivid picture of this slave market in his narrative The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, of Gustavas Vassa, the African (1789). Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa, became, through his lectures and narrative one of the most popular figures of the abolitionist movement in eighteenth-century England. Like Seacole, Equiano was a highly public figure that enjoyed the spotlight. A “master of the commercial book market,” Equiano promoted not only the abolitionist cause, but also himself and his public image in letters and book reviews published in London newspapers (Carretta qtd in Equiano xiii). Claiming to be born in what is now Nigeria, Equiano recounts his experiences of New World slavery after, as a young boy, he is kidnapped by local slave traders. He describes the slave market picture he encounters after arriving in the Caribbean Island of Barbados:

On a signal given, (as the beat of a drum), the buyers rush at once into the yard

where the slaves are confined, and make choice of that parcel they like best. The

noise and the clamour with which this is attended, and the eagerness visible on

the countenances of the buyers, serve not a little to increase the apprehensions of

the terrified Africans. In this manner, without scruple, are relations and friends

separated, most of them never to see each other again. (60-61)

With this short description, Equiano paints an image of the horrors of New World slavery’s trading post. An assault on the senses and emotions, the slave trading post and, on a smaller scale, the slave market, was a site of cultural and physical ruptures.

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Africans were separated from their families and their homes and forced into a position of servitude. Images of trading post and the slave markets pervade the literature of the abolitionist movement. The continuing cultural currency of the trading post is seen in movements to establish memorials on the sites of New World Slavery trading posts from the west coast of Africa to the United States.ii As Equiano’s description suggests, the trading post and the slave market were more than simply sites of the sale of human bodies. Cultures, races and families were made and remade as the bodies of Africans and their descendents moved through these locations.

Through the contemporary fascination with the wondrous and the foreign or ethnically Othered figure, Mary Seacole and other free black women in the nineteenth century are offered an opportunity to turn the metaphorical and literal trading post that enslaved their ancestors’ bodies into what Forbes identifies as a site of “negotiation” and a “mutual if unequal trade off:” a willingness to display their bodies and to sell their stories to a largely white Western audience gains the black woman the right to move and experience a world for which society deems her unfit; however, this movement also requires a mutation of their identities and cultures. This chapter places Seacole alongside women of color that enact this metaphorical trading post by becoming participants in what Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman labels “ragged-edge travel,” which she defines as that undertaken by women for work purposes – whether it be in support of themselves or their community or to critique political and social institutions (5). These women are able to capitalize on the social and political atmosphere of the mid-nineteenth century to turn their unique lives or personal stories into a ticket for potential fame and adventure, all the while having a profound impact on the geographies and cultures through which they

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moved.

Women of color like Mary Seacole, Ellen Craft and Sojourner Truth are writing to a white public that had highly different expectations for the public behavior of white and black bodies. Behavior deemed unseemly by her society could cost a white, female traveler the benefits of a white, middle-class femininity. Black women, on the other hand, could be granted a partial exemption from this loss of status. Steadman cautions us that constructions of gender in the nineteenth century, or even today, cannot be “neatly separated from constructions of race, class and sexuality” and explains the differing expectations for black and white women in the following manner:

While white women could lose status because they traveled and wrote, some

black women travelers experienced greater freedom and mobility because their

skin color automatically excluded them from the rigid expectations of feminine

behavior and limitations to solely domestic space that often afflicted white

women. (7)iii

White female travel writers such as Isabella Bird and Mary Kingsleyiv produced written works or embarked on public adventures that brought their lives and bodies under the scrutiny of the public eye, but unlike the woman of color, the white European traveler is depicted as a “seeing gaze that does not register its being seen” (Ceasareo 108). The white traveling, female subject could assert dominance over the Othered object and discursively construct herself as an invisible observer of her surroundings. The public black, female body is not granted this luxury.

Mobility and the recounting of the story of that mobility for the nineteenth century woman of color like Seacole is intrinsically wrapped up in the idea of exposure

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and consumption in a way that the white woman could potentially avoid. The speech act of the subaltern woman is “not a conversation… but a confession, a deposition, an unveiling to be paraded in front of the Same’s clinical gaze" (Cesareo 115). As Mario

Cesareo suggests, “The Other’s traveling does not textually register the space she travels as an other space, as a space in itself, but as an inscription into her body – which becomes, in the process, the true site of the reader’s traveling gaze… from the point of view of the Same, the Other’s experience is always already embodied” (115). The mobile, Othered woman’s experiences are tied to her body. Contemporary middle-class white women’s femininity in the Victorian era is defined by the cult of true womanhood, which held a self-effacing view of the body. The white woman’s body is private and should, therefore, be concealed. In contrast, the black woman’s body is conceptualized by the dominant culture in chiefly bodily terms; it is envisioned as public and exposed

(Peterson 20). With Seacole’s visible ties to blackness, her public image, as exemplified by the language of the contemporary press, coalesces around her body. In Wonderful

Adventures Seacole presents an image of self defined by her body’s physical appearance

– her brown skin, her bright and feminine clothing – and her body’s use – her doctress skills and her entertainment value. A reading of Seacole’s fashioning in the periodical press reveals the same stress on her body and reflects contemporary conceptions of the black body on public display.

*****

Soon after her bankruptcy is announced the public came to Seacole’s aid.

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Letters are written to the London Times calling for the public to offer their support and

Major-General Lord Rokeby began spearheading the campaign in November of 1856, calling for a company by the name of Mears Cox and Co. to receive the subscriptions.

A writer identified only as a “Friend to Merit” proposes that the “friends of this good old lady… raise subscriptions for the purpose of establishing her in business as soon as her certificate from the Court of Bankruptcy is granted.” It continues “[s]urely, all those who have heard of Mrs Seacole’s good deeds will now come forward and liberally contribute towards this laudable process” (Friend to Merit). Wherever Seacole is mentioned her bravery is lauded and the public’s need to support the failing British heroine is emphasized. A May 1856 article in the English periodical London Journal notes the performance of the opera “La Madre del Regimento,” which recounts

Seacole’s heroic deeds in the Crimea. The article states, “Poor old Mrs. Seacole is hard up” and notes the recent establishment of a fund “yet in its infancy” that has been taken up for her benefit (“The Mother of the Regiment”). An August 1857 article in the

London publication New Sporting Magazine refers to a recent festival for the “especial benefit” of Mrs Seacole held at the Surrey Gardens, citing that “it would be difficult to name a more worthy or deserving character” (“Public Amusements of the Metropolis”).

Punch magazine with the assistance of Lord Rokeby and George Paget – an English

General during the Crimean conflict – launched a four-day benefit concert at the Royal

Surrey Gardens that included 1000 performers, nine military bands and an orchestra

(Paravisini-Gebert 82). In a hard-luck fashion that seemed to suit Seacole, a 29 August

1857 gossip column in the London periodical the Literary Gazette carries news that the money raised for Seacole through this elaborate Surrey Gardens performance was lost

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at the hands of the Gardens’ own declaration of bankruptcy. After some “scheming and dishonest speculators” deceived the shareholders it is affirmed that “Mrs Seacole [has] been deprived of the money generously contributed by the public for her benefit”

(“Gossip of the Week”).

Seacole and her editor offer an image of a woman who would have taken great delight in being the object of this attention and the site of others’ amusement. Catherine

Judd counters this reading, asserting that Seacole’s production of only one piece of writing during a moment of financial trouble signals a conscious effort not to court fame, suggesting that Seacole appears to be a “seeker of fortune, but not necessarily fame”

(106). However, once she is propelled into the public eye, she demands some agency in the production of that image. She is “not content to let others speak of her and for her without having her own say in the creation of her public persona” (Judd 106). I believe that this is a simplified reading of both Seacole’s desire for press and her agency in the production of her public persona. As Steadman states, scholars should not

“simplistically equate” travel with “agency” (5). It is unknown how much control she has over the dissemination of her image and if her behavior following her return from the Crimean War is accurately chronicled in the press or subsequently if the attention she received is unwelcomed. What can be discerned is the appearance of delight in this attention and the manner in which her pubic image is constructed and maintained.

The press latches on to certain elements of Seacole identity and returns to them continually. Seacole is an English heroine; she is “brown;” she is funny and she is different. As seen throughout Wonderful Adventures a main component of Seacole’s public identity is her “dusky, ” “yellow” or “brown” skin. As is so often asked of the

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reader of Wonderful Adventures, scholars need to remember that Seacole is of mixed parental heritage. She lays proud claim to her Scottish and her African heritage and asks her public to remember that there is both African and “good Scotch blood running through her veins” (Seacole 11). Her fashioning in the public eye is impacted by the contemporary receptions of the public black body, but that same black body is also white and this complicates a simple reading of Seacole’s life as strictly that of a public black woman.

Following Seacole’s 1856 bankruptcy proceedings Punch magazine published a song in its 6 December 1856 edition titled “A Stir for Seacole” sung to the tune of “Old

King Cole.” Seacole is described as having a “Berry-brown face / with a kind heart’s trace” and “jolly” or “kindly old soul” (“Stir for Seacole” 221). In a playful ABCB ballad rhyme scheme, Punch outlines Seacole’s kindness and heroics at the Crimean warfront and ends the song with a plea to come to Seacole’s aid in her time of need:

“And now the good soul is 'in the hole,' / What red-coat in all the land, / But to set her upon her legs again / Will not lend a willing hand?” (221). Seacole’s contributions to the war effort are recognized, but so is her “berry-brown face.” Seacole contemporaries at the Crimean warfront also latched onto her “brown” skin as a physical marker. She is continually linked directly to her African heritage but it is also readily acknowledged that she is not completely black. Like the language of Wonderful Adventures the contemporary press marks Seacole with an accessible, unthreatening “berry-brown” blackness.

Seacole’s audience is given visual evidence of the color of her skin. There are three known photographs of Seacole that feature a woman of African descent with

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warm, brown skin; however, it is unknown if these photographs are ever made public or seen by large audience. There are, however, other more widely available visual images of Seacole including sketches and portraits. The front piece to the 1857 cover of

Wonderful Adventures gives her audience a physical image to pair with the verbal descriptions of her character. The front piece presents a middle-aged woman, in a floppy black hat, red vest, black overcoat and white scarf. The background of the picture is yellow and Seacole’s face is shaded with black ink around her checks while both her face and her arms contain hints of red. The yellow background of the picture draws out the warm brown tone of Seacole’s skin. Albert Charles Challen completed an oil painting of Seacole in 1869 that features a profile of Seacole adorned with a red

“Creole scarf” as she stares straight ahead with an air of self-confidence and authority.

Although Seacole’s skin appears to be darker in Challen’s painting, it is still a medium brown. A watercolor of Seacole presumably done in the 1850’s presents a more youthful Seacole with lighter skin and more European facial features. Despite these small variations in the depiction of Seacole’s face, these physical presentations offer a clear image of a dark-skinned – but not black – woman.

Seacole’s is not the only mixed-raced, female body presented to English consumers at mid-century. The African-American abolitionist Ellen Craft offers another example of how the both black and white body was seen in the public eye in England.

Like Seacole, Craft is also of mixed-racial origin: a physical marker that could not go unnoticed by a nineteenth-century transatlantic society either living in the shadow of or directly under New World Slavery. Ellen Craft and her husband William – coauthors of the 1860 slave narrative Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of

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William and Ellen Craft from Slavery – escaped to their freedom in 1848. Ellen, a very light-skinned woman, assumed the clothing of elderly man and led her husband, as her purported slave, by steamship, train and ferry from Georgia to Philadelphia. Once in

Philadelphia, the author and abolitionist William Wells Brown, befriended the Crafts.

The couple participated in abolitionist lectures in the Northern United States until the

U.S. Fugitive Slave Act of1850, forced the, by then, famous couple to flee to England.

Once in England the couple publish their narrative and continue to work for the abolitionist cause. Ellen offers an example of a mobile, black woman who uses her life and story to work for social change. But unlike Nancy Prince or Mary Prince – fellow black woman engaged in abolitionist causes – Ellen brings her story and her body to the public stage.v Like Seacole, Ellen’s body became the subject of the public gaze. And, like Seacole, the celebrated and civilized mixed-raced body in the public space had to be constructed in a manner that highlighted its difference without constructing that difference as a threat to white society.

An 11 August 1849 article in the Friends’ Review, a Quaker newspaper out of

Boston, describes Ellen and her husband’s daring escape from slavery, making significant note of Ellen’s physical appearance. She is described as “white” or “rather, to be strictly correct, a brunette.” Her hair is “long, straight and dark colored” and

“firmness, intelligence and perseverance are distinctly and impressively marked upon her countenance” (“Story of Ellen Crafts”). A particular effort is made in this article to align Ellen with her Anglo-Saxon heritage. Ellen was a slave but “let it not be understood that she [is] a Negro” (“Story”). Ellen is the mobile agent in this saga and the ultimate success of the couple’s escape lay in her hands. Her light skin is able to

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win both her and her husband their freedom and her bravery is applauded by those sympathetic to the abolitionist cause. Indeed a letter from William Wells Brown published in the 12 January 1849 edition of William Lloyd Garrison’s the Liberator

Ellen is identified as a “heroine” (Brown). The nineteenth-century transatlantic press and the leaders of the abolitionist cause allow her to take a place in the public eye, and it is freely granted that she is a woman of strong moral character and a credit to the abolitionist cause. What she is not granted is full access to her African heritage. No one could deny that this heroic woman is a former slave, but the stress on her light skin and its role in earning her and her husband their freedom reminds her public that she, like Seacole, is not completely black.

