Beyond the Battlefield: Mary Seacole’s Legacy as a Nurse,Political Pioneer, and Businesswoman
Beyond the Battlefield: Mary Seacole’s Legacy as a Nurse, Political Pioneer, and Businesswoman
Written by Oluwaseun Sowunmi | TBC Young Champion
Mary Seacole is one of the most well-known Black British female figures in the United Kingdom. So much so that there’s a memorial statue of her at the grounds of St Thomas' Hospital in Lambeth, London. Most Brits, like the Historian Evelyn Hawthorne see Mary Seacole’s autobiography as ‘transgressing gender, race, and class roles’, we describe Seacole as an ‘adventuring businesswoman’ and a ‘heroine extraordinary by any standard’. But her story is bigger than selflessly travelling the Crimean Peninsula to aid English soldiers in the Crimean War. In her autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Seacole challenges and conforms to societal expectations about gender, race, and respectability to navigate a post-abolition Britain. Mary Seacole shows herself as a self-empowered, comic, ‘heroine’, and businesswoman. These aspects of her identity are incredibly important as we get insight into how Seacole viewed herself, how she was viewed by society, and her perceptions of the society she found herself in. Mary Seacole was a mixed-race Black woman, and these facts of her identity permeate the narrative and help challenge Negrophilisim and crafting her sense of self. But she also uses them for another objective- to sell copies of her narrative as after the war she was left bankrupt.
In The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole, she utilises Victorian ideas about femininity, motherhood, and gender roles to challenge contemporary ideas about black women and present how she saw her own womanhood. Throughout the narrative Seacole refers to the British soldiers in Crimea as her “sons” seeing herself as a substitute or surrogate for the “womanly touch” of the white wives, aunties, daughters, sisters, mothers, and grandmothers of the soldiers at home. Seacole presents herself as an ideal English woman- an angel of the house, happy to attend to the needs of the soldiers. She conveys herself as a mother figure to all the British soldiers she cares for and the soldiers themselves perceived her this way as a gentle and caring womanly touch. In The Times, W.H. Russell describes Seacole as a ‘kind and successful physician’ with ‘a more tender or skilful hand’ than the best British surgeons, that she was ‘the old mother venerated throughout the camp’. Even Punch published a poem in 1856 titled ‘A Stir for Seacole’, using celebratory language like a ‘king heart’s trace’ and that ‘her smile, good old soul, lent heat to the coal’ and that the soldiers ‘can tell the story //Of her nursing and dosing deeds’. In doing so, Seacole associates herself with domestic comfort (in some ways racial conformity through the Mammy figure) and desexualises herself to avoid the problematic questions that would have ensued about her sexuality. This challenges the ideas held about black womanhood at the time. Black women were wrongly perceived as hypersexual and deviant, there were popular ideas of Black women as snakes making the life blood from white men and making them unproductive. She challenges this by presenting herself as respectable woman. For example, when visiting Panama, Seacole describes herself as wearing a “light blue dress, a white petticoat” and an “equally chaste shawl”. This makes here stand out against the “lawlessness” of Panama with thieves and reckless men that went to her hotel. The use of the adjective “chaste” describes her moral purity, something not associated with her because of her blackness and mixed-race identity. Seacole utilises ideas of motherhood, chastity, purity, and domesticity to make herself more respectable. In doing so, Seacole not only crafts her femininity outside of the gendered expectations for her race by conforming to Victorian ideas about gender. However, her respectability also makes her narrative appeal to a wider audience and overcome her bankruptcy.
