Introduction
<1>Towards the end of Mary Seacole’s best-selling autobiographical narrative, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857), the Jamaican-born “yellow doctress” (Seacole 38) describes to her British readers a scene of pointed emotional empathy. Seacole is narrating her time in the Crimea, just as the Crimean War of 1853-56 had concluded, and when many British soldiers were beginning to return home after the armistice. Seacole, who had invested heavily in her “British Hotel” for soldiers, finds herself facing the doubly unattractive prospects of bankruptcy and inactivity after the peace. She describes the “glad faces and happy hearts of those who were looking forward to the delights of home” (164), but she notes feeling excluded from this joyful group. Instead, her strongest moments of sympathy are with another sort of solider leaving the war front:
[A]ll this going home seemed strange and somewhat sad, and sometimes I felt that I could not sympathise with the … joy of seeing once more the old familiar faces remembered so fondly in the fearful trenches and the hard-fought battle-fields. Now and then we would see a lounger with a blank face, taking no interest in the bustle of departure, and with him I acknowledged to have more fellow-feeling than with the others, for he, as well as I, clearly had no home to go to. He was a soldier by choice and necessity, as well as by profession…. [T]he peace would bring no particular pleasure to him, whereas war and action were necessary to his existence, gave him excitement, occupation, the chance of promotion. … Was it not so with me? (164)
This description of sympathy with the “blank face[d]” solider marks an overlooked but crucial moment of heightened feeling in the text. Seacole recognizes a likeness based on unseen, but felt, similarity between herself and this career soldier who fights “by choice and necessity, as well as profession.” He, like Seacole, requires “excitement [and] occupation,” and her ties to him are brokered exclusively through the mechanism of “fellow-feeling.” Their correspondence in the imperial setting is formed not by gender, or race, or place of birth—dominant nineteenth-century identity paradigms—but through an imagined essential emotional likeness. Seacole next details her conflicted emotions about leaving the excitement of war, as she, like the solider, feels acutely that she will probably “long in vain for another [occupation] so stirring and so useful” (164). This expression of shared emotion with the serviceman positions Seacole as a site of highly developed affect within the imperial context. She suggests here and throughout the text that such imperially-formed emotions justify her presence in the Crimea.
<2>As I argue in this paper, the capacity of bodies to feel acutely is privileged in Wonderful Adventures in ways that challenge the increasingly rigidifying physical taxonomies of the mid-nineteenth century. Seacole positions her “Creole” body, which she codes as being emotionally responsive, as one that is both unfamiliar, but in many ways superior, to those of her comparatively emotionally repressed British readers. Specifically, the text’s challenge to the Victorian period’s assumed physical hierarchies—where bodies were often stratified along gendered, classed, or racialized lines—depends upon the privileging of bodies like Seacole’s that are framed as being particularly attuned to patriotic sentiment.
<3>For instance, in the first chapter of Wonderful Adventures, as Seacole is relating the experience of losing her husband years earlier, she describes her previously intense feelings of grief:
If you had told me that the time would soon come when I should remember this sorrow calmly, I should not have believed it possible; and yet it was so. I do not think that we hot-blooded Creoles sorrow less for showing it so impetuously; but I do think that the sharp edge of our grief wears down sooner than theirs who preserve an outward demeanour of calmness, and nurse their woe secretly in their hearts. (14)
Here Seacole subtly admonishes her British readers and their
ostensibly problematic relationship to feeling. The British, she
implies, are more likely than the “hot-blooded Creoles” to bottle up
grief, and thus can only approximate an “outward demeanour of
calmness.” This crucial and instructive distinction made between
bodies early in the text at once marks Seacole’s physical
dissimilarity from her northern readers—she is “hot-blooded”—and her
emotional resilience, which is linked to her ability to be truly
calmer than those who “nurse …woe secretly in their hearts.” Seacole
thus suggests her Creole body is more able to enact the ideals of
British steadfastness in a sustained fashion—precisely because she
does process emotion in ways English “hearts” cannot, or will not.
<4>I contend that this primacy placed on feelings is crucial to Wonderful Adventures’ broad reimagining of the British subject. Seacole cultivates her “brown” “Creole” female body as one especially curated for participation in British imperialism, precisely because of its putative ability to feel acutely. The text suggests that such a nuanced capacity for emotion helps to produce and sustain ideal imperial subjects who are more able to withstand the complex emotional demands required of imperial engagement. As I argue in this paper, Wonderful Adventures reveals an alternate way of appraising imperial subjects, particularly female, racialized ones like the “berry brown” Crimean nurse.(1) Seacole positions her body as an alternate and refined version of the national subject: the feeling subject.
