Expanding Mary Seacole's Archive Main Menu

Identity Performance Path

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In this path, I lay out her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands as a carefully tailored book meant for a British audience. The text understandably occupies a privileged position as the most comprehensive source for the study of her life, as it is evident in critical studies like Nicole Fluhr's and Tan-Feng Chang, who explore the doctress' construction of herself as a mother figure for the British soldiers in Crimea. However, Seacole scholarship has yet to consider her autobiography as a physical object meant to be bought. Here, I take up this issue to investigate the different layers composing the Seacole persona in Wonderful Adventures as a comercial product that Seacole produced to generate revenues and pay off her debt.

Each of the nouns below represents a layer of Seacole's identity performance in her autobiography. These categories were determined based on contemporary scholarship and a close reading of Wonderful Adventures. 

This page has paths:

  1. Knowledge Paths Winnie Perez Martinez

Contents of this path:

  1. Doctress
  2. Entrepreneur
  3. Mother
  4. Sutler