Penn Arts & Sciences Logo

Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Travelling Medicine Chest: Mary Seacole's Journeys to Panama and the Crimea"


Cheryl Fish
Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY)
cjf@pipeline.com

This paper looks at the travel narrative Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (London, 1857) by Mary Seacole, a free-born woman of color from Kingston, Jamaica, in order to examine the transnational interventions Seacole made at sites of empire and war in Panama during the Gold Rush and as a doctress and businesswomen at the Crimea War front. In adopting the narrative voice of an ironic "yellow" picara, Seacole valorized both her commonality with Englishness and her creole Jamaican otherness for an English reader.

Through the use of what I am calling a "mobile subjectivity," expressed discursively through shifting spacial coordinates as well as Seacole's relationship to various persons, institutions and locations, she accommodates certain discourses of empire even as she charmingly attemps to disrupt and refigure others. Gendering Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic to include women of color as agents of change, I look at how Seacole's laboring female body as travelling medicine chest dissects and heals various bodies in Panama and in the Crimea. In doing so, she bridges the cap between curing and caring just at the historical moment when these practices were being split off by gender and professionalized into the separate spheres of doctoring and nursing. A relatively priviledged free woman of color who travelled away from post-emancipation Jamaica and its history of slavery, Seacole moves to locations dominated by American and English colonizing presences, textually negotiating with race, imperialism and femininity to mime certain colonial discourses, but with a difference. I shall select specific narrative incidents from her travel writing to illustrate how Seacole uses mobility and observation to both challenge and reinforce certain aspects of national, racial and gendered identities, while daring to "trespass" unofficially at the war after being turned down by Florence Nightingale.


Dr. Cheryl Fish
Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
cjf@pipeline.com

RETURN TO CONFERENCE SPEAKERS, TITLES AND PROGRAM

Updated May 23, 1999