I Shall Make No Excuse: The Narrative Odyssey of Mary Seacole

"I shall make no excuse to my readers for giving them a pretty full history of my struggles to become a Crimean heroine! (76) says Mary Seacole in her travel book, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. This statement encapsulates the project of her entire work. While Wonderful Adventures was marketed as a travel book, a genre enjoying high popularity at the time, it was in fact, a kind of autobiography in which Seacole, conscious of audience expectations, employed sophisticated rhetorical strategies to establish herself as a perfect Victorian heroine. Since Seacole presents herself in her text as unmarried, childless, not overtly Protestant (except in her disdain for Catholicism), not English, and not white, this is an impressive literary feat. Seacole succeeded brilliantly. Not only did Wonderful Adventures become an overnight success in Great Britain, going into its second printing within a year of its first publication in 1857, but Seacole made enough money from the profits to live well after returning from the Crimea virtually bankrupt.

Since Seacole needed to earn money from her book she adopted the pose of travel writer, and in this case, 'lady' travel writer, in order to achieve these goals. In Transatlantic Manners Christopher Mulvey explains the obstacles travel writers needed to negotiate to publish. He compares travel literature to fiction, claiming "the most pervasive fiction constructed by the nineteenth-century travel writer was that of the gentility of the writer and reader." Mulvey adds, "literary decorum demanded that an author assumed a genteel voice in order to address society"(8).¹ These restrictions, the call for travel writing to be "relentlessly genteel," is second nature in the work of the well known women travel writers of the day, including Mary Kingsley, Isabella Bird, Marianne North, and others who were born into the privileged world of empire. Seacole was an anomaly in this scene. To achieve success, therefore, she needed to exercise extraordinary powers of rhetorical negotiation—personally, socially, and politically—to overcome the biases and expectations of her readers. Her own sense of self was dictated by her indeterminate position in the world. She was neither white nor black, having been born to a Scottish father and a Jamaican mother. In her status as childless widow, she was neither virgin nor matron. Her social position was dictated by matters of both race and gender as they encountered the attitudes of the age. And, finally, Seacole's political position was odd—neither slave nor quite free, neither Colonial nor British, a "Creole" woman with a fierce allegiance to the British Empire. In what follows, I shall take up these matters, exploring the difficulties Seacole faced on her way to becoming a "heroine" and her rhetorical means of overcoming them.

Becoming a Heroine

Seacole was a free woman of color born in Kingston, Jamaica, into a mixed race family that she described as Creole. Her mother was a Jamaican doctress, and her father a Scottish soldier. According to Ziggi Alexander, Mary's mother was of a group of "notable doctresses " who were adept at the "prognosis and treatment of tropical diseases, general ailments and wounds." She elaborates, "The techniques of 'Creole medical art' . . . evolved on the plantations, . . . based on knowledge of herbal medicine and midwifery brought from Africa. Seacole's apprenticeship in her mother's profession gave her "not only access to Caribbean traditional medicine, but also opportunities to learn the practices of men trained in Europe" (13–14). Since she was competent to treat diseases such as dysentery and cholera—diseases that flourished under the conditions she found in Panama and in the Crimea—Seacole called her medical skills into service often during her travels. These journeys, first to Panama where she ran a restaurant for itinerant gold seekers, and then to the Crimea during the Crimean War, where she operated the successful British Hotel, are the basis for her book. She used her medical skills in both of these locations and during her lifetime gained almost as large a reputation in England as did her contemporary, Florence Nightingale. But Seacole was...