However, Seacole challenges ideas about gender through the genre. The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands is multi-genre and can be classified as an autobiography, travel narrative, and a war memoir. This is very important as these genres in the period were mostly from Eurocentric and androcentric authors. To have a non-white and non-male voice is incredibly novel for the period and can bring new perspectives to our understanding of the Crimean war and live in post-emancipation Britian. In the Victorian era, autobiographies, travel narratives, and war memoirs were masculine and a way for men to show their heroism and scientific knowledge- to show the masculine trait-the faculty of reason. Seacole’s travel narrative describes her trips to New Guinea, Jamaica, America and Crimea. Like other travel narratives of the period like Le Valliant’s narrative in Cape Town, Seacole presents herself as an authority on the people she observes and encounters. Seacole’s narrative challenges ideas about gender- she presents herself as an expert on womanhood. She describes her mother as an “admirable doctress”, explaining that her passion for knowledge and science did not come from her Scottish father but from her mother who sold goods and medicines. Seacole also challenges gender expectations through her love for science as whilst in Jamaica, wanting to help cure the cholera and yellow fever outbreak, she secretly dissected the body of a one-year-old boy. This gave her the same level of authority as European thinkers like Cuvier and Rousseau at the time. This would be unthinkable for a woman of the period who was expected to be domesticated and nurturing children. It also challenges assumptions of black people as unknowledgeable. This portrayal of Seacole fashions her own feminine identity, she celebrates her racial origins, defies some societal expectations for her as a woman, whilst drawing on elements of Victorian respectability for white women.
Mary Seacole’s autobiography does touch on race, but her narrative completely challenges racial inequality and racial hierarchy in post -abolition Britian. Seacole disrupts British Negrophilism. She describes her rejection by Florence Nightingale (The Lady with the Lamp) and her nurses, by questioning if the racial discrimination she witnesses ui9n America could “have some root here”, that could these “ladies have rejected me because my blood flowed under a duskier skin than theirs.”. This is significant because it challenges the idea that slavery meant an end to inequality, and acknowledging her race as the reason for rejection shows how aware Seacole was of the politics of the society around her. She exposes a myth of British humanitarianism and liberalism, that America is not a bogeyman.
Moreover, Seacole makes use of the slave narrative genre to challenge ideas about blackness, showing how acutely aware she was of society’s assumptions on the colour of her skin. Majority of slave narratives like the History of Mary Prince (first autobiography published by a black woman in the UK) and The Many Travels of Olaudah Equiano, begin with a vague place of birth, vague time of birth, and a recognition of the status of their parents. Seacole uses the same ‘I was born…’ however her lofty details are presented more humorously. She blames not remembering, sarcastically on the fact that she is a “female” and an old “widow”. Seacole refuses to take part in the racial humility and sombreness of the genre associated with her race and instead she chooses to adopt a humorous tone making her narrative comedic and self-empowering.
Seacole uses her narrative to make commentary on her race and emancipation. In post-emancipation Britain there were debates about what emancipation would look like and whether formerly enslaved people should be self-governing. Seacole wedges her opinion that they should be able to govern themselves as they are “lovers of liberty” and “democracy”, and they don’t need European paternalism. Furthermore, Seacole takes pride in her skin colour. She was invited to an honorary dinner in America to praise her efforts as a hotelier and nurse. A guest suggested that she could be even more respectable if she bleached her skin. Seacole refuses saying that she would be just as “useful” and “respectable” even if her “skin were as black as any other n******”. Seacole’s narrative promotes her own sense of respectability and black pride, which is incredibly inspiring.
Overall, the driving force behind Seacole’s narrative was primarily to make money. The book was published in 1857 a time of bankruptcy for Seacole. Furthermore, her primary reason for going to Crimea was to sell hospitality, goods, and medicines to soldiers on the battlefield as a silter. She was primarily an enterprising black woman, thus, to sell more copies she presents a version of herself to best appeal to a white Victorian audience and their sensibilities. However, Seacole is simultaneously motivated to challenge the racial barriers and stereotypes in her society. She does this not only through the literary devices in the text but also her experiences in of themselves. A mixed- race black woman in the period would not be expected to have so much mobility and knowledge, let alone such a loud voice that reverberates through our archives.
Key words
Negrophilisim - The idea that racism in Britain was different from the way racism was carried out in America and the Caribbean but also that in British liberalism there’s a love of Black people in Britain.
Eurocentric - This is about focusing on European culture or history so much that it excludes the wider world.
Androcentric - This is about focusing on men