In the nineteenth century hybridity is primarily a physical rather than a cultural concept. Seacole’s contemporary audience held certain preconceived notions of the biology of the mixed-raced body. Although it may enjoy popular currency in recent scholarship in the fields of cultural and postcolonial studies, the word hybrid developed in the nineteenth century from the biological sciences as a physiological phenomenon.

The word hybrid originally described the mixing of two species of an animal or plant. Its first recorded use in the nineteenth century to refer to the mixing of different races is listed as 1861 in the OED. Robert Young marks the years 1843 to 1861 as the rise of the belief that there could be such things as a human hybrid (6). This midcentury rise of the notion of the human hybrid means that Seacole is writing to a public that sees the mixed- raced woman as a figure related to, but separate from the fully black woman. This does not mean that her audience does not associate her with other public black bodies, but rather that the issue of her race is more complicated than a simple reading of black and

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white.

The mixed-raced body brought with it suggestions of possible infertility and debates over a single origin of the human race. It became a site on which scientists could play out contemporary debates over monogenism (single species) and polygenism (many species). Those white men who supported the subjugation of and separation from the

“African race” forwarded a theory of polygenism that separated whiteness from blackness on a biological level. Mixed-raced bodies, like Seacole’s, are seen as the crossing of two species or a human hybrid and thus subject to potential infertility (Young

9). Seacole may have entered a culture that is debating the precise scientific labeling of the mixed-raced body, but it is my contention that although her reader’s recognize her

“dusky” or not quite black skin Seacole is linked culturally to certain public conceptions of blackness, particularly those tied to notions of spectacle or entertainment.

Mixed-raced women like Seacole and Craft exist in a state of limbo between two races, and it is their state of being in between two points that ultimately allows them their relative freedom of movement. These women who travel on and through the margins of society are constructed as figures who “clash with or conform to moral and aesthetic parameters, first provoking titillation, then reassuring that social order has been restored”

(Romero-Cesareo 135). Outer appearance is thought to mark an internal difference of character. In this way difference between groups is secured and a normative identity stabilized. The highly socially and physically mobile context of mid-nineteenth century society made the tensions surrounding how a person appears, what they do and who they are endless topics of debate (Rupprecht 181). As women of mixed racial origin put on public display, the contemporary presentations of Craft and Seacole’s bodies highlight

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these tensions. The media’s attempts to reconcile a popular figure’s status as a heroine and as a woman of African heritage reflects the available solutions to the potential problem of the mixed raced body in the public space. However, Ellen Craft’s mobility is more complex than Seacole’s. In the eyes of the US law, she still belongs to her master, and with the passing of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law the Crafts were forced to flee to

England. Their mobility and freedom of movement no longer became a choice. Their story brings them fame but that fame ultimately forces them back into a situation of quasi bondage.

*****

Like Seacole, Craft’s unique life story transforms her into a celebrity, but that fame also brings with it a certain set of limitations. As a woman of African ancestry whose life and story brings her into the public eye, she is still bound by her blackness; she is still the subject of what Curdella Forbes labels the “mutual if unequal tradeoff” that requires her to offer up her body for public consumption in order to gain celebrity and mobility. Upon their arrival in England, Ellen and her husband enter a market hungry for the body of the ex-slave. Victorians are lining up to hear the speeches and purchase the narratives of former slaves as well as see the physical impact of slavery, via scarring, on the black body (Fisch 5). In his exploration of the connection between memory and public performance, Joseph Roach suggests that the memories of particular times and places can become embodied in public performances. Performances come to constitute

“rites of memory” and a specific performance of race, as in the case of the abolitionist

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lecture circuit, begins to function as an “alternative to the ontological commitment to its reality” (Roach, Cities of the Dead xi). The African body on display in the abolitionist lecture tour offers the English at mid-century an opportunity to rewrite their relationship to the black body. The celebrity of a mixed-raced woman like Ellen Craft created a positive association for the potential usefulness and dignity of the African body in the public eye.

Audrey Fisch suggests that the abolitionist movement that made women like Ellen

Craft international celebrities became central to a “campaign of Englishness” that emerged at mid-century as a product of the “hungry forties.”vi A stress began to be placed on England as a prosperous nation and the moral center of the Western world.

American barbarism was placed in contrast to English morality (Fisch 5). The presentation and consumption of the black body found itself at the center of this cultivation of Englishness. These representations of the transatlantic slave campaign,

“took their place in the parade of non-white Others, each displayed in its objectified turn in front of the English public as an exotic spectacle” and for some it was the exotic spectacle, not the abolitionist message that defined the demand for popularity of the Afro-

Americans in England (Fisch 70).

Sojourner Truth offers another example of a prominent black, female figure that found herself in the public eye in the mid-nineteenth century. Like Seacole and Craft,

Truth is propelled to heroine status and comes to function as more of a symbol of blackness in society than an autonomous subject. Although both Seacole and Truth are useful women of African descent, their public figures are still linked to a notion of spectacle or performance. Truth is born into slavery in New York State in 1797 and is

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most commonly associated in public memory with her famous “Ain’t I a woman?” speech delivered at a Women’s Rights Convention in 1851 in Akron, Ohio. Like Craft,

Truth – who changed her name from Isabella Baumfree to Sojourner Truth in 1843 – spoke before numerous audiences in the United States advancing abolitionist causes throughout the 1850s. Truth is propelled to the height of her fame through the publication of an article by Harriet Beecher Stowe titled “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan

Sibyl” that appeared in the American periodical the Atlantic Monthly in April of 1863.

The article outlines Truth’s 1853 visit to Stowe and her family in Andover, MA. Stowe presents herself and her family as people of culture who “appreciate Sojourner Truth as a primitive objet d’art and source of entertainment” (Painter 154). Stowe describes Truth as a “full-blooded African” and claims “on her head she wore a bright Madras handkerchief, arranged as a turban, after the manner of her race” (Stowe). Like Seacole’s red and yellow dresses or her “simple straw wide-awake” with “bright red streamers”

(Seacole 79), Truth’s brightly colored clothing becomes a marker of her ethnicity. These markers label Seacole and Truth as different and link them to their African heritage.

The article further Africanizes Truth’s body and emphasizes the performative aspects of her race. She is said to occasionally cry out in recollection of the “tears,”

“groans” and “moans” inflicted by slavery. Stowe also paints a picture of Truth’s grandson who accompanies her on her visit: “I should have said that she was accompanied by a little grandson or ten years, - the fattest, jolliest, wolly-headed little specimen of Africa that one can imagine. He was grinning and showing his glistening white teeth in a state of perpetual merriment, and at this moment broke out in an audible giggle” (Stowe 474). Stowe’s use of racial markers like “wolly hair” and “white teeth”

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echo Seacole’s own language and racist stereotypes of the black body, specifically her cook Frances as discussed in the previous chapter. Seacole deploys and becomes the target off the racist language used by the white public in its description of black bodies.

Stowe emphasizes Truth’s African-ness and her Otherness, quotes her in her

Negro dialect and praises her naïveté and her ability as a performer who can captivate her audience (Painter 151). Stowe claims that she cannot “recollect ever to have been conversant with any one who had more of that silent and subtle power which we call personal presence” and that Truth possessed an “unconscious superiority, not unmixed with an solemn twinkle of humor” (Stowe 473). Truth is presented as a born performer, able to captivate her audience with only her presence. But, of course, the presence of this imposing black woman is not without a “twinkle of humor.” As demonstrated by the creation of the aforementioned opera “La Figlia del Regimento” dramatizing Seacole’s

Crimean heroics, Seacole’s life, too, is a performance, often in the most literal sense.

Unlike Seacole and Craft, Truth never visited England as her lecture tours were confined to the Northern United States. As such, she did not reach the heights of English celebrity seen by Craft and Seacole, and such a large and varied English audience would not have consumed her image. There is reason to suggest that Truth was well known in

English abolitionist and political circles. Truth’s first anti-slavery tour came in the winter of 1851; she traveled the Northeastern United States with the radical British MP George

Thompson and they developed a close friendship (Painter 116-17). By the 1863 publication date of her “Libyan Sibyl,” Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) and Dred: A

Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) would have made her a household name in

England, thus her commentary on Truth may have reached an English audience.

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Although the average reader of Wonderful Adventures may not have been intimately aware of Truth and her image, she offers an example of the contemporary presentations of the public black body. The person behind the performance or the “presence” of women like Seacole, Craft and Truth is irrelevant: the real lives of these women of African descent became overshadowed by their symbolic status. As Nell Irvin Painter suggests,

"to appreciate the meaning of the symbol – Strong Black Woman – we need know almost nothing of the person” (Painter 3). The meaning that the public attached to these women far overshadowed their own lives or accomplishments. They became representative of the possibilities for and potential of the woman of color in the public eye.

*****

Wonderful Adventures was written for an audience familiar with the body of a black woman on display, whether it is for the purposes of social reform or strictly entertainment. In addition to real women like Mary Seacole, Ellen Craft and Sojourner

Truth, audiences at mid-century would have been familiar with one of the most famous tropes of black womanhood that emerged from New World slavery: the mammy. A significant degree of overlap between the mammy and Seacole’s public image suggests that the periodical press as well as Seacole and her editor may have used the popular image of the mammy to offer a version of black womanhood to which their audience could relate. With the 1851 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the pre-existing stereotype of the mammy is brought to an international stage. More than a half a million copies were sold in England in the year of its publication (Patkus and

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Schlosser). Stowe’s text reached such widespread popularity and sparked such controversy that in 1852 an anonymous author penned a text billed as the “Sequel to

Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, titled Uncle Tom in England; or, Proof that Black’s White. The self-described sequel to Stowe’s text was more than likely conceived to capitalize on the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and gather its own publicity and sales (Fisch 33). The author goes so far as to lift and rewrite the history of certain characters. The text introduces the struggles of the English working class, rewriting the history of the Chartist movement and ultimately using Stowe’s story and the legacy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to celebrate and glorify England (Fisch 45). The presence and popularity of both of these texts would ensure that Seacole’s reading public was familiar with the image of the large, amusing and maternal American mammy.

Although her image has developed over the years, the mammy of popular imagination is a large black house slave typically depicted with a huge smiling grin and considered to be unquestionably loyal. Kimberly Wallace identifies the mammy as a woman possessing the following attributes: “her deeply sonorous and effortlessly soothing voice, her infinite patience, her raucous laugh, her self-deprecating wit, her implicit understanding and acceptance of her inferiority and her devotion to whites” (2).

She is also characterized largely by excess; she is extremely overweight and has very dark skin; she is tall, broad-shouldered, and pleasant but very strict (Wallace 6). Stowe’s mammy, Aunt Chloe, is said to have a “round, black, shiny face” and Stowe writes that her “whole plump countenance beams with satisfaction and contentment from under a well-starched checkered turban” (Uncle Tom’s Cabin 24). Seacole, in turn, is described as having a large body and is often depicted smiling or laughing, aligning her with this

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contemporary image of the mammy (Fish, Black and White Women’s Travel Narratives

80). The mammy, like Seacole, mimics Western customs and manners. Aunt Chloe’s corner of her cabin is described as the “drawing-room of the establishment [italics in original]” and treated with “distinguished consideration” (Stowe 25) in contrast to the remainder of the room. The use of the word “drawing room” and the italics are meant to demonstrate Aunt Chloe’s affinity for the culture of her white masters. Aunt Chloe is lovable figure whose attempts to be like white society are endearing yet comical.

Wonderful Adventures and the contemporary press’ establishment of Seacole as a surrogate Mother for British soldiers echoes the mammy’s role as a physical and emotional caretaker for her white owners. Because of widespread theories of racial essentialism in the nineteenth century, black women were believed to be innately superior caretakers of white children. The mammy’s blind devotion to her white family is reflective of her own racial inferiority and speaks to the racist and patriarchal society in which she lived (Wallace-Saunders 6, 8). As explored in the preceding chapter,

Wonderful Adventures continually plays on the image of Seacole as mother. After learning that Britain had declared war against Russia, Seacole states her ambition to travel to the Crimea and of the “delight” she would experience if she could be useful to her own “sons” (71). Later in the narrative, while on the Crimean warfront, she describes how a British soldier died in her arms and mistook the self-identified “yellow” nurse for his mother and the battlefields for his childhood home. The periodical press echoes this labeling identifying Seacole as the “Mother of the Regiment.”

However, the link between the classic figure of the mammy and the public image of Mary Seacole is not inflexible. The mammy is a stationary figure while Seacole is

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characterized by an exceptional mobility. Seacole also deviates from the classic mammy figure when it comes to the place she claims in the public eye. Emerging from a history of slavery, segregation and persistent racism, the strong black woman, like the mammy, becomes an almost superhuman character recognized primarily by her relation to others rather than her relationship to herself (Beauboeuf-Lafontant 106). Seacole to a large extent rejects this role. Although she often defines herself through her work for others,

Seacole delights in being the center of attention, The classic mammy, on the other hand, seems more content to lurk in the shadows, appearing when needed, but never lingering too long in the spotlight. Although she ultimately gains fame for her service to the

British Empire, she claims ownership over her own life and story writing, “unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life my own way, I cannot tell it at all” (Seacole 128). By claiming rights to her story she is insisting upon control and power (Mercer 4), she longs for the fame and attention she believes she has earned; and once that attention is received, she appears to delight in it. Although Seacole, like the mammy, spends her life largely in service of the white man and his cause, she does not want to live a life of self-sacrifice.

