IN AUTUMN OF 1854, Mary Jane Grant Seacole traveled to England from Jamaica and “laid…pertinacious siege” to the official and private residences of Sidney Herbert, Secretary-at-War, hoping to secure a post as hospital nurse in the Crimea. Thwarted in her attempts to see the Secretary, Seacole applied to his wife, Elizabeth Herbert, who informed her “that the full complement of nurses had been secured” (Seacole 78, 79). Seacole made one last effort, meeting this time “with one of Miss Nightingale's companions”; this woman, she reports, “gave me the same reply [as Mrs. Herbert], and I read in her face the fact, that had there been a vacancy, I should not have been chosen to fill it” (79). These interlocutors rejected her, Seacole implies, on account of her colored skin (her mother was Jamaican, her father Scottish), but English prejudice did not keep the “doctress” (as she termed herself) from the front.
In January 1855, Seacole arrived in Crimea, where she tended to injured and ill soldiers and opened the “British Hotel,” a restaurant and store that catered to the troops. One medical officer speaks in his memoir of making
the acquaintance of a celebrated person, Mrs. Seacole, a coloured woman, who, out of the goodness of her heart and at her own expense, supplied hot tea to the poor sufferers [wounded men being transported from the peninsula to the hospital at Scutari] while they were waiting to be lifted into the boats.
…She did not spare herself if she could do any good to the suffering soldiers. In rain and snow, in storm and tempest, day after day she was at her self-chosen post, with her stove and kettle, in any shelter she could find, brewing tea for all who wanted it, and they were many. Sometimes more than 200 sick would be embarked in one day, but Mrs. Seacole was always equal to the occasion. (Reid 13–14)
She won respect for her medical skill and prospered as an entrepreneur until the declaration of peace rendered her stock obsolete, bankrupting her. Returning to England, Seacole sought to revitalize her flagging fortunes by writing a memoir, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), that capitalized on and sought more firmly to establish her status as “a Crimean heroine!” (Seacole 76). Styling herself the “Mother” of the British troops, Seacole coded her entrepreneurial ventures and medical work in the Crimea as maternal labor, positioning the soldiers who were her customers and patients as figurative children.
Describing her initial desire to travel to the front, Seacole speaks of the “delight [I] should…experience if I could be useful to my own ‘sons’” (75). Alexis Soyer, the French chef whose memoir of the Crimean war appeared in the same year as Wonderful Adventures, provides perhaps the most striking examples of the persistence with which Seacole claimed figurative kinship with the men at the front. On meeting him, he recounts, Seacole cried out “Who is my new son?” When she learns his name, she replies, “God bless me, my son…” (231), announcing that “‘all those fine fellows you see here are my Jamaican sons–are you not?'’… ‘We are, Mrs. Seacole, and a very good mother you have been to us'’” (232), one answers. (Seacole terms these men her “Jamaican sons” because she had known them in Jamaica, where some soldiers fighting in the Crimea had been stationed previously.) Soyer reports two additional instances during this brief meeting of Seacole's allusions to her “sons,” and she not only identifies herself as standing in the position of a mother vis à vis the soldiers but exhaustively documents soldiers' recognition of this relation, citing multiple instances when others refer to her as “Mother.” Her claim to the title is further ratified by independent accounts.1
As Seacole travels to the front, she alludes to two instances when men hail her as “Mother,” once at Gibraltar and once in the hospital at Scutari, which she visits overnight. In the former incident, she is accosted thus: “Why, bless my soul…if this is not our good old Mother Seacole!” When she explains her presence in Gibraltar and her intentions to the two men, whom she knew in Jamaica, the following exchange ensues:
“And you are going to the front…?”
“Why not, my sons?–won't they be glad to have me there?”
“By Jove! yes, mother….” (84)
In an 1857 letter to Punch, Seacole claims the journal itself as a figurative son:
Mother Seacole loves to acknowledge the kindness shown her by her sons, whether in black or red coats, and hastens to assure Punch that she has long felt a mother's affection for him. For she remembers a time when a word of cheer and encouragement broke like a ray of golden sunlight through the gloom of a suffering army, and that word Punch never failed to give her soldier sons. (“Our Own Vivandière”)
Finally, published memoirs (Soyer's Culinary Campaign) and private papers (Calder's diary, Cattell's unpublished memoir) confirm that Seacole was known as “Mother.”
However, while the autobiography repeatedly invokes a maternal persona it remains silent about the biological daughter who appears to have accompanied Seacole to the Crimea. While Soyer's account establishes Seacole's claim to figure as a mother to the troops, it also troubles her self-representation as a strictly figurative mother by mentioning “Miss Sally Seacole.” Soyer identifies this girl as Seacole's daughter and quotes her calling out “Mother, mother!” to Seacole (269). The girl, variously termed “Sally” and “Sarah,” appears more than once in Soyer's memoir. He refers to her as “the Egyptian beauty, [Mrs. Seacole's] daughter Sarah,” “swear[s] by [her] blue eyes and black hair” (435) and insists that she “richly deserves the title of the Dark, instead of Fair, Maid of the Eastern War” (436). Wonderful Adventures makes no mention of this child, and, in their preface to the British edition, editors Ziggi Alexander and Audrey Dewjee argue that “Soyer was probably mistaken about the relationship,” although they acknowledge that “it is odd that Mrs. Seacole makes no reference to Sarah in her autobiography” (43n 22). Critics have largely ignored the single published reference to the girl.2
Hawthorne and Gunning are the exceptions.
