Creolizing the White Woman's Burden: Mary Seacole Playing "Mother" at the Colonial Crossroads between Panama and Crimea

This essay examines how the creolized formations of race, gender, and empire in Mary Seacole's 1857 memoir, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, challenges Victorian discourses on motherhood and racial purity. Seacole creates an interstitial "Creole" female subjectivity through her creolization of the racial, culinary, and medical aspects of Victorian motherhood. These nursing, cooking, and healing rituals performed by Seacole as a "doctress, nurse, and mother" during the Crimean War allow the memoir to articulate an alternative model of mixed-race motherhood subverting the prevailing nineteenth-century anxieties and stereotyping about the sexual promiscuity of Jamaican womanhood. By reading "Creole" subjectivity as a nonconformist and interracial form of cultural creolization, this essay showcases how the "Creole" subject's maternal and culinary practices can destabilize Victorian racial boundaries and power relationships between colonizer and colonized, home and battlefield, and Britishness and otherness, and further cultivate a space for re-conceiving a creolized empire.