Those that packaged Seacole’s image borrow those components of the mammy stereotype that neutralize contemporary fears over the comingling of black and white bodies. However, Mary Seacole remains different from, and subsequently better than, the

American mammy in that she is of a lighter complexion, but perhaps even more so in that she requests and receives the respect of a white audience for her individual achievements in a white man’s world.

*****

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Seacole is writing to an audience familiar with the image of the black body in the public eye displayed simply for its entertainment value. A central component of Mary

Seacole’s public body is its ability to entertain. As discussed in the Introduction, although Seacole’s popularity should not be simply read as an extension of contemporary displays of the black body as found in minstrel shows or the Freak Show circuit, these performances laid a foundation of black performance upon which Seacole and the press could build her public image. Mary Seacole is a larger than life figure and is fashioned as a woman who brought humor and diversion to even the most serious of circumstances. A

31 January 1857 notice in the Morning Chronicle announces the bankruptcy court’s decision to award Seacole and her partner Thomas Day first-class certificates. The paper briefly recounts a scene witnessed after Seacole and Day were granted the certificates:

Subsequently a bystander inquiring of Mrs Seacole what class certificate she had

got, she exclaimed in a voice sufficiently audible to be heard by everybody in

court, ‘What class? A first class to be sure. Am I not a first-class woman?’ An

observation which caused general amusement. (“In Re Seacole and Day”)

Even in her darkest financial hour, Seacole does not fail to amuse her public.

This focus on Seacole’s entertainment values continues in visual depictions of her figure. A 30 May 1857 issue of Punch features an illustration of Seacole titled “Our Own

Vivandiere.” A common sight in both the Crimean and the American Civil war, the aforementioned vivandiere found herself exalted as a sort of regimental mascot who boosted morale among the troops (Furgurson 131). Seacole is just such a figure. The

Punch cartoon presents Seacole as middle-aged woman with dark skin; she is dressed in

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long dress, a cape and a white bonnet and her face appears to be almost expressionless, with the slightest hint of a smile as she stands over the bed of an injured white man. The injured soldier’s frail, pale hand stands in stark contrast to Seacole’s dark skin and general air of health and stability. Seacole clutches several issues of Punch to her chest and holds one issue above her head as she stares down at the white man while he looks up at her with a look of despair and helplessness in his eyes. The viewer cannot help but feel sorry for the man and admire Seacole’s virility and strength surrounded by such despair. The image of Seacole standing among the injured soldiers is an allusion to popular images of Florence Nightingale as the “Lady of the Lamp” watching over her patients in Scutari. The caption of the cartoon reads that Seacole is distributing

“contributions of the kind officers to their sick men” (“Our Own Vivandiere”). As a vessel for the distribution of English goods, Seacole represents the “righteous force of

Englishness” (Gunning 959).

Sandra Gunning suggests that this cartoon’s judgment of her as “primarily a source of diversion, underscores the assumption that real nursing could be associated only with the white Nightingale” (958). In this cartoon her medical service to the troops is overlooked entirely and instead she serves as a source of entertainment or diversion.

Images of well-known black bodies in Victorian periodicals, like that of Seacole in

Punch, offer a critically underexplored element of the function of the periodical press in the generation of certain notions of race. Illustrations added an emotional element to a written story and could reinforce existing stereotypes (Codell, “Imperial Differences”

411); Victorian readership would have readily identified with this direct linking of

Seacole to her entertainment value.

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Punch’s poem “A Stir for Seacole” reflects this discursive linking to amusement that took place within the contemporary press. The ballad rhyme scheme, written to the tune of the popular English folk poem “Old King Cole” suggests a level of play in the description of this “old soul.” By rewriting her as Old King Cole, the English press solidifies her status as an English heroine but also reinforces her self-fashioning, as explored in Chapter 2, as a source of amusement amid the turmoil of the Crimean War.

Punch features a third article on Seacole in September of 1857. “Poking up the Seacole

Fire” recounts an alleged conversation between a fictional “Mr. Punch” and Lord

Palmerston, the then Prime Minister of Great Britain. In a playful and amusing banter,

Mr. Punch requests that the aforementioned funds raised and lost by the Surrey Gardens performance are returned to Mrs. Seacole. Lord Palmerston interrupts the conversation to pay Mr. Punch a seemingly nonsensical compliment on his “splendid figure-head,” to which Mr. Punch responds, “The ladies have been pleased to say [so]” (“Poking up the

Seacole Fire” 102). Again, the need to come to Seacole’s aid is readily acknowledged, but without, of course, forgetting to have a good laugh in the process.

*****

English periodicals offer a uniform image of Seacole, both visually and verbally: all who hear her story will be greatly impressed by her deeds on behalf of Britain and amused by her unique and vivacious character. The English press presents an image of

Seacole that reflects the prevailing stereotypes of the black and mixed-raced body, and like Seacole and her editor, work within these existing ideas to present Mary Seacole’s

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life as one characterized by exceptionality, but an exceptionality that did not overtly challenge the expectations of her audience. However, periodicals in Seacole’s birthplace, the Jamaican colony, had to consider not only the conceptions held by the English, but also the stereotypes of their readers who were intimately aware of the widely held conceptions of the colored Jamaican woman at mid-century. Several articles appearing around the turn of the twentieth century in Kingston’s Daily Gleaner shed light on the specific challenges the colony press in Jamaica faced when fashioning its image of

“Mother Seacole,” the mixed-raced, not quite English heroine.

Seacole is a born a free woman to a free mother. Her free status, along with the lightness of her skin places her in a distinct social and economic class. The insecure social and political positions of free people of color in the Anglophone Caribbean seemed to encourage the definition and maintenance of strict and rigid boundaries between white, brown and black populations (Fredrick 491). While some critics have read Seacole’s own demand for respect and recognition of her value as deliberate appeal on behalf of the black race,vii I join Anita Rupprecht in asserting that Seacole’s self-confidence and belief in her “usefulness” stems from this subject position as a free, colored woman emerging from this unique social environment. It is Seacole’s colonialism that encouraged a type of female self-empowerment that is not available to English women (Hawthorne 322). By

1830 free men of color in Jamaica had achieved legal equality with whites; they were free to participate in politics both at the parish level and in the House of Assembly and could often be a significant political force in Jamaica (Heuman xv). While colored men are carving out their place in the political sphere, women like Mary Seacole and her mother are building on a tradition of free colored women as entrepreneurs through their work as

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innkeepers and doctresses. Seacole comes of age in a context that saw the consolidation of the Creole identity that meant a “strong sense of homeland, cultural confidence and a sense of imperial affiliation” (Rupprecht 183). The color of her skin and the economic independence linked to her position as an innkeeper demand a certain degree of respect in

Jamaica and she expects the same respect in England and the Crimea (186).

It is impossible to determine precisely how Seacole conceived of herself when she was not obligated to be “Mother Seacole” for the readers of Wonderful Adventures and the contemporary press, and discovering the true Mary Seacole is not my goal. However, this unique history from which Seacole emerged did determine the manner in which she was presented by the press in the place of her birth. Seacole is a woman of mixed-raced ancestry who ran a boarding house in the capital city of Jamaica. Her ethnic, economic and cultural background place her within an established demographic, complete with certain associations that would have been easily identified by a turn of the century reading public. As briefly explored in the preceding chapter, mixed-raced, hotelkeepers from the Caribbean were thought to be morally suspect and over-sexualized. Thus, in turn, their actions were subjected to an increased level of scrutiny. By stressing her mother’s success as a hotelkeeper and doctress within Wonderful Adventures, Seacole and her editor work to undermine the stereotype of the morally disreputable, female innkeeper (Hawthorne 322). Periodicals produced on the British mainland could effectively deflect this scrutiny by packaging her as a brave, amusing and useful “berry- brown” woman, without having to face this cultural image directly. On the other hand, this deflection is more challenging for periodicals produced in Kingston, such as the

Gleaner, that are writing to a readership with direct and intimate knowledge of the local

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social intricacies of color and class.

To the English reading public she is a not-quite English, Crimean heroine. To those in the Jamaican colony, she is a Jamaican heroine, a site of Imperial pride and a uniquely Jamaican version of greatness. There is a Bakhtinian heteroglossia in the language of the colonial Jamaican press. Multiple voices emerge from the words of colonial periodical, where worldviews, histories and languages merge together. The press “presumes to speak for a nation of a people or a public, but it speaks conditions and identities always in process and always multi-voiced” (Codell, Imperial Co-histories”

15). Julie F. Codell suggests that the “multi-voicedness” of the press leads to the production of “co-histories” where “joint histories… intervene in one another’s texts in a dialogue between Britain and its empire… “ (Imperial Co-histories 15-16). In the

Kingston’s Daily Gleaner, multiple voices join together in an attempt to praise Seacole and find her proper place in Jamaican and British history, but as we have seen thus far, the complexity of Seacole’s multiple identities and public roles makes this task of establishing Seacole as a Jamaican heroine a difficult one.

Seacole makes her living as both a doctress and an innkeeper, but the trade that sustains her financially throughout her travels is that of an inn, lodging house or hotelkeeper. The nineteenth century Jamaican press needs to situate Seacole in this particular context for her Jamaican readership. The figure of the black or mixed-raced innkeeper was seen throughout Caribbean history. Seacole joins the ranks of famous

Caribbean female innkeepers such as her sister, Louisa Grant, and the aforementioned

Rachel Pringle, a Barbadian woman who lived during the eighteenth century. While

Seacole's career as a transatlantic doctress and proprietor is unique, this work developed

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from a legacy of independent, entrepreneurial, free-colored women in Jamaica (Brereton

83). The image of the Caribbean market woman stands as a pervasive symbol in the iconography of Caribbean womanhood and carries with it certain cultural associations both positive and negative: an innkeeper was a woman; she was more than likely of mixed racial origin; she was probably a prostitute (or at least kept a brothel) and she was fat. Although there is little concrete evidence to suggest that the wider Caribbean link between prostitution and innkeeping was a historical fact in Jamaica, it is most certain that lodging houses were established by white men who maintained them, and that the black or mixed raced woman who ran them were most likely involved in informal sexual liaisons or concubinage with these men (Kerr 199). White colonizers’ relationships with black women allow for exploitation of black women but also create a possibility for financial power and the creation of a certain class of free, independent, colored women

(Gunning 957). However, the historical moment that allows for her empowerment also carries with it an inescapable legacy of exploitation. As a physical reminder of sexual contact between white men and black woman, the body of the mulatto, particularly that of the female mixed-raced body, brought with it an image of intrinsic sexuality.

How then does the Gleaner negotiate the stigma of the mixed raced body and the stereotypes attached to the Jamaican innkeeper? What unique role could a colonial publication play in the dissemination of a colonial legend? In the nineteenth century, the press produces of national identities, and the colonial press became a site for the generation for what Codell labels “co-histories” in which the colonizing powers are forced to see their histories alongside the colonies (Imperial Co-histories 16, 18).

Seacole’s attachment to blackness and a class of morally suspect women is part of this

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co-history, and like the place of a black heroine in the English psyche, that history had to be negotiated in the public eye. Articles found in the Gleaner offer insight into the attempts to brush past the complex and often dark history of its home and Jamaica’s connection to England to arrive at the figure of the jolly innkeeper who brought her

Jamaican, Creole heritage with her as she cared for her Majesty’s soldiers halfway across the world.

These articles pay particular attention to Seacole’s status as a figure from history, as the product of a particular cultural moment. In the 27 July 1905 issue of the Gleaner two articles appear with Seacole as their topic. The first is titled “The Story of the Life of

Mrs. Seacole” and is an extended account of the life and times of Seacole, including excerpts from Wonderful Adventures. It is spurred on by an anonymous letter to the editor of the Gleaner, querying “how many of your readers in this island – whose inhabitants, are prone to take as little interest in the incidents and traditions of our past as they are in solving the problems of today” (“Story”) remember the name Mary Seacole? The article goes on to identify Seacole as a “remarkable daughter of Jamaica” and chastizes

Jamaicans for letting her legend and contributions to the nation fade away.

The second of the two articles is simply titled “An Old Type” and further demonstrates the complicated relationship between Jamaican and English identities for the Anglophone-Caribbean subject. The author offers an assessment of Seacole’s life and accomplishments and places her in a particular moment in British history. Seacole is described as an “Old Jamaican character famous in her day and representative of a class of Jamaican women which has almost wholly passed away,” asserting that these “old time hotel keepers were English to the backbone” (“Old Type”). The conclusion of the

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article mentions Seacole’s sister Louisa Grant, whose death inspired the duo of articles written on Seacole in this issue. Ms. Grant is a well-known Jamaican figure and hotelkeeper in her own right and is said to have cared for Anthony Trollope during his travels in the West Indies (Kerr 203). Trollope recalls this encounter in his travelogue

The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1860). While in Kingston, Trollope spent time at

Grant’s Blundle Hall and recalls Ms Grant stating that Seacole was making plans to travel to India but that the Queen insisted that her life was too valuable to risk. Trollope comments, “Mrs. Seacole is a prophet, even in her own country” (23). The two Gleaner articles describe Ms. Grant as being “equally as patriotic as Seacole herself” (“Story of the Life”) and recount a story in which Ms. Grant refused to allow the exiled leader of

Haiti to board with her. When the exiled Emperor came to Jamaica “[Ms Grant] simply refused to have him in her hotel” and is said to have stated, “Him King, indeed!... Queen

Victoria is my King” (“Old Type”). The placement of this story at the conclusion of

Seacole’s characterization as a “long lost type” of Jamaican works to further align

Seacole with British nationalism and reveals the complexity of her dual national identities.

