Black mobility and the construction of the self: Mary seacole's the wonderful adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

Abstract

This essay examines the formation of subjectivity in the black British writer, Mary Seacole. Her travel memoir, the immediate text for this study, exhibits, the essay argues, not a passive black subjectivity, but an agential one. This subjectivity is constructed through three modes. The first mode is the act of travel. Mobility, I argue, offers the black an agential role, and therefore contributes to the making of her identity. In the second mode, Seacole constructs an entrepreneurial self where, as a business woman, she overcomes obstacles. Finally, in the latter half of the memoir, Seacole describes her services as a nurse on the Crimean war front. In this section, narrating her experiences and documenting testimonials by those she treated, Seacole, in contrast with the early identities, constructs the Selfless Self where her service to society gives her an identity. I conclude by proposing that it is necessary to examine alternate modes of subjectivity that blacks and other oppressed races managed to construct through travel and labor in the nineteenth century. © 2011 IUP.