<5>The text’s rendering of emotional bodies can be situated historically in the nineteenth century when affect, denoting an “emotional, unreflective response” (“affect,” def. 5.a), was understood as existing both within and without the body. Affect was thought to be simultaneously physiological and intangible, and it could influence both individual and collective bodies. Affect’s tangible relation to the body and the nature of emotion’s corporeal basis were being debated actively in the overlapping arenas of science, culture, and politics, as many examined emotion’s potential to influence physical bodies. In this context, many nineteenth-century literary texts were preoccupied with how emotion might structure and influence larger groups of people while also being a discrete, physically-embodied phenomenon. Describing this tension between individual and collective understandings of emotion, Christine Levecq argues that literary understandings of affect in the nineteenth century were concerned with “depict[ing] individual and communal experience….[by] making the relations between an individual and other individuals or groups the subject of an affective encounter” (16; emphasis added). The body and its potential to perceive and transmit emotion beyond its own tangible limits was at the core of this broad examination of the “affective encounter.”
<6>Levecq underlines that while emotion could be understood as exceeding the bounds of any single body, given affect’s ability to influence groups, emotion’s effects were still understood to have a tangible basis in the discrete body, as the flesh both produced and evidenced affective change. As she argues, the “peculiar configuration of interiority and bodily attributes…guides the process” of affective exchange (Levecq 16) in eighteenth and nineteenth-century texts. In other words, the presence of the body remained integral to the production of affect in many genres of nineteenth-century writing. And significantly, some bodies—especially those deemed emotionally “sensitive”—were understood as crucial to the guiding of such emotional exchanges. In this context, Seacole’s brown Creole body, which is repeatedly coded as a highly sensitive one, is deemed indispensable for several critical interpersonal emotion exchanges in the text, in the context of war.
<7>Throughout this paper, I claim that Wonderful Adventures relies upon an understanding of these physical, affective differences between Seacole and her readers to suggest that her brown Creole body is best suited to perform the often overlooked, but necessary, affective labor of empire. Conceptually, at the core of Seacole’s rhetorical strategy, is the insistence upon a double logic of the same but different quality of her feeling body. Specifically, Seacole reflects, on the one hand, a dominant nineteenth-century ethos that Levecq describes as the “logic of interiority”; this logic of interiority is underpinned by the politics of “interior …sympathy” (Levecq 34) in the period. Interior liberal sympathy relies upon and reifies an idea of internal emotional sameness, a “correspondence between two interior worlds” (Levecq 34), that often precludes the acceptance of any real physical and aesthetic differences between bodies—such as racialized difference. However, while Seacole evokes such understandings of interior sympathy, since she describes herself as being as maternal and as patriotic as the best of her readers and comrades, I also argue that during these moments of sympathy, she insists upon the simultaneous recognition that her Creole body is “brown,” and “a few shades duskier” (13) than those English bodies reading her text. Such reminders of Seacole’s racial difference move beyond the limitations of the logic of interiority—a logic based on the ethos of internal and external sameness—as she underscores these somatic differences. These dissimilarities allow for the “recognition and inclusion” of her body within imperial space.(2) Indeed, Wonderful Adventures’ often unexpected reminders of Seacole’s “brown cheeks” (60) and “impulsive” (74) Creole nature are not simply incidental when examined within the context of the text’s specific politics of inclusion, which necessitate such reminders of embodied contrast. Thus, Seacole’s invocations of contemporaneous ideas of raced and gendered bodily predispositions—references to her “hot-blooded” behavior for instance—become not anomalies to envisioning a national imperial vision that decenters white male totality, but, rather, integral parts of narrating a more heterogeneous national identity. Seacole places the body—her body—firmly within her depictions of affect, and the brokering of sympathy between herself and others thus relies, ironically, upon the logic of bodily difference. For Seacole, brown feeling bodies like hers are essential to imagining ideal iterations of empire.
<8>As I discuss Wonderful Adventures’s politics of feeling in this paper, I do not wish to imply that Seacole’s strategic imbrication of race and affect should be naturalized or unquestioned. Rather, my reading of emotional bodies in Wonderful Adventures is shaped by Sara Ahmed’s assertion that the feeling body is one “constructed as ‘being’ through ‘feeling’” (2). That is, in my analysis of Wonderful Adventures, “emotionality” (Ahmed 4) is not an inherent trait of raced bodies; instead, privileging affect in the text is a way of shaping Seacole’s “emotional orientation toward others” (Ahmed 4). Her body is thus aligned with patriotic sentiment because of her rhetorical deployment of emotion as a socially structuring concept.
<9>I am less concerned with simply rehearsing or establishing Seacole’s degree of complicity in empire in this paper—a matter examined (and often bemoaned) by critics like Sandra Gunning, Sean X. Goudie, Bernard McKenna, and others.(3) Sandra Gunning, for instance, laments that Seacole made “derogatory references [to] colonial others” and that she “openly fostered an exclusively white, at times exclusively male clientele for her successive establishments” (951). Similarly, Bernard McKenna has discussed Seacole’s strategic alignment with a white readership, although he does argue that her “travel narrative …ostensibly supports but covertly undermines English provincialism” (221). While I agree that Seacole is complicit with empire, I am arguing that understanding Seacole’s affective positioning is crucial to a more nuanced understanding of these complex political allegiances. Her affective problematization of the “logic of interiority” in Wonderful Adventures means that her emotive patriotism also critiques and reassess the extant ways of valuing brown, feminized bodies within this imperial system. I am thus examining how Seacole’s affectively constructed body models imperialized feeling, and how this patriotic affect does not dismantle colonial power, but instead seeks to renegotiate bodily hierarchies within this system. In this analysis, race and gender are not stable social identities, but, rather, these ideals are only made visible and meaningful as reflections of bodily affect.