William Menzies Calder, an assistant surgeon to the 49th regiment, which was stationed in the Crimea, echoes the French chef's claim. Calder recorded in his diary that “the celebrated black lady Mrs. Secole [sic]…has a daughter about 16, called Sarah, a great character too” (115). Because Soyer traveled widely in the Crimea, the peripatetic nature of his travels may raise doubts about his ability to identify with any degree of certainty the relationship between the two women. And yet Calder, whose diary refers to “Secole” several times, was stationed within a few miles of her store for a minimum of eight and a half months (his extant diary covers the period from 1 July 1855 to 18 March 1856). It is unlikely that he, too, was mistaken about the way the relation between Seacole and her young companion was understood by the community at the front.
Although several of the essays written about Seacole since the autobiography's republication (in Britain in 1984 and in the United States in 1988) analyze her strategic use of a maternal persona, they focus primarily on her claim to figure as the mother of British soldiers and only two mention Sarah.3
Alexander and Dewjee (1984) and Andrews (1988), respectively, edited and wrote introductions to British and American editions of Seacole's text. Since 1992, it has been the subject of essays by Paquet, Robinson, Smith, Fish, McKenna, Hawthorne, and Gunning, and of chapters in books by Judd, Gikandi, Paravisini-Gebert, and Paquet. Paquet, Robinson, Gunning, and Fish pay particular attention to the question of Seacole's maternal persona, and Hawthorne and Gunning discuss Sarah.
Building on Simon Gikandi's and Evelyn Hawthorne's claims that Seacole fashioned a hybrid identity, I show how the text appeals by turn to a range of apparently incompatible maternal ideals, juxtaposing English and Jamaican, middle- and working-class, and black, mixed-race, and white mothering practices. The essay has two purposes: first, to examine the range, composition, and effects of the hybrid maternal identity Seacole claimed in Wonderful Adventures; then, to consider why, given this unorthodox textual persona, the existence of a biological daughter struck the autobiographer as inassimilable to the written account of her life.
SEACOLE, OF COURSE, was not the only nurse in the Crimea who was seen as a maternal figure. Nurses were regularly associated with mothers and were aware of the association. One nurse observed that the Turks “call us Mother” (Leaves from the Annals 180), while another meditated on the significance of the association:
We often thought it curious that the last words of a great number of the men were of their mothers, though many of them must have left a wife and children. We speculated whether this resulted from the fact of our being elderly women, and therefore bringing the memory of this parent more vividly before their failing faculties; or whether it was true that a man's highest, strongest, most enduring earthly affection is his love for his mother. (Goodman 108)
Amy Robinson spells out the argument that Seacole makes, namely that the “title…‘Mother’…marks [Seacole's] position as a substitute object for the women who are absent from the lives of the soldiers she tends” (546). Seacole's rhetoric figures the autobiographer as a stand-in for the “English home” and its most potent synecdoche, the mother:
Don't you think, reader, if you were lying, with parched lips and fading appetite, thousands of miles from mother, wife, or sister, loathing the rough food by your side, and thinking regretfully of that English home where nothing that could minister to your great need would be left untried– don't you think that you would welcome the familiar figure of the stout lady whose bony horse has just pulled up at the door of your hut…. I tell you, reader, I have seen many a bold fellow's eye moisten at such a season, when a woman's voice and a woman's care have brought to their minds recollections of those happy English homes which some of them never saw again….
Then their calling me “mother” was not, I think, altogether unmeaning. I used to fancy that there was something homely in the word; and, reader, you cannot think how dear to them was the smallest thing that reminded them of home. (127)
Seacole stakes out this position early in the text, when she relates in detail an incident that occurs in Jamaica and foreshadows the more-briefly sketched moments she will describe in the Crimea: “A young surgeon…fell ill [and] they brought him to my house, where I nursed him, and grew fond of him–almost as fond as the poor lady his mother in England far away…. I used to call him ‘My son–my dear child….’” As this man lies dying, he says to Seacole, “Let me lay my head upon your breast…. It's only that I miss my mother” (61–62), and after his death, the man's mother sends Seacole “a little gold brooch with his hair in it” (63) and a letter of thanks. Both the patient and his mother recognize Seacole as a surrogate mother, as her payment–a sentimental token, rather than a cash reward–indicates. (Mary Seacole's status as surrogate is further underlined by the signature appended to the mother's letter: “M ____________ S ____________” [63].) This story, in which an English soldier and an English mother endorse Seacole's work as nurse and authorize her to stand in for the absent mother, serves as a potent fable of authentication.
It is impossible to evaluate Seacole's maternal persona without reference to that other famous Crimean nurse who was portrayed as a mother figure.4
An unsigned article in the Illustrated London News asserts, “[Florence Nightingale] has gracefully bent her mind to the education and amusement of–we had almost written it, the troops committed to her care;' but more properly–the ‘sons of her adoption’” (“Nightingale Fund”).
“…give my respects to Miss Nightingale, and say, if I were not so busy I should run as far as the hospital [at Balaclava], to pay my duty to her. You must know, Monsieur Soyer, that Miss Nightingale is very fond of me. When I passed through Scutari, she very kindly gave me board and lodging.”