An article from the 17 August 1910 issue of the Gleaner continues this historicized reading of Seacole. The Gleaner claims to be writing this article in response to recent attacks from readers. The previous days’ edition features an article about

Florence Nightingale’s heroics without mentioning Seacole, an act that offends many readers. The Gleaner responds with a four-column article outlining Seacole’s life and her place within the history of both Jamaica and the British Empire. It reads, “Certain characters are produced in certain ages only. It is the surroundings that help to make

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them” (Jamaican Veteraness”). Her image is linked to nostalgia of times past and a type of imperial glory that has regrettably passed: “People who might be Mrs Seacole would need for their complete development the Jamaica which existed in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the sort of campaigns that were conducted by European armies at that time” (“Jamaican Veteraness”). Echoing her sister’s alleged patriotism in the face of the Emperor of Haiti this article stresses Seacole’s immense loyalty to the British crown:

“The loyal Jamaican is always more loyal than anybody else, and Mrs Seacole was the most loyal of all loyal Jamaicans ever known” (“Jamaican Veteraness”). Seacole is described as “the most loyal of all loyal Jamaicans” in one breath and as “fiercely loyal to the British crown” in the next. The colonial press “vanquished distances between

‘centers’ and ‘peripheries’” and allowed colonized populations to generate and compose their own identities that were not simple hybrids of “British and Other” (Codell, Imperial

Co-histories 17). While this may prompt the modern reader to question exactly to whom loyal Jamaican is loyal, the contemporary, turn-of-the-century reader, still living under imperial rule, may have been able to conceive of the lines between metropole and periphery much more fluidly.

The article continues, “We cannot think of Mrs. Seacole being out of place in any country in the world. Her self-possession would never desert her” (“Jamaican

Veteraness”). Here Seacole is able to transcend the implicit conflict between a strong

Jamaican and British identity by becoming an international figure, a citizen of the world.

In addition to exemplifying an extraordinary degree of physical movement, Seacole possesses a symbolic mobility; she cannot be bound by a singular “home.” As discussed in Chapter 2, Seacole possesses a portable domesticity as she carries her home with her as

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she moves. This language from the Gleaner reflects a desire to focus on the positive aspects of colonialism while also demonstrating the manipulation of Seacole’s body to fit a particular nationalist or imperialist identity. Yet, in spite of her great loyalty, Seacole is not one to be taken advantage of. The article claims that she “knew her place but servility was not in her. She made others know their place also” (“Jamaican

Veteraness”). Although the article makes no explicit mention of Seacole’s ethnic background, it was widely know that the Jamaican heroine is a descendent of those men and women upon whom servility was recently forced. This quick assertion of Seacole’s confidence and independence of mind and body can perhaps be read as a further attempt to separate her from a dark and unsettled history.

At the time the articles under investigation were published, the Gleaner would have been in publication for over 60 years and have just gone public. The periodical’s legacy as a site for advertising and commercial ventures is still very much seen in the aforementioned issues. Although fading slightly over the decade under investigation, the bulk of the pages are filled with ads for both English and local goods and services. Like

Seacole’s very life, the turn of the century Gleaner, perhaps unconsciously, straddles the blurry line between an English, a Jamaican and even a greater Caribbean life. Within contemporary issues of the Gleaner can be found several articles that address highly national issues such as the outbreak of a water-born disease or the problems surrounding the influx of East Indian laborers, alongside more regional ones like wars and rioting in

Central America, particularly Nicaragua. However, the Gleaner also carried news from the motherland, often printing articles from English publications. This characterization of Seacole in the turn of the century Gleaner demonstrates the full complexity of the

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post-emancipation Caribbean experience, demonstrating how aspects of Seacole’s complex Creole identity are highlighted or silenced as the reading public consumes the

Crimean heroine’s body. Seacole’s mobility creates different readings of her body that were played out in contemporary media; however, because of the complex subject position of the mixed-raced, colonized body in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these multiple readings should not always been seen as functioning at odds with each other.

i For example, publications such as Punch, the London Times and the Literary Gazette frequently covered Seacole’s life. ii Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle (http://www.capecoastcastlemuseum.com) is designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and was visited by U.S. President Barack Obama in July 2009. The International Slavery Museum (http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/) is housed in Liverpool, UK, one of the principal slave ports in eighteenth century Europe. iii For a further discussion of the complexity of prescribed gender roles see Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in mid-Victorian England.(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) or Linda M. Shires’s edited collection Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History and the Politics of Gender (London: Routledge, 1992). iv Isabella Lucy Bird (1831-1904) was a travel writer who produced numerous works throughout the later half of the nineteenth century. Bird undertook a sea voyage to improve her health and fell in love with the adventures of foreign travel and the beauties of the natural world. Her works include, among others, An English Woman in America (1856) and A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879). Mary Kingsley (1862-1900) was a travel writer and explored whose writers and travels shed great light on the people and cultures of Africa. Her works include Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1899). v It should be noted that Ellen’s husband, William, and the male leaders of the Abolitionist Movement did assume a certain degree of control over the fashioning of Ellen Craft’s pubic image. In this way Craft’s public life further echoes that of Seacole’s, as the agency of both women was complicated of male figures, whether it be a husband or a editor. vii See Ivette Romero-Cesareo. “Women Adrift: Madwomen, Matriarchs, and the Caribbean.” Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo. Women at sea : travel writing and the margins of Caribbean discourse. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

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Chapter 4: Mary Seacole and the Not-Quite English celebrity in Victorian England

“Lola Montez has had a more difficult time to get born than even that, for she has been born over and over again of the separate brain of every man who has attempted to write her history.” ~ Lola Montez, Lectures

In the early 1850s Mary Seacole was the proprietor of a store in Cruces, a city in the Republic of New Granada. While in Cruces, Seacole notes the appearance of Lola

Montez – the infamous “Spanish dancer” and toast of the contemporary tabloids in both

England and the United States. Seacole writes,

Came one day, Lola Montes, in the full zenith of her evil fame, bound for

California, with a strange suite. A good-looking, bold woman, with fine, bad

eyes, and a determined bearing; dressed ostentatiously in perfect male attire, with

shirt-collar turned down over a velvet lapelled coat, richly worked shirt-front,

black hat, French unmentionables, and natty, polished boots with spurs. She

carried in her hand a handsome riding-whip, which she could use as well in the

streets of Cruces as in the towns of Europe; for an impertinent American,

presuming – perhaps not unnaturally – upon her reputation, laid hold jestingly of

the tails of her long coat, and as a lesson received a cut across his face that must

have marked him for some days. I did not wait to see the row that followed, and

was glad when the wretched woman rode off on the following morning. (Seacole

41)

Montez – whose real name was Eliza Rosanna Gilbert and who was in fact born in

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Limerick, Ireland, not Spain – first made a reputation for herself as a dancer who moved among the literary circles of nineteenth-century Paris and later amassed considerable fame following her tryst with Ludwig I of Bavaria. Montez travelled throughout Europe and the United States, fueling her reputation as a heartbreaker and a woman of loose and questionable morals. This reputation is recalled in Seacole’s description of Montez’s “fine, bad eyes” and her “evil fame.” Seacole also notes

Montez’s masculine attire and alludes to the infamous story of her whipping an impertinent guard of the Bavarian court – a story retold countless times in contemporary gossip columns.

Montez, or at least someone claiming to write in her name, also notes this alleged interaction with Seacole in her Lectures of Lola Montez (Countess of Landfield):

Including her Biography (1858); however, Montez claims a different version of the truth, identifying “several rather comical mistakes” in Seacole’s “complimentary notice.” She claims that she was “never dressed off the stage in a man’s apparel in her whole life,”

(Seacole 79-80), citing as an exception the one occasion on which she had to reenter

Bavaria undercover after she fled the city. In reference to the impertinent American who met her whip she counters that she never had a whip in her hand in Cruces so she could not have possibly whipped the American, nor could he have pulled her coat tails since she was not wearing a men’s coat. But perhaps the most telling moment of her rebuttal is when she claims to have never even met Seacole. She writes, “[I] never lived in Cruces in

[my] life. Before [I] went to California the new route was opened, and [I] passed many miles from that place” (80). Seacole sets the “interesting event” in 1851 while Montez claims not to have visited California until 1853. A 4 June 1853 article in New York’s

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Spirit of the Times confirms Montez’s chronology placing “the lioness, Lola Montez” in

Panama in May of that year (“Panama Correspondence”).

Montez ends her discussion of Seacole’s “complimentary notice” by stating that the “whole story is base fabrication from beginning to end. It is as false as Mrs

Seacole’s own name” (80). By this Montez is not calling into question Seacole’s very existence, but rather suggesting that the cultivation of Seacole’s public life is often based upon, if not lies, at least a generous massaging of the truth. Indeed, the truth of the tales of women like Seacole and Montez may never be known. In the absence of published works, letters or a diary and even despite autobiographical texts, the “facts” that circulated via contemporary periodicals cannot be verified (Roach, Cities of the Dead xi). And as Montez writes in her Autobiography, “If I were to collect all similar falsehoods which I have seen in papers or books about Lola Montez, they would form a mountain higher than Chimborazo” (80). However the real worth of Montez and

Seacole’s words lies not in the truth behind them, but in the roots and repercussions of those words’ very existence.

In the same breath as this denunciation of Montez, Seacole notes the appearance of Catherine Hayes, an Irish opera singer, writing, “A very different notoriety followed

[Montez] at some interval of time – Miss Catherine Hayes, on her successful singing tour, who disappointed us all by refusing to sing at Cruces” (41). Hayes, like Seacole, was a British, but not English, celebrity who gained immense popularity in Victorian

England. After several performances in the eastern half of the United States, Hayes entered a contract with the legendary P.T. Barnum and en route to the West Coast via

Panama, arriving in California in November of 1852 (221). This record of Hayes’

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movements suggests that Seacole would have allegedly crossed path with both Montez and Hayes in the fall or winter of 1852 when both women were truly in the “zenith of

[their] fame” (Seacole 41). However, Montez’s comments in her Autobiography place this time line and even the physical intersection of these three women’s lives in question.

In all likelihood, Mary Seacole did not cross paths with either Lola Montez or Catherine

Hayes, but Seacole’s leniency with the truth is very telling. Seacole’s reference to Hayes and Montez within Wonderful Adventures demonstrates her desire to discursively place herself in the realm of celebrity.

At the time of the publication of Wonderful Adventures, Montez and Hayes’s names were well known in England and brought with them a story of fame: the fame, I argue, Seacole sought. Seacole and her editor were aware of Montez and Hayes’ popularity and deliberately brought Seacole into conversation with these women.

Seacole writes herself into the celebrity that would win her fame, recognition and financial independence and this celebrity was fueled by public conceptions of the non-

English body in the English public eye. Antoinette Burton examines the life of three

Indian figures of varying degrees of fame that each visited late-Victorian England:

Pandita Ramabai, a women’s rights activist; Cornelia Sorabji, the first female barrister in

India; and Behramji Malabari, a poet and social reformer. Through her work on these men and women Burton wishes to call attention to the “cultures of movement that brought a variety of colonial subjects – Indian, African, Caribbean, Chinese, and even

Irish” to England and made them “visible on the cultural landscape” before the greater immigration trends following World War II (2). These men and women represent the way British, but not quite English, figures were fashioned in the public eye. While

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Burton looks at Indian subjects that achieved some renown in late nineteenth and early twentieth, Mary Seacole emerges from a group of non-English figures from the British colonies who became highly visible decades earlier at mid-century.

As previously explored, as men and women of color, Mary Seacole, Ellen Craft and Sojourner Truth achieved a degree of fame in England that can be linked back to the darkness of their skin and contemporary conceptions of the use and value of the African body. Seacole can also be linked to public figures of European ancestry. Women like

Lola Montez, Catherine Hayes and Mary Seacole can be brought into the same critical conversation through their status as what Homi Bhabha labels “subject[s] of difference that [are] almost the same but not quite” (86). Examining the periodical fashioning of these transatlantic celebrities provides a model for understanding the literal and metaphoric meetings of various women from the margins of society, who through their mobility and their particular talents rose to the forefront of the public consciousness in

England. Seacole, Montez and Hayes enter a contract – in the case of Hayes’ association with P.T. Barnum this contract was both literal and metaphorical – under which they surrender their privacy and their right to “tell the story of [their lives] in

[their] own way” (Seacole 128) for access to a world of travel, adventure and fame. In his discussion of Joice Hethi – George Washington’s alleged nurse who was exhibited by

Barnum in the early nineteenth century – Benjamin Reiss suggests that Joice Heth transcends her own personal story to become a story of nineteenth century American society. Heth’s life should be read “not just as a distorting and reflecting glass, but as a wondrous magnet, attracting and reworking many of the most potent cultural forces of the period” (Reiss 6). The lives and bodies of Seacole, Montez and Hayes are magnets

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to which the English public’s anxiety over and fascination with the non-English, female, public body are drawn. Like the women of color explored in the previous chapter,

Montez and Hayes enter a “mutual if unequal tradeoff” (Forbes 2) that highlights the

English public’s complicated relationship to non-English figures. For these women, fame became the access to the lives they wanted; that fame was generated by circulating images of women and Othered bodies in the public eye.