<10>This paper focuses primarily on the Crimean segments of Seacole’s personal narrative, and in the next section, I argue that Wonderful Adventures’s descriptions of Seacole’s affective labor in the Crimea decenter the primacy of the white male martial body and the ideals of military stoicism it frequently represented in the nineteenth century. While male soldiers were often considered ideal imperial representatives, Seacole suggests instead that it is not skin and sinew, but the receptive emotion of bodies that should be most valued in the martial setting. Thus, bodies like Seacole’s become especially suited to enact imperial ideals, precisely because of their capacity for feeling—imperial feeling. In this section, I scrutinize how Seacole positions her emotive body as a site of proper feeling, a body needed to sustain the affective work of empire at close quarters. Moreover, her “brown” “Creole” form is set in opposition to the white bodies—male and female—of Britain, and she describes her emotional, “hot-blooded” body as necessary to maintain an empire of moral sentiment. In the following section, I examine how instances of strong collective emotion among soldiers in Wonderful Adventures are brokered through Seacole’s feeling body. In many of the Crimean passages of the text, Seacole describes powerful emotional release after the armistice, and this strong affect is both focalized and regulated through her. In these scenes of group emotion, Seacole enables sanctioned, patriotic demonstrations of feelings, and the affective and the imperial collude to produce new iterations of national sentiment on a broader scale. Throughout this paper, I argue that Wonderful Adventures reveals an affective genealogy of British identity that must be put into explicit conversation with other paradigms of nineteenth-century identity, such as gender and race.
Seacole And The Rhetoric Of Imperial Feeling
<11>In this section of the paper, I contend that by insisting on the sustained physical presence of Seacole’s body during interpersonal emotional exchanges, the text underlines the importance of otherwise marginalized figures in constructing the entwined histories of emotion and empire. Wonderful Adventures argues that brown, emotive bodies are indispensable in imagining and sustaining a lasting empire, and this idea depends upon understanding how feeling bodies foster and maintain imperial sentiment. Many analyses of Wonderful Adventures have subsumed analyses of Seacole’s feeling form under the text’s representation of gender and surrogate maternity, entirely. For instance, Nicole Fluhr observes of Wonderful Adventures: “Seacole coded her entrepreneurial and medical work in the Crimea as maternal labor, positioning the soldiers who were her customers…as figurative children” (96). And according to contemporaneous descriptions of Seacole from the 1850s, this maternalism was a successful strategy, as visitors to Seacole’s British Hotel, like Alexis Soyer—the famous French chef and culinary reformer—observed her “Jamaican sons” in Crimea; they were so called because Seacole had also treated many of them while they were stationed in Jamaica (Soyer qtd. in Fluhr 96). Fluhr and others underline the prevalence and strategic usefulness of the title “Mother” for Mary Seacole, as it permits her to minimize any differences between herself and “the white mothers whose shoes she claims to fill” (Fluhr 101). Similarly, Sara Salih notes that Seacole was meticulously concerned with her “self-construct[ion] as a ‘proper woman,’” and she argues that Seacole’s “feminine propriety” is maintained at all costs in the Crimea (xxi). While these and other analyses of Seacole’s mother persona have stressed the respectability Seacole cultivates by placing her maternal body in favorable apposition to idealized forms of white British femininity, what has not been discussed hitherto, and what I am arguing here, is that Seacole’s positioning of her feeling body as ideal often differentiates her body from the many white British women found within and without her narrative. That is, while Seacole’s emotional labor in the text does suggest a proxy maternalism for her British “sons,” affect also deliberately marks bodily difference, rather than seamless similarity, between her form and other white, female bodies.