This was about the twentieth time the old lady had told me the same tale. (435)
The ongoing comparison between Seacole and Nightingale was immediate and long-lasting. For example, a letter to the Times signed by “Da Meritis” queries whether the “humbler actions of Mrs Seacole [are] to be entirely forgotten” while the “benevolent deeds of Florence Nightingale are being handed down to posterity with blessings and imperishable renown.” (103)
Paravisini-Gebert notes that “Seacole…cleverly weaves Nightingale into her text, creating a mirror image that in many ways subverts Nightingale and allows Seacole, if not to displace Nightingale…at least to share her Crimean space” (77). Seacole might well have boasted that she was better qualified to care for the soldiers than Nightingale and her nurses. Alexander and Dewjee write
the facts of Mrs. Seacole's knowledge and field training cannot be over-stressed. For it was out of this experience, and confident that she could help the troops in the Crimea, that she volunteered her services to the army when she arrived in England in October 1854. It is doubtful whether there were any white women who could equal her expertise and training, since at that time in Great Britain few females of any class had the opportunity of acquiring such extensive practical experience. (17)
However, what the autobiography has to say about Nightingale, whom Seacole calls “that Englishwoman whose name shall never die, but sound like music on the lips of British men until the hour of doom” (91), is rather different from what it implies. The humility Seacole expresses when she notes that “Punch…allowed my poor name to appear in the pages which had welcomed Miss Nightingale home” (133) is qualified by her implicit claims to equality with and, at times, superiority to Nightingale.6
Punch devoted at least three items to Seacole, a poem entitled “A Stir for Seacole” (6 December 1856), and “Our Own Vivandière” (30 May 1857).
As she was traveling to the front, Seacole encountered a doctor she knew in Jamaica, who gave her “a letter of introduction to Miss Nightingale” (85). In the midst of organizing her stores in Constantinople and preparing to travel on to the Crimean peninsula, Seacole “found time…to charter a crazy caicque, to carry me [across the Bosphorus] to Scutari, intending to present Dr. F ____________'s letter to Miss Nightingale” (87). Once there, she encountered “an old acquaintance…an old 97th man” (87) who showed her around and establishes for readers how welcome she was to the wounded men in the hospital. As the day waned, another acquaintance “agreed with me that the caicque was not the safest conveyance by night on the Bosphorus, and recommended me to present my letter to Miss Nightingale, and perhaps a lodging for the night could be found for me” (89). Looking for the superintendent, Seacole first encountered “Mrs. B[racebridge]”; although Nightingale's companion manifested great surprise at Seacole's presence and at her request to see Nightingale, Seacole informs us that “there is that in the Doctor's letter (he had been much at Scutari) which prevents my request being refused” (89), and Nightingale received her. In the brief interview that ensued, Seacole quotes her hostess as saying, “What do you want, Mrs. Seacole–anything that we can do for you? If it lies in my power, I shall be very happy” (91). A (flea-ridden) bed was found, and Seacole spent the night, going on her way the next morning.
What was Seacole doing on this trip, and why does she recount the story in such detail? Initially, she tells us that she chartered the boat in order to present the letter to Nightingale; however, rather than seeking out the superintendent upon her arrival, Seacole postponed their encounter until she was forced to ask for Nightingale's help. The autobiography suggests Seacole had gotten so caught up in reminiscing with old acquaintances and easing stiff bandages that she failed to notice how late it had grown, but the inconsistencies in this account become irrelevant if we read this as another tale of authorization; it then becomes apparent that Seacole's seemingly pointless visit to Scutari in fact accomplished a great deal.
When we read it as a mission designed to compel Nightingale's recognition, it appears as an admirable success. Seacole wins what she takes as Nightingale's approval for her work, garnering an expression of respect that she is careful to record and publicize. For instance, Soyer reports an encounter with Seacole during which she boasts of Lord Raglan's patronage and then notes, “I know Miss Nightingale too. She was very kind to me when I passed through Scutari, on my way here; she gave me lodging and everything I required, in the hospital” (233). In fact, as we have seen, Seacole's trip to Scutari took her out of her way; she made the overnight trip from Constantinople and returned to that city, where her ship, the “Hollander,” was moored, before traveling on to the Crimea. Her insistence that she “passed through Scutari, on [her] way” to the Crimea emphasizes the strategic nature of the story, whose point is that Nightingale puts herself out for Seacole, not vice versa. The memoir thus claims the recognition that Seacole had earlier been denied by the war office and Nightingale's proxies in England. Those proxies may treat her rudely (at home and abroad), but this visit effectively disposes of their condescension by revealing Seacole's ability to command from their superior the respect they would deny her.
This point is brought out by the exchange with Mrs. Bracebridge that preceded Seacole's interview with Nightingale:
What object has Mrs. Seacole in coming out? This is the purport of her questions. And I say, frankly, to be of use somewhere; for other considerations I had not, until necessity forced them on me. Willingly, had they accepted me, I would have worked for the wounded, in return for bread and water. I fancy Mrs. B ____________ thought that I sought for employment at Scutari, for she said, very kindly–
“Miss Nightingale has the entire management of our hospital staff, but I do not think that any vacancy–”
“Excuse me, ma'am,” I interrupt her with, “but I am bound for the front in a few days.” (90)
In underscoring the point that prejudice is responsible for her commercial ventures and recounting her triumphant deflection of Bracebridge's snub, Seacole revises the earlier scenario in which she was passed over for a nursing post. Then, she found herself in tears on a public street, stinging from her rejection and questioning the motives of those who refused her services; now, the story is repeated with a difference. As Bracebridge begins to refuse a request that Seacole, this time, has not tendered, the autobiographer effectively silences her interlocutor, rejecting the falsely sympathetic rebuff she is about to receive before it can be made.7
Seacole's account of Mrs. Bracebridge's insolence is supported by F. B. Smith, who notes that she “was especially haughty to the candidates [for nursing positions in the Crimea] she inspected…. She lined the postulants along a wall and fired ‘sudden questions’ at them. If the questions were not answered immediately and to her satisfaction, she barked, ‘She won't do; send her out’” (33).