Lola Montez and Catherine Hayes are Irish women who, like Seacole, are denied full access to Englishness. While the modern reader may conflate England and Ireland, overlooking their complicated and often violent history and seeing them as countries nearly identical in climate, geography and culture, Ireland in the nineteenth century is a colonized land, and the relationship between the English and the Irish is one of colonizer and colonized. Noel Ignatiev suggests that Ireland in the eighteenth century presents a classic case of racial oppression. The Irish are conceptualized by themselves and the

English as a distinct race – labeled the Gaels, the Celts or the Irish – and are to be kept in their rightful place below the English (Ignatiev 35). With the Act of Union in 1801, the

Irish found themselves under the direct political and economic rule of the motherland, and subsequently victims of a national oppression as well (37). In spite of this national and racial oppression marking it as a colonized state, Ireland was, as exemplified by the devastating impact of the Irish potato famine,ii often overlooked by its Mother country.

As Joe Cleary suggests, “[Ireland] was perhaps geographically too close to England to be exotic in the manner of India, the Americas, or Egypt, and culturally too stubbornly

Catholic, to frequently rebellious, too commonly byword for misery and failed policy to be either a showcase for either the benefits of the Union or those of imperial progress”

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(21). In is in this environment of potential oppression and a racialized understandings of the Irish that Montez and Hayes make their appearance on the public stage. Like

Seacole, their bodies are, to vary degrees, exoticized and this exoticization is played out in the public eye. Although Montez and Hayes are white, their subject position as members of a colonized and often ignored nation imbues their public images with a similar element of wondrousness, eccentricity or Otherness that fed their celebrity. Like

Seacole, although they become celebrities in English culture, they are not and can never be authentically English celebrities. This lack of authenticity determines how all three women are fashioned in the public eye by contemporary periodicals.

*****

Montez began her career as a dancer on the French stage and because of her olive skin and exotic sounding name is identified as a woman of Spanish decent. London papers announce the arrival of the “Spanish danseuse, Donna Lola Montez” in 1843.

Montez appeared between the acts of the opera and the reviews of her performance are mixed. She is said to be “destitute of those graces which impart such a charm to the performance of the French and Italian dancers, but there is a “certain intensity of expression, and as it seemed, a certain nationality, which gave her a peculiar interest”

(“Her Majesty’s Theatre”). From the moment Montez appears of the public stage it is not her talent but her “peculiar interest” that makes her noteworthy figure. Her interest is tied to an intangible “intensity of expression” and a “certain nationality.”

Throughout her life there are continued debates over Montez’s birthplace and

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ethnic origin, and the contemporary press feeds the mystery surrounding these elements of her identity. A 1843 article out of a Dublin newspaper identifies Montez as the

“daughter of a deceased Spanish general” (“Danseuse in a Scrape”) and correctly identifies her age as nineteen. A 15 December 1849 article on Montez in Littell’s Living

Age, a nineteenth and twentieth century American magazine known for republishing stories from both American and English periodicals, begins by touching on this speculation over Montez’s ethnicity. It reads, “Be she Celt of Ireland or of Spain, with the fire of Milesian or Mauritanian blood in her veins, Lola Montez is an anachronism”

(“Lola Montez”). The article goes on to recount the many legends of bravado associated with Montez’s name and claims she belongs to a lost age of adventure, acting with the

“ease of theatre and the chivalrous romance” (“Lola Montez”). Here it is Montez’s inability to be pinned down or placed in an easily identified category that adds both to her mystique and her status as a societal menace.

Montez’s identity could not be fixed, and that made her both dangerous and alluring. As Robert C Young suggests, “Fixity of identity is only sought in situations of instability and disruptions, of conflict and change” (4). Multiplicity had to be set against singularity. In her 1848 Autobiography Montez addresses this contemporary debate over her slippery ethnic origins. Montez states that she was, in fact, born in the city of

Limerick in Southwest Ireland in 1824. She claims that her mother was known as a handsome lady and was descended from the Spanish noble family of Montalvo and was originally of Moorish blood. She writes, “the fountain-head of the blood which courses in the veins of the erratic Lola Montez is Irish and Moorish-Spanish – a somewhat combustible compound it must be confessed” (Montez 18). In spite of this clear

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declaration of her true ethnic origins, an April 1847 notice in the Daily News carries a letter supposedly signed by Montez that appears in several contemporary Paris journals.

In this letter Montez challenges the “false reports” surrounding herself and her family stating that they are false and she wishes to clarify the issue. She writes, “I beg of you to insert the following retraction…. [I was] born in Sevilla in 1823 and… [my] name was

Marie Dolores Porris y Montez, a name which I never changed.” (Montez, Letter). She also claims that her father was a officer and was her mother’s second husband. Given that a year later, Montez proudly claims her Irish heritage and recounts in detail her upbringing in Ireland, India and England, the authenticity of this letter or even its very existence is called into question. The letter may be a product of the rumor mill or rather a reflection of Montez’s own desire to drive the speculation further. Regardless of its authenticity, the notice reflects the contemporary debate surrounding her ethnicity and the importance the mid-nineteenth century public gave to the set categorization of peoples.

As previously addressed, Seacole’s subject status as both black and white and English and Jamaican, too, blurs the lines between established categories and this boundary crossing or wondrousness drives both Montez and Seacole’s celebrity.

Unlike Montez, Hayes’ ethnicity is never called into question and she is explicitly linked with her Irish heritage in the contemporary press. In a fashion similar to many nineteenth-century female writers and celebrities, Hayes disappears from the pages of popular Western history for many years until she is brought forth from the archives by researchers and writers – primarily music historians – drawn to her fascinating story. Catherine Hayes, Montez’s public counterpart, was born in 1825 in

Limerick, Ireland – also Montez’s hometown – and died of stroke in London in 1861 at

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the age of 45. Hayes came from a humble background and used her talent to acquire wealth and great social and physical mobility. Her father left her family when she was young and Hayes uses her voice to support her mother and her sisters. Hayes’s talent allows her to tour the world, traveling across Europe, the United States, Central

America, the Caribbean and even Australia. Hayes is not a member of the Anglo-Irish elite and, thus, for the early years of her life, is subject to the potentially oppressive forces of British colonialism before her talents gain her fame and financial independence. In 1851 Hayes undertakes an American tour for which she is paid a base fee of 650 pounds a month, an impressive salary for a female performer at the time

(Walsh 172). Walsh is able to use her wealth to support her mother and sisters throughout her life.

At mid-century Hayes “otherness” as a publically celebrated Irish body allows her status as a colonized subject to be a source of power and righteousness, particularly in the wake of the great Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. In late 1845 Irish farmers began to notice their potato crops mysteriously whither. What history has shown to be a fungus infecting the country’s crop soon began leaving Irish farmers in the West and

Southwest of Ireland penniless and dying. About half a million Irish families were evicted from their homes and sent on what became known as “coffin ships” to the

United or Canada. The English did seemingly little to allay the deep suffering of their closest colony. This neglect joined a history of the political and cultural marginalization of Ireland.

The English charged the Irish body with phobic myths of origin and race. Texts like Gerald of Wales’ 12th century The History and Topography of Ireland reflect

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historical conceptions of the Irish as a site of humor and a beast-like and uncivilized race. Gerald of Wales describes a “woman with a beard and mane down her back,” presumably owned by the King of Limerick. She is said to have had a “beard down to her waist” and a “crest from her neck down along her spine” (Wales 72-73). Gerald goes on to claim that “in spite of these two enormities” she was “not a hermaphrodite” and “in other respects sufficiently feminine. She “followed the court wherever it went, provoking laughs as well as wonder” (Gerald of Wales 73). Gerald also claims to have seen or heard of a “man that was half ox and an ox that was half man” (73) and a “goat that had intercourse with a woman” (75). Gerald of Wales’ comments reflect a tradition of conceptualizing of the Irish as a base, uncivilized and animalistic people who, if noting else, provide the English with humorous, wondrous bodies to behold. This historic link between humor or entertainment and the Irish body aligns it with nineteenth-century conceptions of the public black body.

*****

As explored in previous chapters, the sexuality purity, or lack there of, of the public woman comes under fire. The potential controversies surrounding the sexuality of the public female body need to be addressed. Through fashioning Seacole as surrogate mother to the British troops, the forces involved in the creation of her image neutralize

Seacole’s sexuality. Montez offers a clear alternative to the de-sexualized female body in the public eye. Montez was widely known as a woman quick to marry and even quicker to divorce. An 18 November 1853 article in London’s the Daily News recounts

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Montez’s continuing antics in San Francisco, noting that she has been “again married, and in regular categorical order again applied for a divorce.” Her husband is identified as Mr. Hall, the late editor of the San Francisco Herald (“California”). A February 1852 note in the Morning Chronicle brings Hayes and Montez into the same conversation.

The Hayes note is brief and innocuous. She is said to be drawing “large crowds” with her performances in Charleston, South Carolina. This sentence is immediately followed by the announcement of Montez’s arrival in Washington, DC on the 8th of February. She is said to have “quite astonished the natives’” and one of the papers said that an

“Iroquois chief, 30 years of age, fell desperately in love with her, and she thinks the

Indian mode of making love far superior to that pursued in the Quakerly City” (“United

States”). Here Hayes and Montez act out their respective roles in the public eye. Hayes is treated with the respect deserving a lady, while Montez is an exoticized anomaly who never fails to find a way to push the boundaries of decency. In this notice, Montez’s affinity for the American-Indian population serves only to heighten her exoticism, linking her with this othered or outside people in a sexual manner feeds pre-existing stereotypes of Montez as a heart-breaking, over-sexed, indecent woman.

Montez’s countless associations with different men clearly prevent her from occupying the same chaste space to which Hayes laid claim. Hayes is continually presented in a manner that stresses her delicate beauty and inherent femininity. Unlike

Montez, she is the perennial lady. An 1851 article in the American Phrenological Journal describes Hayes as “personally prepossessing and lady-like, without being strikingly handsome.” Her features are said to be “noble, her complexion light, her hair a fair auburn, and the expression of her face exceedingly delicate and feminine” (“Catherine

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Hayes,” Oct 1851). Hayes was preceded on the opera circuit by the Swedish star, Jenny

Lind, also known as the “Swedish Nightingale.” Hayes was subsequently forced to cultivate her public image in Lind’s shadow. A 25 October 1851 article in Gleason’s

Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion places Hayes in opposition to Lind who was first brought to the American stage by P.T. Barnum. Lind was 5’3, considered plain, and had a large nose and an introverted disposition. The widespread attention she received from contemporary media came from her enormous talent and vocal range (Walsh 98). Hayes, on the other hand, was known for her delicate beauty as she was as pleasurable to view as she was to hear. The Gleason’s article reads, “There is about the same physical difference between the two ladies as is their vocal performance. Miss Lind presents a full, stout and hearty appearance, while Miss Hayes is of a frail but beautiful mold, possessing a face and bearing of the most poetical delicacy” (“Catherine Hayes,” Oct

1851). Perhaps it is Hayes’s light skin and her pleasing and calm demeanor that make her a less sexually contentious figure. Beyond her seemingly aesthetic purity, Hayes actions are that of a lady; she is a figure worthy of respect. By praising Hayes in Wonderful

Adventures and placing her in direct contrast to Montez unfeminine ways, Seacole prioritizes Hayes lady-like version of celebrity.

*****

Lola Montez is a divisive figure who produces strong opinions among the public.

Montez’s near constant motion and her refusal to settle down and resume her proper domesticated identity fuels this storm of gossip. Montez moved through Europe before

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crossing the ocean and, after a brief pause on the east coast of the United States, journeyed to California. Montez, like Seacole and Hayes, is an anomaly and this unique mobility is ultimately allowed by her eccentric ways and her unique story and her

Othered status as a not quite English body. An American journal relates an account of

Montez’s “manners and customs” while on the West coast of the United States. It begins

“Lola is an inexhaustible mine of eccentricities, and in one way or other, makes everyone talk about her” (“Lola Montez in California”). It also details Montez’s new scheme for making money that includes charging the public a fee to have “conversations” with her and ask her any questions that may have. The article ends by noting that in spite of her apparent cruel treatment at the hands of the public she delights in an increase of that

“celebrity which she runs after with so deplorable perseverance” (“Lola Montez in

California”). Like Seacole, Montez has a complicated relationship with her own celebrity and this final statement reflects the partnership women like Seacole and Montez enter with the public where the arguably welcome attention of the press, both positive and negative, grants them their mobility and social and financial independence.