<12>Specifically, when Seacole underlines the capacity of her “Creole” body to feel heightened emotion, she challenges extant mid-century taxonomies of bodies—especially racialized female bodies—by questioning the assumed relation between said bodies to affect. Seacole’s initial description of herself as a “Creole” in the first paragraph of her text is, at best, an ambivalent reference to her racial heritage, given that the word “Creole” in 1857 could signify, spatially, a person born “[c]hiefly in the Caribbean [and] certain parts of the Americas” claiming descent from “Europe or Africa” (“Creole,” def. 1.a). And Creole could also define, racially, “[a]ny person of mixed ancestry born in a country previously colonized by white Europeans” (“Creole,” def. 1.b). But Seacole eventually makes it clear to her readers that she is a person of color, and “a few shades duskier” than the whiter “brunettes whom [her British readers] admire so much” (13). Seacole’s subsequent examinations of emotion revise physical and psychical assumptions about such “duskier” Creole women, whose minds and bodies were thought to be impacted negatively by the tropical climate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.(4) For instance, Seacole states, “I have often heard the term "lazy Creole" applied to my country people; but I am sure I do not know what it is to be indolent” (11). She counters prevalent depictions of (primarily white) Creole women, who were described as having “voice[s] soft and spiritless” and bodies characterized by “languor and lassitude” by earlier influential writers on the Caribbean and its inhabitants.(5) At the same moment, Seacole confronts disparagements of mixed-race Jamaican and Caribbean women, as she counters a dominant narrative that “repeatedly constructed Jamaican mixed-race womanhood as a register of sexual promiscuity and racial degeneration” (Chang 533).(6) In particular, assumptions about the brown Caribbean woman’s emotional unrestrainedness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fueled racist notions about her social and sexual impropriety. For instance, politician and slavery advocate Bryan Edwards wrote that Jamaican mixed-race women, who were often not educated and kept as mistresses of white planters, were “threatened by poverty, urged by their passions, and encouraged by example; upon what principle can we expect these ill-fated women to act otherwise than they do?” (26). While Edwards’s depictions of West-Indian concubinage are relatively sympathetic to the women involved when compared to contemporaneous depictions of female Caribbean licentiousness, his authoritative account still presupposes a race of women more uncontrollably “urged by their passions” than their white female counterparts. Wonderful Adventures confronts implicitly this discourse of unruled passion; however, Seacole’s rhetoric does not negate entirely the perception of the brown Creole woman’s heightened feeling. Instead, Seacole reframes assumptions about the value of these pre-existing “passions” of brown Caribbean women. She introduces this ardent emotion as evidence not of dangerous unruliness, but of the brown Creole’s physical and mental predisposition for moral, patriotic feeling.
<13>In fact, the affective capacity of the mixed-race female Creole body—deemed “hot-blooded” or “urged by passions”—is at the heart of Seacole’s social positioning of emotion and bodies in Wonderful Adventures. Seacole re-appropriates this discourse of passion-filled brown female bodies, a narrative often used to control said bodies in imperial systems, and she instead uses this discourse of emotional ardor as a source of agency. The text thus depends upon a distinction between bodies that are subject to what Denise da Silva defines as “affectability,” or the “condition of being subjected to both natural…conditions and to others’ power,” and those with less “affectable,” bodies (xv). And while historically, the West’s distinction between the affectable and the less affectable body has privileged the latter’s presumed relation to “universal reason” (da Silva xxxix), Seacole re-frames this bodily difference to position the affectable body as the proper arbiter of imperial emotion.
<14>In this vein, Jessica Howell has recently examined the text’s emphasis on the physicality of the mixed-race body in the context of epidemiology. Howell argues that Seacole positions herself as biologically superior to her British readers, and as Howells asserts, Seacole “stress[es the] British subject’s fundamental biological incompatibility with tropical climates [to] valorize the racially mixed subject who can survive different disease environments”—particularly those affected by cholera and yellow fever (108). Howell’s reading is particularly elucidating for its analysis of Wonderful Adventures’s subversion of mid-Victorian racial and bodily hierarchies, as Seacole “proves her legitimacy as a hybridized Briton, while undermining scientifically-justified racism and, by implication, imperial ideology” (Howell 110). However, while Howell reads Seacole’s valorization of the mixed-race body as an act “undermining…Imperial ideology,” I contend that Seacole’s valuation of the “duskier” body does not necessarily act in opposition to imperial rhetoric. Rather, Seacole’s positioning of her brown, emotionally refined form often justifies her position as an active participator in the work of empire. Seacole’s claims are not an outright challenge to the power structures of empire, but, rather, a case that the dark female body should be reassessed within this system.
<15>Indeed, in a scene where Seacole discusses the ravages of yellow fever on the British in Jamaica, which Howells analyses in terms of Seacole’s “valoriz[ing] [of] the racially mixed subject,” Seacole also frames her favorable description of Creole morphology in terms of nuanced feeling that may support empire. Seacole states:
Very often they [yellow fever victims] were borne in from the ships in the harbour – sometimes in a dying state, sometimes – after long and distressing struggles with the grim foe – to recover. Habituated as I had become with death in its most harrowing forms, I found these scenes more difficult to bear than any I had previously borne a part in; and for this reason perhaps, that I had not only to cheer the death-bed of the sufferer, but, far more trying task, to soothe the passionate grief of wife or husband left behind …. Nature has been favourable to strangers in a few respects, and that one of these has been in instilling into the hearts of the Creoles an affection for English people and an anxiety for their welfare, which shows itself warmest when they are sick and suffering. (58)
Seacole’s reference to “Nature” here underscores the rich capacity of “the hearts of Creoles” that care for the beleaguered English, who fight in “vain contest with a climate that refused to adopt them.” As Howell observes, the putative morphological differences between English and Creole bodies preclude the English’s natural adoption of the colonial landscape. However, the Creole’s naturally warm “heart,” an organ that simultaneously denotes physicality and feeling, also permits the sustained presence of the British in this imperial space. Creole “affection” facilitates the healing of both the English body and the English soul, as the former is tended to with the native “healing art,” and the latter is helped by Mary’s “cheer [of] the death-bed sufferer” and her soothing of the “passionate grief of the wife or husband left behind” (58). Seacole underscores that the ability to face such harrowing emotional scenes is entirely a matter of natural make up, and she states just after the passage above: “Death is always terrible – no one need be ashamed to fear it. How we bear it depends much upon our constitutions” (59). The term “constitution,” which infers the “[p]hysical nature or character of the body in regard to healthiness, strength, vitality,” suggests that this emotional capacity is innate, embodied, and natural to Creole morphology (“Constitution,” def. 5.a). And implicitly, the physical “constitution” of Mary the Creole is best adapted to face these emotional scenes of death in Jamaica.