Seacole's rebuke is the more pointed because it follows hard on the heels of the felicitous thought that occurs to her as she walks the corridors of the hospital, “lending a helping hand here and there”: “I felt happy,” she relates, “in the conviction that I must be useful three or four days nearer to [the soldiers'] pressing wants than this” (88–89). Without ever criticizing Nightingale, Seacole reminds the reader that her desire to get to the Crimea was nearly thwarted by that lady's assistants and implies that she will be able to succor sick soldiers better than the more famous Nightingale, since she will be “nearer to their pressing wants” by several days. Encouraging readers to compare her to the lady with the lamp as she encouraged them to compare her to soldiers' mothers, Seacole again obliquely but unmistakably suggests that she is at least as well equipped to care for the men as their mothers and as her more famous counterpart.8
In an interesting echo of Seacole's effort to authorize her work by comparing herself to Nightingale, the Florence Nightingale Museum has this to say about Seacole:
Florence Nightingale had already left for the Crimea by the time Mrs. Seacole arrived in London to volunteer as a nurse [that is, it was not Nightingale's fault Seacole's petition was rejected]…. Unable to make any headway with British officials, she traveled to the Crimea at her own expense…and helped the wounded to embark for Scutari and Florence Nightingale. The two women met in Scutari and later at Balaclava, and respected each other's work. (“Mrs. Seacole.” June 1998)
WHILE THE COMPARISON to Nightingale helped Seacole position herself as a substitute for the soldiers' mothers, Wonderful Adventures simultaneously insists upon her difference from and her resemblance to the white British mothers whom she proposes to displace. This point is brought home by two incidents Seacole relates, both of which occur when she first appears on the wharf at Balaclava to nurse the sick and injured soldiers bound for the hospital at Scutari. As she tends to a man whose sight is gone, she writes, “his hand touched mine…and I heard him mutter indistinctly, as though the discovery had arrested his wandering senses– ‘Ha! this is surely a woman's hand.’” Before she leaves him, he tells her, “God bless you, woman–whoever you are, God bless you!” (97). The text invokes the soldier's testimony to establish the significance of Seacole's identity as a woman; the man who provides such testimony is literally blind to all distinctions other than sex, and the scene serves to show the insignificance of the differences distinguishing Seacole from the “loving ones” at home “who would ask no greater favour than the privilege of helping” (97) the man she tends. If this anecdote has not established this point with sufficient clarity, she offers another: “It was on this same day, I think, that bending down over a poor fellow whose senses had quite gone…he took me for his wife…calling me ‘Mary, Mary,’ many times…. Poor fellow! I could not undeceive him. I think the fancy happily caused by the touch of a woman's hand soothed his dying hour” (99).
Again, Seacole's “woman's hand” serves as a synecdoche for herself and a soldier's reaction shows that it is as a woman that she is important. This time, the soldier himself, rather than the text, makes the point that Seacole is a substitute for a “loving one” at home–namely, his wife. His conflation is explained by the fact that his “senses had quite gone”; this information lets readers know that his mistake is not a threat to them–that they are allowed to remember the distinction he forgets. At the same times, the story undermines the importance of that distinction by giving the woman with whom Seacole is confused the same first name as Seacole herself. This shared name suggests a kinship between the two women–the two terms of this comparison–that blurs the boundaries distinguishing them. As women who care to “soothe the dying hour” of this injured man, Seacole and his wife are alike. Their differences, implies Seacole, while real, are less important than their similarities and make precisely no difference to the dying man.
My argument is not that Seacole sees herself as the same as the white mothers whose shoes she claims to fill, but that she is indifferent to their differences. While she lays claim to the privileges of British subjecthood, she refuses to acknowledge either the hierarchical structure of the colonial discourse of difference or the ways in which it seeks to label her as inferior, and this refusal constitutes a challenge to the authority of a colonial discourse predicated on the ability to make hierarchical distinctions.
Seacole's insistence on her status as a British subject has been read as an eager embrace of whiteness that constituted a rejection of her Jamaican heritage, but this reading ignores important aspects of Seacole's historical situation and rhetorical self-fashioning. Amy Robinson argues that Seacole “simply presumes her status as a British subject and erases her debt to a Caribbean national context” (546).9
However, Robinson herself points out that white Creoles in the early years of the nineteenth century “reject[ed] their identification as British subjects” (540), which suggests that Seacole's decision to identify herself as British would have had the effect of distancing the autobiographer from Jamaica's white ruling class.
Both agree that for Seacole to identify herself as a British subject was for her to repudiate, however incompletely, her ties to Jamaica. In contrast, I would suggest that standing in for the mothers of her British patients did not require Seacole to renounce Jamaican culture for British or exchange a white, middle-class ideal of maternity for the example provided by her mother. Instead, rejecting both white Creole and English abolitionists' notions of black and mixed-race femininity, she fashioned her own composite ideal.10
Paquet seems to endorse such a reading when she writes, “[Seacole] admits no conflict of interest; to be Jamaican and to be a British subject are culturally interchangeable” (Caribbean Autobiography 64), yet she quotes with approval Gikandi's claim that “Jamaica must fade into the distance…so that England can be rewritten as the real place of identity” (278n 22). Yet Seacole herself seems, as Paquet has just implied, to contest the notion that there must be one “real place of identity.”
Although Seacole modeled some aspects of her public identity on the British mothers of the men she nursed, she also drew extensively and explicitly on the particulars of her own upbringing and education in Jamaica. Her self-chosen title aligns her with her mother, the text's only other doctress, and she grounds her medical authority not in formal British training or recognition (she came to the Crimea without either) but in her Jamaican mother's practice.11
Alexander and Dewjee note that Seacole's mother “was one of many [Jamaican] women who were notable doctresses, familiar with the prognosis and treatment of tropical diseases, general ailments and wounds. Their expertise was recognized throughout the island” (13).