An August 1856 story in the London Times carries news of Seacole’s appearance at the Royal Guards Regimental Dinner and offers a similar take on Seacole’s own designs to make “everyone talk about her.” Her arrival is said to have “awakened the most rapturous enthusiasm” as the soldiers “not only cheered her, but chaired her around the gardens.” The attention Seacole is said to have received nearly caused her bodily harm were it not for two sergeants of “extraordinary stature” who sought to protect her from the “pressure of the crowd.” Instead of being alarmed by this borderline dangerous attention Seacole does not appear in the “least alarmed” and in fact, “smiled graciously

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and seemed highly gratified” (“26 August 1856”). There is, of course, no way to determine the veracity of the Times account of Seacole reception or reaction to that reception; however, it is clear that Seacole brings with her associations of excitement and heightened attention, and that she is largely believed to bask in the glow of these attentions. Celebrities like Seacole, Hayes and Montez thrive on this attention and it becomes a key component of their public images.

While Seacole’s symbiotic relationship with fame grew out of her heroic deeds in the Crimea, a large part of Montez’s celebrity is fueled by a less gracious public display: the legendary story of Montez whipping of a guard of the Prussian court. Seacole references this encounter in Wonderful Adventures when she cites Montez’s “handsome riding whip” and it appears that Montez spent the majority of her life either speaking back against this incident or fueling it. A notice in the London periodical the Morning

Chronicle dated October 23, 1843 states that Montez “got into trouble by her eccentricity by forcing her way on horseback into the suite of the Emperor of Russia and King of

Prussia” and “assaulted the police in the execution of their duty” (“Berlin, Oct 23”). For this offense she is imprisoned shortly. The columns’ use of the word “eccentricity” highlights how Montez’s public body was conceived. She deviates from expectations and this deviation is the source of her troubles.

On 14 October 1843 Freeman’s Journal and Daily Advertisers out of Dublin states that Montez is in jail and is likely to be for some time for this offense. The article recounts a similar story, stating that on the day of the Grand Review Montez’s horse bucked at the sound of gunfire and rushed closer to the royals. One of the guards ordered her to fall back and hit her horse with his saber. At this act she is said to have struck the

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guard across his face with her whip. The guard filed charges against her which she is said to have replied to by tearing the order in pieces and “throwing it at her feet” (‘”A

Danseuse in a Scrape”), at which point she was led away forcible. The Era out of

London also covers Montez alleged run in with the law, relating the same facts concerning her use of her whip and her impertinence regarding the accusations. The article claims that she was in direct violation of Prussian laws, an offense that carries three to five years of imprisonment in the “House of Correction” (“Berlin,” Oct 1st).

Montez’s behavior is painted as exaggerated and extreme. She does not simply reject the accusations of wrongdoing; she rips the order apart and throws it to the ground.

As reflected in Seacole's comments in Wonderful Adventures, the Bavarian horsewhipping incident follow Montez wherever she traveled. An August 1857 article in the London periodical the Theatrical Journal continues this legacy. While on a train in

New York state traveling from Niagara to Buffalo Montez sat in the baggage car, and

“while thus cosily throwing off from her lips the curling smoke” she is discovered by a conductor who informed her that passengers could not sit the baggage car. She refuses to move, claiming that she had “horsewhipped bigger men than he.” Obviously affected by this brazen woman, the conductor let her sit there and didn’t bother her again. The article concludes, “she rode to Buffalo on the baggage car, and had no occasion to use the whip”

(“Lola Montez on her Travels”). Here Montez is “brazen” and threatens physical violence to any man who attempts to control her. There is little doubt that Montez is an out-spoken and bold woman, and that this sort of behavior would be surprising from a woman, but it is clear that newspapers exaggerate their accounts of the eccentricities.

These exaggerations are part of Montez’s public image and the performance of her

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celebrity. The public wants to hear tales of Montez oversized life and personality and these stories speak to that desire.

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Montez’s legend is also driven by a romance she developed with Ludwig I of

Bavaria. An 1848 article in the popular English periodical Fraser’s Magazine recounts the then infamous romance between Louis I of Bavaria and Lola Montez. The Fraser’s article is written in an attempt to speak back against all the scandalous and unsubstantiated rumors circulating about Montez – including, among others, the assertion that those with political designs against the King took Montez under their employ to gain sway over the King – criticizing the English public for indulging themselves in such base behavior. The critique by Fraser’s reflects a growing fear of the decline of English tastes at mid-century. This decline of English taste is also brought to the forefront of the public consciousness through the aforementioned contemporary fascination with American slave narratives. At this time men and women in the middle and lower classes found themselves with increasing access to commercial culture. This access served to upset the preexisting social orders and categories Victorian society held so dear as these

“uncultivated” readers found themselves, to some degree, determining the content of publications (Fisch 6). Fraser’s comments reflect this attempt to restore proper notions of English taste to a mass public, and the public’s indulgence in the gossip surrounding the infamous Montez is a clear example of a consumer culture’s uncultivated tastes.

Fraser’s ultimately defends Montez against gross allegations of “low and

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unwomanly” impropriety but does admit that she is “high-spirited” (100). The article confirms that the “popular notion of Montez, judging from newspaper paragraphs” is that she is “an embodied fury” and “seizes every occasion to outrage public decency” (98) but suggests that Montez has a gentler side and all is not what meets the eye. The article carries excerpts from the poems Louis I wrote in her honor that reflect a deep love of

Montez and decry a contemporary misunderstanding of her character. One such poem reads, “Against others they have no hate; / It is against thee alone they are enraged; / In thee everything is a crime; / Thy words alone, as deeds, they would punish” (Walsh 144).

Another poem cites “the little who deem themselves great” that “cast [Montez] off as a pariah” (Walsh 144). This poem shows a disconnect between Montez’s public and private body.

Montez reflects P.T. Barnum’s notion of celebrity and the celebrity’s relationship to his or her public. The tactics of the infamous P.T. Barnum illuminate the market forces that fostered Seacole, Montez and Hayes’s fame. Through his pioneering inventions in the development of commercial culture, including the exploitation of the burgeoning periodical press, Barnum “practically invented the modern notion of fame” (Reiss 3).

Barnum cultivated a trick of mass marketing that revolved around the tactic of making consumers feel both good (full) and bad (empty) about what they are buying, as well as making consumers believe the person or product which they are buying, somehow determines who they are. Consumers are made to feel full by seeing a reflection of themselves in the product and empty because they cannot fully possess it. As Joseph

Roach suggests, “To Barnumize means to create the sense of emptiness on which promotion feeds” (47). The ethnic or colonized body offers a perfect opportunity to

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capitalize on this modern notion of name. It is at once something to judge and place oneself alongside (to feel full) and to be mysteriously drawn to because it possesses something the white, middle class consumer could not (to feel empty).

Montez’s high-spirit gave a transatlantic readership something to secretly admire and publicly fear. In Seacole’s own description of Montez she seems to be torn between purely a moral judgment of her character on one hand and a respect for her power on the other (Romero-Cesareo 152). Montez is a strong female character, and perhaps Seacole could not help but somewhat admire the tenacity of another “unprotected” woman like herself. Or perhaps Seacole and her editor had a different strategy in mind when denouncing Montez. Whiteness could bring with it certain restrictions on women in the form of heightened expectations of feminine behavior. Black women could use these expectations in their favor. By focusing attention on to the morally suspect behavior of some of the white women they encounter, the publicly exposed black female body could deflect the gaze away from herself (Steadman 10). Montez’s brazen lack of femininity stands in contrast to Seacole’s “Motherly” virtues. By placing herself in conversation with Montez, Seacole becomes a more desirable celebrity.

After the horsewhipping incident and her passionate if not short-lived romance with the King of Bavaria, her reputation as a woman of loose and questionable morals was cemented. On 15 July 1852 Montez responds in the form of a Letter to the

Editor of the New York Times, to an article in the same publication that identifies Montez as a “brazen prostitute whose virtue has ceased to be saleable” (Montez). Montez demands proof for the editor’s claims and asks him to retract every “calumny and slander” made against her. Specific reference is made to Montez as “homeless wanderer”

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to which she counters that those repeated movements are merely an attempt to “gain an honest livelihood” or “acquire a competence.” And yes, her history to this date has been

“wild, eccentric and unfortunate” as the editor identifies but not in the “guilty” light he attempts to display it (Montez, “Letter to the Editor”). The fact that Montez’s homelessness is constructed as dangerous signals contemporary discomfort with women, regardless of race or class, who refused to be domesticated themselves. Montez’s mobility is something to be feared. As discussed in Chapter 2, Seacole’s construction of her “mobile domesticity” could alleviate this fear. Like Montez, Seacole refuses to stay in one place; but unlike Montez, she carries her home with her.

Montez’s letter is articulate and well argued and concludes with a call for the New

York Times to print her letter and for the Editor to state that he has done her wrong. The

3 August 1852 edition of Dublin’s the Freeman’s Journal also carries this same letter to the editor reflecting the type of transatlantic media coverage that Montez experienced during her life. Montez previously composed letters to the editor, for instance one to the editor of the London Times in March of 1847 hoping to set straight that periodical’s notice of her recent adventures in Bavaria. While these letters very well may have been composed in an effort to correct the rumors circulating about her activities, they also demonstrate that Montez was at least to some degree invested in the maintenance of her public image and her continued presence in the public eye. By constantly working toward establishing the “truth” about her life, Montez insures that she never left the public eye.

In his the Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself, Barnum recalls an interaction with a

Mr Maelzel, a renowned showman that Barnum looked upon as “the greatest father of caterers for public amusement” (156). During this conversation Maelzel stresses the value

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of the press in the art of showmanship and Barnum himself writes extensively about his efforts to keep his employees in news. In order for an exhibit to be successful, the showman had to keep it “fresh in the mind of the public” (Barnum 157). Montez appears to subscribe to this commercial philosophy when it came to her own life.

*****

Like Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures, reviews of Lola Montez’s memoirs appear literary magazines shortly after its publication in 1848. Each review links Montez to the infamous horsewhipping incident at the Bavarian court. A review in the nineteenth century London literary magazine the Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres,

Arts, Sciences refers to the controversy surrounding her ethnic origins, noting that the memoirs reveal the truth about her much debated parentage. The author writes that she was a “lady to whose very existence the excitement of a public life seemed necessary”

(“Sketches of Society”). This final comment reflects the common conception that Montez sought and relished in her fame. A second review in the Victorian periodical the Critic offers unfavorable reviews in terms of literary merit, stating that it “expected wit, or sprightliness, or even a lively, dashing style – a flourish of the literary horsewhip – and we have been invited to a sorry banquet of old facts, old common-places, old anecdotes, and old moral sermons” (Review of Lectures of Lola Montez). It goes on to call into question the authorial authenticity of the text and calls for Montez to confess that she had one of those “conventionally clever and well-advertised universal geniuses” compile her book to “free herself from the stigma of having compiled a very dull and commonplace book” (Review of Lectures of Lola Montez). The Critic claims to have received

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information on good authority that the text was actually written by a “versatile American gentlemen” the Reverend C. Chauncey Burr, a professor of elocution who was called upon to produce the book. (“Review of Lectures of Lola Montez”). The same Burr wrote an extensive biography of Montez in which the aforementioned poems from Louis I appear. The review does not intend to question Montez’s intellectual capacity to write the text, but rather draws upon her reputation for wit and excitement to propose that such an infamous woman could not have produced such a commonplace text. Later versions of the text attribute the Lectures of Lola Montez, including her Autobiography, to Burr suggesting that Burr played at least some role in the compilation of Montez’s lectures and her personal story. The question of the authorial authenticity as it relates to Montez’s

Lectures comes in the form of a backhanded compliment: Montez is far too witty and exciting to author such a boring work

As noted in the Introduction, reviewers of Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures took a similar stance regarding its authorial authenticity. Like those reviews of Montez’s text, critics did not wish to suggest that Seacole’s life story was a fabrication. There is no doubt that Seacole and Montez lived the lives they laid claim too; however, it appears to be a widely held suspicion that both women had at least some assistance in writing their autobiographies. Reviewers of Wonderful Adventures do not offer a concrete explanation as to why they question Seacole’s complete autonomy in the production of her narrative; however, as explored in the Introduction, Seacole’s status as a free woman of color independently authoring a work may have raised some doubt in the minds of her readers as her audience would have been familiar with black authored slave narratives that bore the stamp of their editors. This overlap in the language of the reviews of Seacole and

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Montez’s works then begs the questions why both of these women were denied a role as agents in the dissemination of their own stories? This refusal to assign Seacole and

Montez clear, identifiable voices is a further manifestation of the public’s need to control and package the celebrity to meet its own expectations and to confirm its own stereotypes.

Montez died in 1861 at the age of 40, twenty years before Seacole and in the same year as Hayes. Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic carried news of her untimely death on January 17, 1861. A 13 Feb 1861 death announcement in the Belfast Newsletter notes that the “pretty picaroon woman” died of “paralysis, followed by pneumonia.” At mid-century the term “picaroon” was used to describe the behavior of a “rogue,” an

“outlaw” or a “scoundrel” (“Picaroon”). The picaro, before becoming associated with the picaresque novel, referred to a “subaltern subject attached in conditions of servitude to a powerful figure” (Cesareo 121). The picaresque novel later adopts this term to describe a subject of the lower classes who uses his or her wit to survive as they travel through societies. In order to survive, the picaro must adopt a variety of masks and at times suspend her values in order to survive (Cesareo 121). In addition to being a “rogue” and a “scoundrel,” Montez is a woman whose wit and charms were continually celebrated by both her critics and her admirers. She becomes a living manifestation of that Othered subject who captivated readers in contemporary literature.