<16>I have been arguing so far that Seacole’s narrative intervenes against the negative associations attributed to the emotional, brown, and female Creole body. Such bodies were often deemed suspiciously affectable and presumed to have less of the reason, logic, and rationality attributed to less affectable, white, male bodies. I have also suggested that Seacole, instead of insisting on the identicalness of her form to said white bodies, claims instead that emotion be reappraised as a crucial facet of patriotism. As the text reinforces its argument for the brown feeling body, Wonderful Adventures necessarily challenges the cultural primacy of the stoic British solider in the nineteenth century. Seacole’s text was composed at a mid-century moment when militarized notions of masculinity were in transition, and as Jeffrey Weeks notes, ideas of white imperial masculinity shifted from an ascetic, monastic ideal to a more militaristic model, particularly in British public schools (Weeks qtd. in Mohanram 4). Similarly, David Newsome argues that ideals of masculinity in the mid-century were marked by a “transition from Christian immaturity to maturity, demonstrated by earnestness, selflessness and integrity…. [L]ate Victorian [masculinity, which] stood for neo-Spartan virility …[was] exemplified by stoicism, hardiness and endurance” (qtd. in Mohanram 4). These evolving notions of muscular, imperial masculinity chart a shift from an emotionally subdued to an emotionally repressed, “neo-Spartan” ideal of male identity. This idealization of emotionally-controlled white male bodies Radhika Mohanram describes as a part of a broader construction of white masculinity in the nineteenth century, entailing the “‘depassionat[ing]’” of the body, which … drained the body of its chaos and grotesquerie” (20). Yet, Seacole’s text shows consistently the shortcomings of this Spartan model. She notes repeatedly the vital need for emotional release in martial settings, and then underlines her own nuanced capacity to guide these necessary forms of affect, essential to her soldier “sons.”
<17>Evidencing her specialized affect, Seacole begins the Crimean sections of her biography describing her felt desire to be useful to her “sons” in the Crimea, and she seeks to do this by redressing not only the reported lack of needed medicinal skill on the war front, but also a widespread want of “sympathy.” For instance, Seacole’s move to the Crimea is triggered by reports of problems with the imperial campaign there, and she describes hearing “from various quarters of mismanagement, want, and suffering in the Crimea… after the battles of Balaclava and Inkermann” (70). She notes:
we knew that the hospitals were full to suffocation, that scarcity and exposure were the fate of all in the camp, and that the brave fellows for whom any of us at home would have split our last shilling, and shared our last meal, were dying thousands of miles away from the active sympathy of their fellow-countrymen. (70)
Tellingly, the “brave fellows” whom Seacole longs to help lack access to “active sympathy” (emphasis added). This sympathy is not a passive emotion for Seacole, but one that must be produced and disseminated energetically. And while the dying men she describes miss the affection of their “fellow-countrymen,” it becomes clear that Seacole is more suited to provide this requisite, active sympathy than men, because of her refined emotion coupled with a maternally inherited Creole “medical knowledge and practice” (1).
<18>While Seacole notes her admiration of her “sons” and “comrades” from Jamaica and the Crimea, she intimates that their British tendencies of emotional suppression are inadequate and untenable in the emotionally taxing context of war. Her “sons” are among the soldiers enacting the stoic, Spartan ideals of manhood gaining increased prestige in the Victorian period. But she suggests the problems with this behavioral code, given the uniquely traumatic catastrophes of warfare. Seacole, for instance, describes her encounter with an Admiral Boxer when she is tending to sick and gravely wounded men near the harbor at Balaclava. The brusque Admiral, an intimidating man who initially “frighten[s] [Seacole] out of [her] wits” (86), is the father of a young man Seacole had treated in Jamaica. The older man who wears a “rough husk” (86) embodies the emotionally repressed ideal of masculinity valorized by his martial culture. Yet, Seacole observes, even he cannot sustain the fiction of total emotional suppression given the exigencies of war:
I was in the midst of my sad work one day when the Admiral came up, and stood looking on. He vouchsafed no word nor look of recognition in answer to my salute, but stood silently by, his hands behind his back, watching the sick being lifted into the boats. You might have thought that he had little feeling, so stern and expressionless was his face; but once, when they raised a sufferer somewhat awkwardly, and he groaned deeply, that rough man broke out all at once with an oath, that was strangely like a prayer, and bade the men, for God's sake, take more care. And, coming up to me, he clapped me on the shoulder, saying, "I am glad to see you here, old lady, among these poor fellows;" while, I am most strangely deceived if I did not see a tear-drop gathering in his eye. (89)
The admiral’s practiced recourse to a stiff upper lip is revealed as an untenable façade here, as imperial men cannot—and perhaps should not—fully repress their feelings, given the scenes of sickness and death Seacole describes. Certainly, the Admiral is described with affection, as Seacole notes the better feelings of sympathy he tries to repress in vain. But the man also legitimizes Mary’s needed presence in this scene, as she is better suited to manage the complex emotions of the sick ward than he is. His clapping of her on the back, and the enthusiastic assertion that he is “glad to see [her] here….among these poor fellows” comes just before his unbidden tear, and the Admiral seeks to displace this difficult emotional labor onto Seacole. Boxer sees this affective work as the provenance of the “old lady”; it is not only necessary in this context, but, as the Admiral tacitly acknowledges, he is comparatively unfit or unwilling to conduct this sustained emotional work that he expresses in painful groans and “oath[s].”