My mother kept a boarding house in Kingston, and was, like very many of the Creole women, an admirable doctress…. It was very natural that I should inherit her tastes; and so I had from very early youth a yearning for medical knowledge and practice which has never deserted me. When I was a very young child I was taken by an old lady, who brought me up in her household among her own grandchildren, and who could scarcely have shown me more kindness had I been one of them; indeed, I was so spoiled by my kind patroness that, but for being frequently with my mother, I might very likely have grown up idle and useless. But I saw so much of her, and of her patients, that the ambition to become a doctress early took firm root in my mind…. (2)
I agree with Hawthorne that Seacole uses her mother to “present…a non-sentimentalized narrative of womanly entrepreneurship,” but whereas Hawthorne contends that this renovated ideal constitutes a rejection of “Victorian definitions of true womanhood” (322), I argue that Seacole assimilates these radically different ideals to one another, constructing a hybrid self composed with reference to both British and Jamaican models of motherhood.
Her mother's treatment of Seacole is strongly reminiscent of Seacole's treatment of the girl she calls “my little servant” or “my maid” (57, 70). Also named Mary, this girl accompanies Seacole to Panama (though not, according to the autobiography, to the Crimea), and the relationship delineated in the autobiography echoes the terms in which Seacole depicts her own apprenticeship to her mother. Seacole scholars have speculated that this girl, who appears in only a few scenes during the Panama section of the text, may have been her daughter (see Hawthorne 323). Whether or not this child functions as a metonymic displacement of Sarah, the memoir's portrayal of Mary reinforces the paradigm of maternal care we see in Seacole's relationship with her own mother; the author seems to have “inherit[ed] her [mother's] tastes” not only in practicing medicine and running a hotel, but also in training the children in her care.
Like Seacole, Mary receives practical instruction rather than sentimental affection from a woman who treats her as an apprentice and expects her to make herself useful at an early age. While Mary is put to work in Seacole's hotel at Cruces, keeping guests honest and protecting Seacole's property from thieves, the few tasks we see the mistress set the maid are no more onerous than those mothers might and did ask their children to perform. It is likely that such work fell to Seacole in the early years before she left her mother, or in the visits she hints at when she took up residence with her patroness. Seacole shares her rough sleeping quarters with Mary and takes her on outings in Panama. Describing a confrontation with rude Americans, Seacole notes that while she has been defying the women, their “children had taken my little servant Mary in hand, and were practising on her the politenesses which their parents were favouring me with” (57). The correspondence between the American women's treatment of Seacole and their children's treatment of Mary establishes an implicit parallel between the mothers' relationship to their children and Seacole's relationship to little Mary. The suggestion of kinship between Seacole and her servant is strengthened by Seacole's description of the girl's “yellow face”–a phrase that echoes Seacole's self-portrait as “a motherly yellow woman” elsewhere (57, 78). The girl's given name is also Seacole's, and Ellen Ross reminds us of “the custom of giving the oldest child of each sex the name of the same-sex parent” (131).
Seacole's descriptions of her figurative sons and this figurative daughter invoke parallel notions of maternal care, one characteristically middle-class, the other working-class. Ross contends that
conceptions of the central place of female nurture in children's spiritual development circulated in middle-class advice books. But working-class mothers in the same period more unsentimentally viewed their children in terms of the resources they required or contributed. They knew that love was vital to their children, but they acknowledged that young children meant hard work, which the children could later reciprocate. (129)13
The period to which Ross refers, the 1870s through 80s, was fifteen to twenty years after Seacole's memoir appeared; however, earlier accounts (for instance, Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor) support Ross' claim that working-class parents looked to their children to help maintain the family.
This notion of motherhood as exchange is readily apparent in Seacole's relationships with her mother and with Mary, but it is obscured by the sentimental rhetoric with which the autobiographer describes her interactions with British soldiers.14
Seacole invokes a sentimental middle-class model of motherhood with the soldiers as well as with the officers, although as Gunning points out, “while [Seacole] treats common soldiers without a fee, she openly demands money from their officers; by this method, as well as by stocking goods that would attract those who were wealthy enough to pay for English food and clothing, she was able to subsidize her humanitarian efforts and even prosper” (969). The memoir by no means disregards differences of military rank and social class, and Seacole describes her relations with all members of the British army, from working-class enlisted men to upper-class officers, in the same sentimental terms and thus differentiates them from her other patients and customers.
Seacole reports that she once “resigned a plump fowl which [she] had kept back for [her] own dinner” to one customer who, having lost his purchases in the Crimean mud, returned to beg some more, pleading that “he had two fellows coming to dine with him at six, and nothing in the world in his hut but salt pork” (142). The decision to “resign” her dinner to the man accords perfectly with the ideal of a self-sacrificing mother who puts not only her son's needs, but also his wants, ahead of her own. Here, she makes no mention of the price she received for her dinner, eliding the fact that she required her “sons” to pay for that which a (middle-class) mother would freely give. Elsewhere, however, Seacole's rhetoric incorporates a working-class model of mothering that takes an entrepreneurial quid pro quo for granted: “When a poor fellow lay sickening in his cheerless hut and sent down to me, he knew very well that I should not ride up in answer to his message empty-handed. And although I did not hesitate to charge him with the value of the necessaries I took him, still he was thankful enough to be able to purchase them” (125).