Mary Seacole is a subaltern subject who can be read as a nineteenth century

“picaroon woman.” But while both Seacole and Montez found themselves attached in a condition of quasi servitude to a mid-century reading public, Seacole is attached both physically and metaphorically to a much more powerful figure: the British army. Notices

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of Seacole’s death link her to the British army, explicitly asking the public not to forget the brave woman, who risked her life to serve the men of England. Seacole’s name is rarely uttered without reference to her heroic deeds in the Crimea, and, indeed, her very self-worth and claim to the attention of the English public is dependent on these deeds.

The announcement of Montez’s death in the Belfast Newsletter goes on to recount some of her infamous adventures and confirms her reputation for ill repute, stating that after she was driven out of Bavaria, she “became notorious, again and again, in meaner ways” (“Lola Montez”). Her association with licentious behavior is touched upon by stating that with the “aid of her impudence, her gypsy prettiness, and her mother-wit, and her horse-whip” she attracted men of all different types as she travelled across the

Continent and America (“Lola Montez,” Feb 1861). The notices of her death are either neutral or somewhat complimentary in their opinions of her life. She is identified as a

“remarkable woman” who struggled with her fair share of “ups and downs” in life. The notices correctly identify Montez as being a woman of Moorish-Spanish and Irish descent, most likely as a reflection of Montez’s comments in her autobiography. A death notice posted in the Literary Gazette begins by stating that the “extraordinary career of this highly-gifted and eccentric woman has at length come to an end” (“Death of Lola

Montez”). It reads, “Say what we will, the world encouraged, flattered, and rewarded her vice, until, prematurely old and suspended by more fashionable favourites, she became a castaway, and has gone down to the grave a penitent and a pauper in obscurity and solitude, in New York” (“Death of Lola Montez”). The notice reflects a note of pity that the once famous Montez passed from this life in relative obscurity; it acknowledges the role the public played in the creation of the very celebrity they claimed to deplore.

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Like Montez, periodical notices of Mary Seacole’s death are marked by a notable desire to focus on the most positive and least controversial elements of her identity.

Seacole passed away on the 14th of May 1881 in mid 70s, with an estate worth around

2600 pounds (“Wills and Bequests”). A large majority of this money presumably came from a royally sanctioned Seacole fund founded in 1867. Many newspapers in England,

Scotland and Ireland carry news of the “Death of a Distinguished Crimean Nurse.” The death notices are short and to the point, demonstrating that Seacole’s celebrity, like that belonging to Montez, had faded significantly by the time of her death. The aforementioned Daily Gleaner articles also exemplify this drop from the public eye through their attempt to bring Seacole back to public consciousness only after the death of her sister and in the wake of the praise of Florence Nightingale. All Seacole’s death notices repeat the same language: It is noted that trustees of her fund would like the public to know of her passing. She is said to have greatly distinguished herself as a nurse during the Crimean War, and a general overview of her heroics are recounted. She is identified as a “Creole, born in Jamaica” who “bequeathed all her property to persons of title” (“Death of a Distinguished Crimean Nurse”).

The word Creole is a culturally loaded team with several definitions but widely used to refer to person born and naturalized in the West Indies. The name typically is used to note origin rather than color (“Creole”). In its use the term Creole presupposes a situation where society is caught up in a colonial arrangement with a metropolitan power and where “society is multiracial but organized for the benefit of a minority of European origin” (Brathwaite xv). Seacole also refers to herself as a Creole in Wonderful

Adventures, writing in Chapter I “I am a Creole, and have good Scotch blood coursing

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through my veins” (11). She traces her “energy and activity” to this particular heritage and took a great investment in her status as a woman of mixed-racial heritage. The British press’s use of the word Creole reflects the language of Wonderful Adventures and demonstrates a continued need to create a distance between Seacole and the enslaved and completely black body if the situation so demanded. At the moment of her passing, the more, potentially negative, cultural images associated with Seacole are overlooked.

A May 1886 edition of London’s Graphic offers a glimpse into prevailing popular notions of colored or “Negro” life in late nineteenth-century Jamaica at the time of

Seacole’s death. The illustration carries nine pictures of “Coloured Life in Jamaica” and purports to offer a visual testimony of the life of the black population of the island. One image labeled “A Village Belle” presents a dark-skinned, visually pleasing woman in a white dress and a straw hat. The brief notice that accompanies this sketches describes the woman in the following way: “The young ladies of the African race are not, according to our own standards, renowned for their beauty, but there is an exception to every rule, as in this case” (“Negro Life in Jamaica”). A series of three images offers a caricature of the over 15,000 Jamaican men who traveled to Panama to help in the construction of the

Canal. The first shows a dark-skinned man, barefoot with a large bag balanced on his head. He is said to be emigrating to Colon to “make his fortune.” The next sketch, with the caption “He wished he had stayed at Home,” shows the same man deep in an exhausted sleep on a boat. The final image reads “Returned: 13 Months After” and presents an image of the man dressed in the finest clothes, with a top hat and a parasol. A small boy, carrying all the man’s new possessions, follows him. The commentary on the picture explains that these men are “constantly returning to show themselves to their

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friends. Most of their wages go in shoddy garments and watches which are made for show and glitter and not real work” (“Negro Life in Jamaica”). The remaining sketches, such as “Romeo and Juliet” and “Wrestling with a Kingston Bus,” continue to present black Jamaicans in this comical light. When given a chance to become the modern citizen

Seacole so longed to be, they squander their wages and cannot become responsible members of a capitalist society. Their ways of life are primitive and their women are plain. It is in this discourse on the usefulness and worth of the African body in Jamaica that the famous mixed-raced Jamaican took her last breath.

*****

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the definition of the word “eccentric” from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries identifying it as an adjective characterizing something that is “regulated by no self-control…. Irregular, anomalous, proceeding by no known method, capricious” (“Eccentric”). A person is labeled

“eccentric” when he or she is found to be “deviating from usual methods, odd, [or] whimsical” (“Eccentric”). The 27 November 1856 edition of the London Times features a brief mention of Mary Seacole’s financial troubles and also includes significant notice announcing the death of an “Eccentric Clergyman” – the Rev. Henry Dickinson, the

Rector of West Retford in Nottinghamshire. The Rev was a graduate of St Peter’s

College, Cambridge and married a woman of considerable wealth. In spite of this, on the occasion of his sudden death his house was found to be in a state of great disrepair: “The windows had not been cleaned for 20 years; the window blinds, which had never been

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drawn up during all that period, were rotten with age and dirt, and were patched up with pieces of newspaper” (“Eccentric Clergyman”). The story goes on to list the variety of ways in which the Reverend lived in a shocking state of squalor for a man of his position.

In spite of this squalor, he was found to be worth between 40,000 and 50,000 pounds, which he bequeathed to his wife, at the time of his death. The Reverend was also said to be “remarkable for his eccentric and penurious habits” throughout his life. He never kept a domestic servant, ate very sparingly and dressed poorly while not on the pulpit.

Despite living the majority of his life in a rural midland town, the death of this simple clergyman receives a rather substantial note in the London Times because he was

“eccentric;” he deviated from the “usual methods” attached to a man of his wealth and status. At a time of slippery social and ethnic identities it became increasingly important for English citizens to create a set definition of normal and as this particular note – including its continued use of the label “eccentric” – demonstrates, those figures and bodies that lived outside of these barriers garnered increasing public attention. Mary

Seacole and Lola Montez, and to some extent Catherine Hayes, find themselves thrust into the public eye because they are different. Not only did they, like the departed

Reverend, function outside the norms of proper behavior expected of their class, race and gender, but they also use their deviant status as a point of entry into a blocked public space. The “eccentric” could mean big business, but entry into the public eye often came with a price.

i For further information see Benjamin Reiss’. "P.T. Barnum, Joice Heth and Antebellum Spectacles of Race," American Quarterly. 51.1 (March 1999) and The Showman and the Slave. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001. ii Beginning in September of 1845 an airborne fungus began to rot the potato crops of Irish farmers. This collapse of Ireland’s largest crop led to a period of mass starvation and emigration, resulting in the

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depletion of Ireland’s population by almost 2 million. For a more detailed explanation of the lead up to and aftermath of the Irish Potato Famine see Cormac O’ Grada’s The Great Irish Famine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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Coda: The Modern Mary Seacole

“Yes, Mary Seacole was black. So what?” ~ Alex Massie, Spectator, 2 October 2009

“Everyday brings a new act of vandalism against the past,” writes Theodore

Dalrymple in the Summer 1999 edition of the City Journal.i In his article titled “All Our

Pomp of Yesterday,” Dalrymple, a writer and self-described compassionate conservative, laments what he sees as the “passing of the good old days.” He compares the “decline” of Britain to Lesch Nyhan syndrome, a “rare metabolic disorder in which the afflicted person starts to eat – literally to eat – his own flesh” (Dalrymple). Included in this act of

“vandalism” against the past is the recent rise of the cult of Mary Seacole:

Last week, the union representing most nurses in Britain's public hospitals

announced that henceforth Florence Nightingale should be demoted as a symbol

of British nursing. Never mind her heroic role in establishing the nursing

profession worldwide, her sacrifices, her devotion, her indomitable force of

character. The union's annual conference voted overwhelmingly that she

"represented the negative and backward elements of nursing" and suggested that

she be replaced iconographically by Mary Seacole, a Jamaican herbalist who also

went to the Crimea to nurse British soldiers. After all, wasn't Mary Seacole more

representative of multicultural Britain? Wasn't she the victim of Victorian

prejudice? (In fact she was decorated by Queen Victoria herself.) By contrast,

Florence Nightingale came from a white, moneyed, Protestant background,

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"unrepresentative of the ethnic mix in today's National Health Service,"

according to a union member. "All over Eastern Europe, statues of Lenin are

being taken off their pedestals, dismantled, and pulled off to be cut up," the same

member said. "It is in the same vein that the nursing profession must start to

exorcise the myth of Florence Nightingale." (Dalrymple)

Dalrymple asserts that it is this vein of thinking that “perfectly capture[s] the bad temper of our times.” Embracing Seacole requires the erasure of Nightingale’s contributions to the history of nursing; in the face of a new multicultural society, Britain is discrediting its heroes from the past. The celebration of Mary Seacole becomes a vehicle for a loss of

British traditions and values.

Dalrymple is not the only public British voice to create this link between the rise of Seacole and the decline of ‘traditional’ British values and heroes. Attacking what he sees as the blunders of both the Tory and the Labour Parties, in a February 2009 article in the London Times the conservative British columnist Ron Liddle demonstrates the connection between Mary Seacole and a new and modern England. Critiquing then Tory leader and now Prime Minister’s David Cameron’s pledge to “try” to send his children through England’s state school system, Riddle refers to a fictional school called the

“Mary Seacole City Academy for Advanced Textspeak and Stabbing.” With this name,

Liddle lumps together with current prominent challenges facing school-aged children: the reduction of the English language to the “speak” of text messages and the rising number of stabbings. Stabbings in the UK reached a record level in 2008 with on average of five people a week being killed by a knife or a sharp instrument. As of December 2008 there were 277 fatal stabbings in England and Wales (Ford). In Liddle’s eyes, modern youth

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are troubled with a rise in violence, a decline in intellectual standards and, of course, the infiltration of the cult of Mary Seacole.

Mary Seacole’s public figure is not merely fodder for the political gripes of adults.

In the last five years Seacole has become a mainstay in the English classroom. In 1999 the UK’s Department of Education and Employment published “Programmes of Study and Attainment Goals” that include the study of Mary Seacole as part of the UK National

Curriculum for primary school students. Placing Seacole and Florence Nightingale under the umbrella of Victorian Britain and the Crimean War, the Curriculum suggests that instructors use the two woman as a way to understand the impact of significant individuals and events on the course of history.ii The BBC offers sample lesson plans for instructors looking for tips on how to incorporate Seacole into their classrooms. One activity suggests that students make charts that compare Seacole’s life with that of

Florence Nightingale’s. Another activity suggests that instructors use Seacole to introduce the idea of news and newspapers to their children (BBC, Famous People,

Teachers’ Area). The Florence Nightingale Museum also produces a “Mary Seacole

Resource Pack” launched for the Mary Seacole bicentenary in London in 2005. The pack contains six laminated images and the reverse side of each image contains questions, facts and games for the classroom.

Seacole also has a very prominent position in the national life and history of her place of birth, Jamaica. An engraving of her profile marks the entrance to the National

Library of Jamaica in Kingston and Jamaica.com named her to its “Jamaican Hall of

Fame.”iii In 2008 the Hon. Olivia Grange, Member of Parliament and Minister of

Information, Youth, Culture and Sports, spoke before the Jamaican Parliament on what

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she labels “Brand Jamaica.” In her speech Grange groups Seacole together with famous, internationally known Jamaican figures such as Marcus Garvey, Claude

McKay, Bob Marley and Norman Manley who offer, as Grange sees it, an opportunity to market Jamaica to tourists as well as foster a stronger image of self for Jamaicans.