<19>Moreover, immediately after this scene, Seacole demonstrates the particular necessity of her feeling body on the front lines:
It was on this same day, I think, that bending down over a poor fellow whose senses had quite gone, and, I fear me, would never return to him in this world, he took me for his wife, and calling me "Mary, Mary," many times, asked me how it was he had got home so quickly, and why he did not see the children; and said he felt sure he should soon get better now. Poor fellow! I could not undeceive him. I think the fancy happily caused by the touch of a woman's hand soothed his dying hour; for I do not fancy he could have lived to reach Scutari. I never knew it for certain, but I always felt sure that he would never wake from that dream of home in this world. (89; emphasis added)
And this is followed almost immediately by Seacole’s description of another soldier, unfit for the emotional labor of warfare:
Major R— was a brave and experienced officer, but the scenes on the sick-wharf unmanned him often. I have known him nervously restless if the people were behind-hand, even for a few minutes, in their preparations for the wounded. But in this feeling all shared alike. Only women could have done more than they did who attended to this melancholy duty; and they, not because their hearts could be softer, but because their hands are moulded for this work. (90; emphasis added)
Both of these passages describe inchoate male emotion and juxtapose this with explicit references to Mary’s “hands,” underlining the materiality of her emotional care. Affect is not intangible here, but is focalized through Seacole’s specific corporality, which guides powerful emotion appropriately. In the first passage, it is the tactility of Mary’s “woman’s hand” that is capable of calming the soldier during his death; her hand has helped him to imagine a domestic “dream of home in this world,” just as he is set to leave it. The physicality of Seacole’s body, her palpable “touch,” registers the embodied, affective labor that only she can perform. The second passage discussing Major R reinforces this fact. Here Seacole describes the particularly difficult scenes of dying and illness that unravel masculine resolve, as she notes how often “unmanned” Major R is by the harrowing “scenes on the sick wharf.” She adds that this “restless” energy was a “feeling all shared alike,” implying that this anxiety links most of the men, whom she suggests are less cut out for this “melancholy duty” than Seacole. Moreover, the second passage also links feeling to feminine action, as it states “[o]nly women could have done more…and they not because their hearts could be softer, but because their hands were moulded for this work” (90). In both passages, her valuation of hands—brown hands—over hearts suggests the inescapable physicality of her feminine emotional labor on the war front. Affect is valuable when manifested in physical form, and the metonymy of this form is a woman’s hand. The hands permitting this tangible, necessary, emotional labor in public spaces are conspicuously brown and female.
“[t]hey… declared that I was the Queen's first cousin”: Collective Feeling And Imperial Performance
<20>Thus far, I have been scrutinizing instances in Wonderful Adventures where Seacole’s brown body is referenced in relatively discrete terms, as her “hot-blooded” form performs necessary emotional work with soldiers in individual instances. However, feeling bodies also impact the structure of broader corporate, national, bodies in Wonderful Adventures. Specifically, affect is used to broker correspondence between Seacole’s brown form and the other bodies of the British empire, with which she places herself in communion. Descriptions of emotion galvanize an ethical iteration of the empire, in which its many participants are placed in affective alignment with the morality felt by Seacole. Her physical person, a site of refined imperial feeling, serves as a model upon which a larger, collective morality of empire ought to be formed in the text.
<21>Seacole’s narrative forms part of a broader nineteenth-century examination of the political and rhetorical power of affect. As I have argued elsewhere, the nineteenth-century text’s emotional force is one of the most “formidable tool[s] in the installation of …expansive ideas” of nationality (Walters 327). Much recent criticism on the history of emotion has scrutinized how the Victorian text in particular acted as “a technology for the production” and the transmission “of feeling,” and Wonderful Adventures also evidences the socially affective power of nineteenth-century writing.(7) For example, Nicholas Dames has examined what Victorians “considered significant about …texts: feeling rather than thinking” (qtd. in Ablow 5). And Christine Levecq and Theresa Brennan have argued that emotion has a distinctly social nature, separate from the exigencies of a single body, as the transference of affect to another person “has effects on [their] behavior” (Brennan 1). Many in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries understood emotion’s influence on behavior to go beyond that of any one person, and as Levecq has observed, “[w]hen sensibility became a major component of Anglo-American culture…it provided writers with an emotional rhetoric for the political ideas they wanted to convey….[T]hese political theories inevitably drew on the language of human connection and association” (16). Similarly, feeling, as Seacole describes it, is not a solitary action, as it seeks to form connections between her body and a wider body politic.