It is significant that Seacole figures herself as a selfless, middle-class mother only with reference to the British soldiers in her care. On an earlier foray to Panama, she also established a hotel and set up as doctress; but while she treated entire towns–including some small children—in the midst of cholera epidemics, she never codes these relationships as those between mother and child; rather, she is the medical professional, they the patients. Seacole's selective use of a maternal persona indicates that she did not simply equate medical and maternal work; rather, she sought to assert her claim to British identity by establishing a metaphorical kinship with English soldiers that she did not seek with other, non-English patients.
Seacole's anxiety to justify her entrepreneurial work is elucidated by the memoir of William Daverell Cattell, an assistant surgeon in the British army who documented both Seacole's suspect status and the success with which she transcended it:
An elderly mulatto from Jamaica, Mrs. Seacole, wished to open a restaurant at the end of the Light Cavalry's camp…but her intentions were misinterpreted, she was refused. [L]ater she established herself higher up on the road…. Here her charity soon belied her unprepossessing appearance; with a taste for doctoring and nursing, she combined the business of a settler [sutler].
Convoys of sick halted and were cheered with warm refreshment, later she came on the field at Tchernaya with comforts for the wounded[.] [S]he developed as a philanthropist and soon became a general favourite, and on great occasions appeared in the brightest of ribbons. (3: 24)
Cattell's endorsement of Seacole's philanthropy is echoed by Russell, the Times reporter who has been called the first war correspondent. His bulletins from the front, describing the atrocious conditions there, were widely credited with prompting action at home. He introduced Seacole to the Times's readers in his dispatches and wrote an “Introductory Preface” to Wonderful Adventures in which he asserted that “she is the first who has redeemed the name of ‘sutler’ from the suspicion of worthlessness, mercenary baseness, and plunder” (viii).
Cattell suggests that Seacole neutralized that reputation by treating men without charge; linking her popularity and her philanthropy, he implies that Seacole's “charity” is what transformed official skepticism to acceptance. In other words, it is by transferring attention from her remunerated to her unremunerated labor that Seacole wins the trust and respect of her customers and patients–and legitimates her claim to the title of “mother.” Just as she did not claim a maternal relationship to her Panamanian patients, it is only in the Crimean sections of the autobiography that Seacole takes pains to distance herself from a desire for economic profits. Describing her work in Panama, she establishes her entrepreneurial savvy by noting that her customers “were glad of my stores and comforts, [and] I made money out of their wants” (50); those consumers were not part of Wonderful Adventures' intended audience, and she had no interest in persuading them of her disinterested affection.
Seacole's rhetoric has two effects: it domesticates the public work of the store-keeper, but at the same time it presents her “maternal” labor as a public service, rather than a private chore. As hotel-owner, Seacole blurs the line demarcating public and private spheres, because the establishment over which she presides is open to the public, and she does for pay what English mothers were supposed to do for love and out of duty. Her work as a doctress is another case in point. It is remunerative, public labor and thus distinct from the nursing of family members and neighbors that both working- and middle-class British women performed; however, the language Seacole uses to describe it conjures up the very register of charitable visiting for which her fees disqualified her. Seacole did not charge for her nursing, but she was paid for food and the medicines she stocked or, in many instances, prepared herself.16
Calder describes how
a man called in, (a labourer) to ask her advice, + to buy some camphor as a preventative against cholera; she laughed him out of his fears + sent him away a different man…without his camphor + giving him sound practical advice as regards a regimen of [drinking] + etc. her powders for diarrhoea + cholera…[They] seem to have worked miracles; she used them with great benefit in Panama–I gained her favour by telling her her fame was known in England, + she promised me some of the powders; they certainly cannot be less efficacious than all our drugs + etc. for cholera, from all the varieties of which I have as yet seen little benefit here. (114–15)
As I have shown, the training mothers provide their daughters in Seacole's narrative differs from conventional representations of mid-century middle-class English mothers' conduct. The mother-daughter dyad is not isolated in a private domestic sphere separate from the public working world, and mothering daughters does not consist of raising them for marriages in which all labor will be done inside the home. Marriage, in fact, is a minor concern in the autobiography. Anthony Trollope, who once stayed in a boarding house kept by Seacole's sister, noted, “there is something of a mystery about hotels in the British West Indies. They are always kept by fat middle-aged colored ladies who have no husbands” (195), and husbands are indeed absent from or peripheral to Seacole's account of her early life (neither her mother nor her patroness seems to have one). Instead, Seacole described a female world in which women were both caretakers and breadwinners; “many…Creole women” practiced medicine, she tells us, and Trollope's claim about the prevalence of colored lodging-house keepers has been well documented (see Kerr). Seacole's story of her childhood in Jamaica takes for granted a world in which women expected to work–and were respected for working–in what British readers would have seen as the public sphere.
Seacole thus repeatedly asserted her resemblance to middle-class British women by advertising her adherence to certain codes of feminine propriety, and at the same time she offered detailed descriptions of the ways in which she flouted these self-same codes. Indeed, Faith Smith suggests just how transgressive Seacole's behavior would have seemed to her British readers in this description of a Caribbean society stratified by gender and class distinctions–distinctions that were established with reference to British constructions of womanhood:
“vulgar” Afro-Caribbean jamettes [“members of the working (or ‘underworld’) class”] were contrasted [by white British observers] to “dignified” Indo-Caribbean women, a comparison that, in holding both groups of women to standards of Victorian Femininity, ultimately oppressed them both.