These figures aid her in accomplishing her task as the Minister of Information, Youth,

Culture and Sports, which she describes as the creation of a “platform for the further definition of the Jamaican character that will allow [Jamaicans] to become the best we can be and maximize our capacity to learn from all that we are” (Grange). Seacole is part of a platform to advance Jamaican causes and bring more prosperity and pride to the country of her birth.

This debate concerning the place and use of Mary Seacole in the continuing and past histories of various cultures is not confined to the realm of politics or popular culture. Wonderful Adventures appears on the syllabi of courses ranging from Nursing and English to hybrid courses in History and African-American Studies.iv Seacole, an

Afro-Caribbean with no record of visiting the United States, increasingly appears in

African-American Studies classrooms and scholarly journals where Seacole is read alongside the Nancy Prince and the formerly Mary Prince. This varied use of Seacole’s narrative and history demonstrates the continuing consumption and mobility of “Mother

Seacole.” Seacole’s wide range of scholarly applicability can be troubling for some scholars who worry that forcing Seacole underneath the umbrella of various disciplines can have a limiting affect on a clear analysis of Seacole’s multi-layered identity. Sandra

Gunning cautions that scholarly attempts to place Seacole’s narrative in either a strictly

British or American setting has created a bifurcated response to her life and writing,

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“obscuring just how much her nineteenth century identity was a product of a variety of intertwined global and regional power struggles over land, power and colonial control”

(Gunning 950). While I sympathize with this fear over the reductive potential of limited scholarly work, I counter that Seacole’s critical mobility is merely emblematic of her story and the usefulness of her body that she so longed for within the pages of Wonderful

Adventures.

Mary Seacole is not a figure trapped in the pages of history books. She is alive and well, and taking on new meanings in the public eye. Her biography is one that continues to be written, both by Seacole and those that have taken up her image in service of a cause that extends beyond the story of an extraordinary Jamaican woman with an impulse to heal and nurture. To those living in the United Kingdom Seacole has, for better or for worse, come to represent their expanding multicultural society. In October

2009 article in the London publication the Spectator the Scottish columnist raises the important question that commentators on both sides of the political spectrum appear to afraid to broach: “Yes, Mary Seacole was black. So what?” What forces are at work in modern UK society that have transformed Seacole’s blackness into perhaps her most important accomplishment? And, furthermore, why is Mary Seacole the new face of

British multiculturalism? Would not famous black British figures like Olaudah Equiano or Mary Prince – both of whom were ranked among the top five in the aforementioned list of “Greatest Black Britons” – make just as powerful and efficient representatives for a new multicultural Britain? Although I raise these questions I am not sure I can answer them completely. Part of Seacole’s allure is the mystery that surrounds her life and fame, and her recent ascent to the forefront of the public consciousness as a representative of

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multicultural Britain is the latest layer of this mystery. However, her fame can be explained, in part, by recent trends in British intellectualism and pop culture.

The year 2007 marked the bicentennial anniversary of Britain’s 1807 Slave

Trade Act. Although slavery itself still remained legal in the British colonies, the Slave

Trade Act abolished the slave trade in the British Empire. As the bicentennial approached the British began the process of reflecting on the role they played in New

World slavery and its subsequent exploitation of the black body. In the process of what the historian Ross Wilson identifies as “remembering to forget” the British commemorated the abolition of the slave trade with various public displays and events.

In March 2007, the BBC broadcast “Abolition Season,” contributing to the production of

“media memories” surrounding this event by presenting various television and radio programs on the history of slavery and the slave trade (Wilson). WilberforceCentral.org, a website created to commemorate the 200 anniversary of the Slave Trade Act, sponsored events like conferences, specialized museum exhibits and film viewings throughout 2007 with the expressed purpose of celebrating “William Wilberforce and the Clapham Group”v as “leaders in abolishing the slave trade” and examining the

“legacy of Wilberforce and the Clapham Group today in dealing with today’s issues and making a better world” (Wilberforce Central).

To commemorate means “to call to remembrance” and to “mark an occasion with a ceremony or a celebration” (“Commemorate”). The passing of the Slave Trade

Act becomes a moment that is called forth from history and recognized as a triumph of

British values. In the years leading up to 2007, the United Kingdom came together to remember those that suffered and to acknowledge the role it played in that suffering, but

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also to commemorate an end. A year before the United States and 11 years before

France and the Netherlands, Great Britain abolished the slave trade and ended its dirty history in the sale of human flesh. The lead role Britain took in abolition of the slave trade and the in practice of slavery has become a source of pride for the United Kingdom as they restructure their relationship to the black body.

Britain’s act of remembering the role it played in New World slavery emerges from a “culture of abolitionism,” from the moment slavery ended, not from the moments it oppressed and murdered generations of African men, women and children (Oldfield

2). This veiled celebration of the triumph of Britain’s morality became a springboard from which the United Kingdom can explore and flaunt current “multiculturalism” and racial and ethnic diversity. Mary Seacole has become the ambassador for the new and improved United Kingdom. She is a black figure in British history who saw great success, but she also was never enslaved. Seacole offers the British an opportunity to discuss the history of black men and women in their country without having to directly confront the horrors of slavery, focusing instead on slavery’s end. Seacole’s is a ‘feel- good’ story, and placing her atop the list of the “Greatest Black Britons” allows the

British to feel positive about the history of “Black Britons” in their country.

Increased interested in Mary Seacole in academic circles from the 1980s to the present day can be linked to the work of scholars like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy and the rise of the notion of “Black British Cultural Studies” as explored in texts like Black

British Cultural Studies: A Reader (1996) edited by Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara and Ruth H. Lindeborg. Baker, Diawara and Lindeborg define “Black British Cultural

Studies” as a “still evolving field” with a wide and not easily defined scope, engaged in

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the process of “defining role in both practical and academic discussions of race and representation, colonial and post-colonial discourse and black expressive cultural theory”

(2). An increased interest in Seacole’s life and work grows out of this developing academic field. The field of Cultural Studies developed alongside and in conjunction with the work of feminist scholars exploring the place of women of color in the cultural and history of the UK. Texts like Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe’s

The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain (1985) and Black British

Feminism: A Reader edited by Heidi Safia Mirza (1997) created a space for black, female voices like Mary Seacole’s to thrive in the academy.

Throughout this dissertation I have demonstrated the mobility of Seacole’s public image and the role Seacole, her editor and the contemporary press played in developing the figure of “Mary Seacole, the Crimean heroine.” The story of Mary Seacole’s life is one of performance, a performance, with many actors and players, which continues to develop to meet the needs of a changing audience. My goal is not to draw a line between myth and reality, but rather dissect the meanings of the various perceptions and needs of the consumer public that created the image of Mother Seacole. Seacole’s body and image continue to be exploited to serve the needs of particular populations at certain historical moments. Seacole’s black, female body was, and one could affectively argue continues to be, a pawn in a white, patriarchal society. As Errol Miller suggests, the psychological legacy of patriarchy ensures that the “enshrined notions of masculinity and femininity in language, culture, beliefs, customs, stereotypes, occupations, rituals, and indeed every facet of social intercourse” continue to exist well beyond the forces that led to their creation (202). Seacole wrote within these patriarchal forces as well as within the legacy

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of New World slavery and the options it left available to a black woman. But, while the black woman becomes a pawn in the white man’s game, she is lifted to a social status that allows her to compromise that very game; the forces of oppression can lead to liberation and “patriarchy’s traditional associations between gender and power,” and in the case of

Mary Seacole race, are “contradicted and eventually confused” (Miller 204).

*****

In May of 2010 the Florence Nightingale Museum (FNM) reopened after undergoing a complete renovation, including a revamping of the Mary Seacole exhibit.

Visitors to the museum are supplied with a personal stethoscope which they can place on various sites on the museum wall and hear information about Nightingale’s life, the

Crimean War and the history of nursing. The FNM now divides Nightingale’s story into three pavilions: the “Gilded Cage,” detailing her early years and family life; the

“Crimea,” explaining her work during the Crimean War; and “Reform and Inspire,” focusing on her later life and work for health care reform. According Caroline

Worthington, the Director of the Florence Nightingale Museum, the pavilions are

“constructed so that Nightingale’s story is told on the inside while the historical context is set out around the outside.” In addition to detailing Nightingale’s life, the FNM offers permanent and rotating exhibitions on the history of nursing, titled “Hospital Voices;” an art instillation by the UK artist Susan MacMurray, inspired by Nightingale’s theory of miasmavi and an exhibition dedicated to the history of Mary Seacole. The Mary Seacole exhibit along with information about Alexis Soyer lies on the outside ring of the museum,

191

establishing an element of the historical context for Nightingale’s life and work.

The Seacole exhibit offers a specially commissioned film that runs for six minutes and its narrated by Helen Rappaport, an English writer and historian and an author of a study of women in the Crimean War. The museum removed the replica bonnets and the hat stand was replaced with a drawer that visitors are encouraged to open and find examples of the herbs Seacole’s would have used in her remedies. Visitors can feel and smell “vanilla pods” and “rhubarb powder” as they read the museum’s explanations of how Seacole would have used the various herbs in her work (Worthington). Visitors are no longer offered the opportunity to become Seacole but there remains an element of

Seacole’s life that can still be accessed, one that can literally be touched by men, women and children living over 100 years after her death.

Employing Mary Loiuse Pratt’s term “contact zone,” James Clifford examines how museums function as sites of colonial encounters. Using the Portland Museum of

Art’s collection of Northwest Coast Indians as a case study, Clifford teases out the political and cultural meanings embedded in the common appearance of a seemingly innocuous collection of artifacts from one culture as another displays them. The culture on display has often been marginalized or exploited by the one doing the displaying.

Clifford argues that when we begin to see museums as contact zones, their “organizing structure as a collection becomes an ongoing historical, political, and moral relationship – a power-charged set of exchanges, or push and pull” (30). The revamping of the Mary

Seacole exhibit is representative of this push and pull. The United Kingdom has taken admirable steps to recognize Seacole’s place in British history; she is more than Creole woman with the brightly colored bonnets. However, she remains an accessible hero. Her

192

biography is an extended performance, molding to meet the needs of both the speaker who tells the story and the audience that listens.

In an analysis of the relationship between memory and performance, Joseph

Roach recalls the words of Ralph Ellison: “That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; of that which we hope to be” (qtd in Roach

33). The role Mary Seacole has come to play in the modern culture of the United

Kingdom more fully represents public fears and aspirations surrounding what the UK is or what it will be, than an objective analysis of the role Mary Seacole played in British history. Roach goes on to claim, “Like performance, memory speaks on both a quotation and invention, an improvisation on borrowed themes, with claims on the future as well as the past” (Roach 33). The Florence Nightingale Museum, the pages of Wonderful

Adventures and the periodicals from Seacole’s time to the present offer an image and a memory of both Seacole’s life and the geographical and cultural spaces through which she moved. Mary Seacole’s public image throughout history is both a “quotation and invention” built on a foundation of historical events and molded to fit the changing needs of her various audiences and how those audiences view their presents and their futures.

As Roach argues, “selective memory requires public enactments of forgetting, either to blur the obvious discontinuities, misalliances, and ruptures or, more desperately, to exaggerate them in order to mystify a previous Golden Age, now lapsed” (3).

Mary Seacole passed away in 1881; in 2011, 130 years will have passed since her death, yet she arguably finds herself more popular than ever. Through acts of memory and forgetting, Mary Seacole public story brings to light the anxieties surrounding race and gender held by the modern United Kingdom as well as and the transgressive power

193

of marginalized peoples. As a result of her fame Seacole becomes a site onto which others can map themselves (Paravisini- Gebert 83). A shift in the place of the black, female body in British public consciousness creates a shift in the meanings and values attached to Seacole’s public image. In Wonderful Adventures Mary Seacole states, “I wish to be useful all my life.” Through her unique geographic, social and cultural mobility created and allowed by her extraordinary life story and her hybrid identity, I believe Mary Seacole has been and continues to be one of the most useful figures in

British history..

i The City Journal is an urban policy magazine published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a New York based conservative think tank with a mission to “develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility.” The City Journal describes itself as a “quarterly magazine of urban affairs with a team of international journals and commentators writing on a wide range of policy issues. ii For further information on the details of the United Kingdom’s National Curriculum see the National Curriculum website http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/ iii See Margaret Bailey’s “Jamaican Hall Of Fame: Mary Seacole, Jamaican Nurse in the Crimean War” Jamaica.com 1 July 2005. iv I ran a simple Google search of “Mary Seacole syllabus” in September of 2010 and found Seacole’s name appearing on courses such as “Nursing 508: Policies, Politics and Change” at Saint Joseph’s College of Maine, “African-American Studies/History 330: African and African American Linkages” at the University of Wisconsin, “History 364: History of Medicine and Public Health” at Indiana University- Purdue University, and “English 352: Gender and Literature” at California Lutheran University among many others. v The Clapham Group or the Clapham Sect was a group of evangelical Christians prominent in England at the turn of the nineteenth century who were active in the abolitionist cause. Wilberforce was a member of the Clapham group. For further information on Wilberforce Central see www.wilberforcecentral.org. vi Nightingale’s theory of miasma was inspired by her belief that disease was the product of “bad air.” Nightingale details this theory in her Notes on Nursing (1859). For further information see Stephen Halliday’s “Death and miasma in Victorian London: an obstinate belief.” British Medical Journal. 22 December 2001.

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