<22>Indeed, when Seacole calls attention to her visible, embodied emotion, often, it is to spur what Theresa Brennan describes as “socially induced affect,” or a feeling extending beyond the limits of the single body (Brennan 3). For instance, in a scene where Seacole is rejected from Florence Nightingale’s contingent of nurses, likely due in part to her race, Seacole presents her acute emotional reaction as an appropriate national response to the injustice. In this passage, Seacole tells the reader of her patriotic tenacity, despite constant rebuffs, as she has been trying to meet with one of Nightingale’s representatives so that Seacole, too, may go and help British soldiers on the front lines:
Once again I tried, and had an interview this time with one of Miss Nightingale's companions. She gave me the same reply, and I read in her face the fact, that had there been a vacancy, I should not have been chosen to fill it.
As a last resort, I applied to the managers of the Crimean Fund to know whether they would give me a passage to the camp ….But this failed also, and one cold evening I stood in the twilight… and looked back upon the ruins of my last castle in the air. The disappointment seemed a cruel one. I was so conscious of the unselfishness of the motives which induced me to leave England – so certain of the service I could render among the sick soldiery, and yet I found it so difficult to convince others of these facts. Doubts and suspicions arose in my heart for the first and last time, thank Heaven. Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs? Tears streamed down my foolish cheeks, as I stood in the fast thinning streets; tears of grief that any should doubt my motives – that Heaven should deny me the opportunity that I sought. ….I dare say that I was a strange sight to the few passers-by…. I dare say those who read these pages will wonder at me as much as they who saw me did; but you must, all remember that I am one of an impulsive people, and find it hard to put that restraint upon my feelings which to you is so easy and natural. (73-74)
This scene has been rightly scrutinized as an instance where Seacole indicts the British participators in “American prejudices against colour.” And as Salih observes of this passage, Seacole’s “suspicions regarding English racism in the 1850s constitute an implicit challenge to the current truisms regarding the relatively benign nature of racial attitudes in mid-nineteenth-century England” (xxviii). While Seacole offers a veiled critique of the smug assumptions of genial British racial relations here, what has not been attended to closely is how her intense feelings serve to correct those of her potential readers through the pairing of imperial duty and strong emotion. Seacole notes her righteous persistence as she tries to serve, and part of her failure has been in making strictly logical appeals to authority. She makes reasoned requests to both Nightingale's people and to the Crimean fund, noting “so certain [was I] of the service I could render among the sick soldiery, and yet I found it so difficult to convince others of these facts” (73; emphasis added). Her desire to help soldiers is ultimately not understood wholly through “facts,” or empirical methods, and following these failed attempts to show her support, Seacole’s patriotism is expressed, instead, through “tears of grief that any should doubt [her] motives” (74). Emotion becomes the strongest register of patriotism.
<23>The presence of Seacole’s distinctive “skin,” and righteous “tears” is crucial in this scene because they become physical markers that guide her readers into moral feeling, and perhaps moral activity. Seacole’s unique form becomes a political tool, galvanizing these “tears of grief” into potential action. Specifically, she draws attention to the relative physical dissimilarity of her emoting body, noting her “impulsive” heritage and “duskier skin” compared to those of her British readers, and these references to her somatic difference are rhetorically necessary in this passage. For instance, the “duskier skin,” a clear sign of racial difference, is understood in conjunction with her dispositional difference, as she describes her “foolish” tears. Then crucially, Seacole states that she finds it “hard to put … restraint upon [her] feelings” (74), while English emotional repression is comparatively “easy and natural” to her readers. This underlined distinction between “natural” dispositions is important, and Seacole uses it to admonish the underdeveloped moral feelings of some of her readers—those who actually could be restrained in the face of such clear injustice. Thus, while Seacole’s “tears of grief” are unbidden and her heated feelings are “impulsive,” this happens because she is prevented from acting as a useful imperial subject and as a camp mother. And what is “easy and natural” to her readers—emotional suppression—is not deemed the appropriate moral response to the unpatriotic roadblocks of “American colour prejudice,” which fuel her sense of insult. Thus, while Seacole is marking a sharp difference between her attuned feeling and the repressed feelings of her readers, her raced body’s emotional response is clearly the ethical one, and it is the implicit moral guide for her public.
<24>A sustained difference between her body and those of Seacole’s readers must be maintained in the text for the scene above to have its full moral impact. And while, often, the mechanism of sympathy between bodies depends upon forgetting the physical otherness of the sufferer, whose body “becomes an obstacle to be removed…so as to make the imaginative communication possible” between subjects, so that “the observer relinquish[es] his or her focus as onlooker to adopt the vantage point of the observed,” this forgetting of physical difference is never complete in the passage above (Levecq 18). Instead, Seacole’s modeling of proper imperial affect depends upon maintaining awareness of the contrast between her body and those of her white readers, thus disrupting the illusion of perfect interior liberal sympathy. Earlier in her narrative, Seacole hints at the advantages of “hot-blooded Creoles,” who are more emotionally sound for not “nurs[ing] their woe secretly in their hearts” (14), and here, readers are again meant to emulate Seacole’s “hot” feelings. Her difference from her English readers forms part of an aspirational model of feeling that can better structure imperial morality.