…In contrast to the jamette's independence and to her social marking as outspoken, ungainly, and unladylike, the middle-class woman was positioned [by black middle-class commentators] inside the home and her conduct was sedate and genteel. (921nn. 30–31, 910)
Foster writes of Nancy Prince, another nineteenth-century female autobiographer of color from the Caribbean, that, “As implied by her self-designation as ‘Mrs. Nancy Prince,’…Prince was very careful to establish herself as a respectable woman” (85). Seacole claims the designation in her autobiography's title and in her announcement that “Mrs. Mary Seacole (Late of Kingston Jamaica) will open the British Hotel” (81). Russell uses the title in his introduction to Wonderful Adventures; and Punch's and private diaries' references to Seacole (see Calder and Cattell) confirm that she was known by this title, and not only to her face. Although Bush cites “an observer of early nineteenth-century Jamaican life” for her claim that “even the most privileged coloured women were only ever ‘Miss’, never ‘Mrs.’” (775), Seacole was not alone in her distinction. See Kerr for a list of female lodging-house keepers in Jamaica, some of whose names are prefaced by “Mrs.” (200).
At the time Wonderful Adventures appeared, Baptist missionaries from Britain had for several decades been striving to establish in post-emancipation Jamaica “what they saw as a proper gender order, in which men worked for money and women stayed at home, caring for children and household” (Hall 108). According to Catherine Hall, “the abolitionist dream” was “a society in which…black women would become like… the white women of the middle-class English abolitionist imagination, occupying their small but satisfying separate sphere, married and living in regular households” (110). The most cursory reading of Wonderful Adventures establishes that this was not Seacole's dream, and her claim to be like white British women can in no way be taken to connote her acceptance of the repressive mold fashioned by the abolitionists.
IGNORING THE TENSION between two radically different plots of female development, Seacole chose to present herself both as conventionally feminine in British terms and as the product of a Jamaican world with a different understanding of what women should be. She assumes that the ideal of the self-reliant working woman is in no way at odds with the model British mothers for whom she proposes to substitute. Accommodating her British readers' assumptions about how the narrative of a woman's life should read, Seacole also introduced an entirely different set of conventions that might shape women's lives.
Seacole's account of her marriage exemplifies this process, both meeting and undermining her readers' expectations of female coming-of-age narratives. After nursing her dying patroness, Seacole writes:
I went to my mother's house, where I stayed, making myself useful in a variety of ways, and learning a great deal of Creole medicinal art, until I couldn't find courage to say “no” to a certain arrangement timidly proposed by Mr. Seacole, but married him, and took him down to Black River, where we established a store…. I kept him alive by kind nursing and attention as long as I could; but at last he grew so ill that we left Black River and returned to my mother's house at Kingston. Within a month of our arrival there he died. (5–6)
Kerr notes that, “in the establishment of these [lodging-]houses, [Jamaican women] chose strategic locations, that is, land routes and…seaport towns…. They sought out the places where there were no planters' residences and only the houses of a few merchants. They met the demand for lodging and food from a wide cross-section of travelers and became indispensable” (204). Seacole–who ran hotels in Kingston as well as Black River–fits this profile; by the time she ventured forth to apply what she had learned in Panama and the Crimea, she was well versed in deciding where to situate and how to stock a store.
This tale does not simply blur the line demarcating public and private spheres; it erases it, since the house over which Seacole's mother presided –the house from which Seacole “was taken” as “a very young child”– was a boarding house. Such an establishment straddles the divide between public and private; its mistress is paid to fill the role that English mothers were supposed freely to assume.
Critics have taken frequent note of the nonexistence of private space in Seacole's memoir. Robinson asserts, “Seacole stages her ‘private’ self (the ostensible self of an autobiography) by rejecting the distinction between private and public which has so often relegated women (as wives, mothers, domestic workers) to the ‘private’” (549). I agree that the memoir calls into question the differences between public and private realms, between the roles of doctress/hotel-keeper and wife, and between remunerated and unremunerated female labor, particularly in its representations of maternal care. But rather than reading this as a confusion between public and private or as a rejection of their differences, I argue that it reflects a different understanding of what constitutes public and private. Realms and roles that middle-class English readers were accustomed to finding strictly demarcated intermingle in Seacole's description of the Jamaica in which she grew up.
If cultural differences are one factor in the autobiographer's inscription of herself, the significance of the audience for which Seacole wrote and her reasons for writing have also been consistently underestimated. While critics acknowledge the importance of the fact that she wrote in part to recoup the losses she suffered at the war's end, their estimates of her character rarely take into account the audience for whom she constructed this character. Paquet, for instance, criticizes the memoir as “an entirely public account of self” (Caribbean Autobiography 67). Yet these readings disregard the nature, prejudices, and expectations of her intended audience and the influence Seacole's sense of her future readers would have exerted on her self-inscription.
Frances Smith Foster has pointed out that “African American women writers could not assume a readership composed primarily or exclusively of women like themselves” (83), and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese attributes the non-confessional style of black women's autobiographies to this aspect of black women writers' relationship to their audience. Rather than writing for readers “like themselves,” they “wrote to be read by those who might influence the course of public events, might pay money for their books, or might authenticate them as authors” (72). These writers needed to pay special attention to gauging and responding to readers' expectations, and, while Seacole was not African American, her motivations, insofar as we can reconstruct them, fit this profile: her largely white, English, middle-class audience was not “like her,” and she wrote to earn money after the war's end left her bankrupt, as well as to establish herself more firmly as “a Crimean heroine” (Seacole 76).
