Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T04:23:04.619Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“THEIR CALLING ME ‘MOTHER’ WAS NOT, I THINK, ALTOGETHER UNMEANING”: MARY SEACOLE'S MATERNAL PERSONAE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2006

Nicole Fluhr
Nicole Fluhr
Affiliation:
Southern Connecticut State University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , March 2006 , pp. 95 - 113
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alexander Ziggi, and Audrey Dewjee. 1984. Editors' Introduction. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. By Mary Seacole. Ed. Ziggi Alexander and Audrey Dewjee. Bristol: Falling Wall Press 9– 45.
Andrews William. 1988. Introduction. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. By Mary Seacole. Ed. William Andrews. Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. Gen. ed. Henry Lewis Gates,Jr. New York: Oxford UP xxvii– xxxiv.
Bush Barbara. 2000 “‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ or ‘Drudge’? British Slavery and the ‘Fabulous Fiction’ of Black Women's Identities, c. 1650–1838.” Women's History Review 9: 761– 89.Google Scholar
Calder William Menzies. By courtesy of the Librarian, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. RAMC Collection 701, box 56. Wellcome Institute Library, London.
Cattell William Daverell. Bygone Days and Reminiscences by the Way. By courtesy of the Librarian, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. RAMC Collection 391. Wellcome Institute Library, London.
Fish Cheryl. 1997 “Voices of Restless (Dis)continuity: The Significance of Travel for Free Black Women in the Antebellum Americas.” Women's Studies 26.5: 475– 95.Google Scholar
Foster Frances Smith. 1993. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. Bloomington: Indiana UP
Fox-Genovese Elizabeth. 1988. “My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women.” The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Shari Benstock. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 63– 89.
Gikandi Simon. 1996. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia UP
Goodman Margaret. 1867. Experiences of an English Sister of Mercy. London: Smith Elder
Gunning Sandra. 2001 “Traveling with Her Mother's Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race, and Location in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Signs 26.4: 949– 81.Google Scholar
Hall Catherine. 1993 “White Visions, Black Lives: The Free Villages of Jamaica.” History Workshop Journal 36: 100– 132.Google Scholar
Hawthorne Evelyn J. 2000 “Self-Writing, Literary Traditions, and Post-Emancipation Identity: The Case of Mary Seacole.” Biography 23.2: 309– 31.Google Scholar
Judd Catherine. 1998. “‘A Female Ulysses’: Mary Seacole, Homeric Epic, and the Trope of Heroic Nursing (1854–1857).” Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830–1880. By Catherine Judd. New York: St. Martin's, 101– 22.
Kerr Paulette. 1995. “Victims or Strategists? Female lodging-house keepers in Jamaica.” Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. Ed. Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey. New York: St. Martin's, 197– 212.
1883. Leaves from the Annals of the Sisters of Mercy in 3 vols. Vol. 2 By a Member of the Order of Mercy. New York: Catholic Publication Society,
McKenna Bernard. 1997 “‘Fancies of Exclusive Possession’: Validation and Dissociation in Mary Seacole's England and Caribbean.” Philological Quarterly 76.2: 219– 39.Google Scholar
1998. “Mrs. Seacole.” Exhibit. Florence Nightingale Museum, London. June
1856. “The Nightingale Fund.” Illustrated London News 29 March
1857: “Our Own Vivandière.” Punch 30 May 221.
Paquet Sandra Pouchet. 2002. Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation. Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography. Gen. ed. William L. Andrews. Madison: U of Wisconsin P
Paquet Sandra Pouchet. 1992 “The Enigma of Arrival: The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” African American Review 26.4: 651– 63.Google Scholar
Paravisini-Gebert Lizabeth. 2003. “Mrs. Seacole's Wonderful Adventures in Many Lands and the Consciousness of Transit.” Black Victorians/Black Victoriana. Ed. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP,
Reid Douglas Arthur. 1911. Memoirs of the Crimean War: January 1855–June 1856. London: St. Catherine P
Robinson Amy. 1994 “Authority and the Public Display of Identity: Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Feminist Studies 20.3: 537– 57.Google Scholar
Ross Ellen. 1993. Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918. New York: Oxford UP
Russell W. H. “To The Reader.” Andrews vii– viii.
Seacole Mary. 1988. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. Ed. William Andrews. Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. Gen. ed. Henry Lewis Gates,Jr. New York: Oxford UP
Smith F. B. 1982. Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power. London: Croom Helm
Smith Faith L. 1994 “Coming Home to the Real Thing: Gender and Intellectual Life in the Anglophone Caribbean.” South Atlantic Quarterly 93.4: 895– 923.Google Scholar
Soyer Alexis. 1857. Soyer's Culinary Campaign: Being Historical Reminiscences of the Late War, with the Plain Art of Cookery, for Military and Civil Institutions, the Army, Navy, Public, Etc., Etc. London: Routledge
1856 “Stir for Seacole, A.” Punch 31 (6 December): 221.
Trollope Anthony. 1867. The West Indies and the Spanish Main. London: Chapman and Hall