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.

Mary Seacole, born into slavery in Jamaica, was a nurse who served on the front during the Crimean war. She ran hotel and inn establishments in Granada and other places, was an intrepid host, clear-headed entrepreneur and traveler. Eventually settling down in England, she acquired considerable wealth and fame, especially among the nursing professionals (even though Florence Nightingale seems to have cornered the market, no doubt due to her racial identity, among famous women of the nineteenth century). A recent biography of Seacole, by Jane Robinson, terms her ‘The Most Famous Black Woman of the Victorian Age’ (2002). She left behind a travelogue-cum-memoir, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857, reprinted 2004). This essay examines the Seacole narrative for its construction of black subjectivity.

While plenty of studies of white travelers in the heyday of Empire have documented the link between travel, subjectivity, imperial ‘sensibility’ and racial identity (Brantlinger, 1988; Pratt, 1995; Mohanram, 1999; and Franey, 2003), few have paid attention to the mobility of ‘other’ races in the same period. Recent work, since the 1990s (Griffin, 1995; Frederick, 2003; Fish, 2004; Nayar, 2008 and 2009; and Waters, 2009), has remedied this in its scrutiny of the new forms of subjectivity that emerge for the blacks through mobility. Seacole’s work, situated at the intersection of race, gender, and class, offers us a whole new perspective on the ways in which members of a historically subjugated race, whose only brush with mobility was in the form of slaving voyages or as transported slaves within the US, use travel as a means of constructing self-hood.1

The present essay maps the ‘travels of the other’, by which I mean the mobility of the black/Creole, and examines the forms of mobility and subjectivity that emerge in the travel memoir of Mary Seacole. At least three modes of constructing the self emerge in Seacole’s narrative.

English Studies Journal, Intra-Psychic Defense Mechanisms, Anita Desai, Humanistic Psychoanalyst, Neurotic Development, Familial Obligations, Biological Limitations, Psychological Limitations, Foreign Universities, English Governesses.