I have shown how the accounts of Seacole's contemporaries reveal gaps in the story told by Wonderful Adventures, but the autobiography itself also makes its silences legible. If she promises candor, Seacole is also frank about her occasional reticence. Nevertheless, readers past and present have attended more to the text's admissions than to its strategic silences. W. H. Russell calls Seacole a “plain truth-speaking woman” (vii), and William Andrews asserts:
we should remember that Seacole had little patience with pretense of any sort, preferring instead to treat her reader “in a friendly confidential way” that let her speak her mind. Perhaps it is her willingness to “confess” to feelings that many women of her time, white or black, would have concealed that helps to make her autobiography so attractive. (xxxiii)
While in Panama, Seacole treats a boy who has accidentally been shot by Dr. Casey, the American proprietor of a gambling house. She visits Casey in jail, where he queries her, first angrily, then nervously, about the boy's condition. When he asks her, “how's that ____________ boy?” Seacole chastises him for his lack of concern and overstates the boy's danger, leading Casey to entreat her to intercede on his behalf with the local authorities, who have as little sympathy for Americans as Seacole herself:
“[Y]ou'll surely help me? you'll surely tell the alcalde [magistrate] that the wound's a slight one?”…
“What can I do or say, Dr. Casey? I must speak the truth, and the ball is still in the poor lad's hip,” I answered, for I enjoyed the fellow's fear too much to help him. (54–55)
The nature of her relationship with the young woman identified by Soyer and Calder as her daughter was among the truths Seacole chose not to tell. As far as we can gauge from Seacole's own and corroborative reports, she made no effort to conceal Sarah or her relationship to Sarah from the people around her in the Crimea, yet she seems not to have wanted her English readers to put the disparate elements of her identity together. Why did her daughter appear as her daughter in the Crimea and figure precisely nowhere in Seacole's written account of her time there?
The events of the autobiography occurred at the Crimean front, in time of war, while the text itself appeared in an England at peace. As Seacole explains, with perhaps more irony than critics give her credit for, “you see war, like death, is a great leveller, and mutual suffering and endurance had made us all friends” (191). A dichotomy that could be overlooked on the war-torn peninsula would not be so readily countenanced in peacetime England. In the Crimea, it was possible for Seacole, “who was at her door with her daughter Sarah,” to “call out, ‘Go it, my sons!’” to a group of riders flying by on the road (Soyer 334). There is no apparent difficulty with the juxtaposition of a literal daughter on the one hand and “sons” on the other.
In her autobiography, however, Seacole shied away from maintaining both a literal and a figurative claim to maternity. Any evidence of a particular child would have compromised the indispensable illusion of a generally available maternal figure; moreover, for the text to suggest a kinship, however metaphorical, between “the Dark, instead of Fair, Maid of the Eastern War” (Soyer 436) and a host of British soldiers, would have violated racial taboos. To represent her mixed-race daughter in the same pages in which she lay claim to white “sons” would be to ask the British public that was Seacole's audience to accept them as siblings. Barbara Bush contrasts Jamaican and English attitudes toward interracial liaisons, noting that while relationships between white men and black or mixed-race women were ubiquitous and tacitly accepted in Jamaica, “concubinage…was heavily censured in England” (769), and Sandra Gunning argues, “it is [Seacole's] widowhood, as well as her presumed childlessness, that make it possible for Seacole to claim her surrogacy as the mother to English soldiers far from home” (956).
Seacole's silence may be attributed to variations in the social codes governing Jamaica and England, on the one hand, and a military society in the midst of war and a civil society in peacetime, on the other. Yet another operative distinction is the difference between the constraints that governed how Seacole could represent herself in her day-to-day existence (her performance of her identity “in the flesh”) and those that governed how she could represent herself in her autobiography (her performance on the page). The transgressions that representation licenses are predicated on the representational–that is, figurative–nature of those transgressions. They are permissible because they are carefully demarcated from the realm of the literal. Seacole is able to play with the meaning of the signifier “mother” because her text insists that such play is not to be taken literally. Such regulations imply that it is the literal, not the figurative, that is dangerous, since one is “real,” the other only always potential.
In Seacole's case, however, the reverse was also true: what was permissible in life was not permissible in representations of that life. Her decision to omit from her performance on paper what she could play out in her performance in the flesh suggests that motherhood's importance is at least as much a function of its signifying power as of its literal existence. It was as a figure that created meaning, not as a body that created babies, that Seacole represented a threat.19
This point holds true whether Seacole's reticence was her choice, as Hawthorne suggests when she speculates that Seacole may not have wished “to make her daughter…into a literary spectacle” (324), or whether, as one anonymous reader suggested, the decision to omit reference to Sarah was prompted by Seacole's editors.
In reading Seacole's relationship to the title “mother” today, it is tempting to grant the information supplied by external sources–that is, the information that Seacole chose to omit–more interpretive authority than her own text's declarations about her maternal persona. Such a reading is predicated on the belief that truth lies in that which is hidden and must be revealed, an idea that posits an antagonistic relationship between reader and writer, who fight for mastery over the meaning of the text. Reading this way, it is tempting to say that the significance of Seacole's self-chosen title, “mother,” is defined by what the memoir leaves unsaid; the literal truth of the biological relation threatens to discredit the figurative truth of metaphorical kinship. But ignoring the self Seacole chose to claim in favor of the self she chose to conceal restricts our ability to appreciate the ways in which Wonderful Adventures both played with and was bound by prevailing conceptions of what motherhood meant. I have shown how a monolithic stereotype of motherhood fractures along class, racial, and cultural lines in Seacole's memoir. The full dimensions of the renovated maternal ideal she offers in its place can only come into focus when, like her, we can acknowledge the simultaneous influence exercised by seemingly incompatible ideals of maternity and womanhood.
I would like to thank Sandra Gunning for introducing me to Seacole's memoir and for her generous comments on early drafts of this essay.