<25>As I have been arguing, shifts in Wonderful Adventures between descriptions of Seacole’s embodied emotion—her “feeling” and “tears of grief”—and the direct addresses to her imagined readers demonstrate how affect was deployed to structure individual and collective bodies in the nineteenth century. Feeling, more than her failed attempts at disembodied “facts,” becomes the yardstick of what is ethical, given that her body is constructed as a refined channel for emotions of patriotism and injustice. Seacole’s emphasis on her body as this feeling instrument is also part of a larger discourse in which emotion could be used to legitimize dark and/or feminized bodies in the nineteenth century. Thus, when Seacole seems self-deprecating about her heightened feelings and “foolish tears,” she is also authorizing herself as a sophisticated subject with the same, if not superior, claims to agency and morality as her white British readers. As Kyla Schuller has argued, early in the nineteenth century, refined feeling, or sentiment, was thought to appear only “in the most advanced species and races” (278). Schuller notes that in this period, nuanced emotion presented “a fantasy of the ability of the civilized to master the biological body” (Schuller 279). Since affect was linked to these early ideas of refined civilization—and thus, by close association, to the structuring of racial hierarchies—dark bodies were charged symbolically regarding the matter of feeling. The body’s capacity to feel nuanced emotion was deemed evidence of potential civilization, and this proof of one’s higher emotional faculties was particularly important for the dark and/or feminized bodies thought to have, at best, inconstant access to refined feelings by patriarchal European measures. Given this context, Seacole’s narration of affect becomes a way of not only modeling her refined emotions for readers and creating moments of connection through empire, but her emotion also becomes a form of racial polemic, as she reinforces her rights to personal agency by demonstrating the nuanced range of her feelings in the imperial context. Thus, affectable bodies like Seacole’s become necessary for the construction of patriotic, imperial unity.
<26>The understanding of the individual and collective nature of feeling I have been discussing also enables socially and racially transgressive models of collective patriotism in Wonderful Adventures. In particular, between Christmas of 1855 and the early New Year of 1856, Seacole describes her body as a locus of shared feeling about home among the British officers, and these feelings are mapped explicitly onto her “brown” skin in ways that challenge what Antoinette Burton describes as the prevalent ideal of white Victorian “racial motherhood” (Burton 49). As Burton argues, racial motherhood imparted white women with a “national and racial duty” as national “race creators” (49). In contrast, Seacole’s brown Creole body becomes repeatedly a metonymy of “home” among the soldiers during the emotionally charged holidays on the front. For example, when Seacole receives requests to cook Christmas puddings for some higher-ranking officers, she notes an amusing plea to “cook the captain’s mince pies to a turn—‘Sure he likes them well done, ma’am. Bake ‘em as brown as your own purty face, darlint’” (160). This entreaty is comic, yet the humor also permits a transgressive (if problematic) interchangeability between Seacole’s body and traditional Christmas at a moment when “empire was increasingly perceived as an extension of domesticity, and generally overseen by the white woman” (Chang 528).
<27>Shortly after Seacole has presumably delivered the puddings as “brown as [her…] face,” it is early in the new year of 1856, after the armistice, and she notes that she is one of the first people to enter Tchernaya. Moreover, she is one of, if not the only, British woman to enter the region at this moment, and she suggests:
the army did not desire peace because they had my distaste for fighting; so far from it… but they were most heartily weary of sieges, and the prospect of another year before the gloomy north of Sebastopol damped the ardour of the most sanguine. Before the armistice was signed, the Russians and their old foes made advances of friendship, and the banks of the Tchernaya used to be thronged with strangers, and many strange acquaintances were thus began. I was one of the first to ride down to the Tchernaya, and very much delighted seemed the Russians to see an English woman. I wonder if they thought they all had my complexion. I soon entered heartily into the then current amusement.…[A]nd a wag of an officer, who could talk Russian imperfectly, set himself to work to persuade an innocent Russian that I was his wife, and having succeeded in doing so promptly offered to dispose of me for the medal hanging at his breast.” (161)
While Seacole defends the patriotism of her soldier friends, she is also describing cautiously the battle fatigue felt by troops, and its ability to dampen “the ardour of the most sanguine.” Seacole becomes a locus of desperately needed happiness in this context of psychological despair, and she is the only representative of an “English woman.” She soon joins in with the collective “amusement” shared between soldiers across former battle lines, and this joy is provoked, in part, by the sight of her brown “complexion[ed],” but “English” body.
<28>Of course, neither Seacole nor her readership can be sure if the Russians “thought …all [Englishwomen] had [her] complexion,” but this offhanded comment signals another unconventional allegiance between her brown body and imperial feminine identity. And here, as elsewhere in the text, Seacole is not performing an English femininity linked only to the private, domestic sphere. Rather, the emotional elevation needed to sustain the morale and patriotism of her beleaguered comrades can only be performed by an active woman in the public sphere of the front lines—a woman like Seacole. Moreover, the scene above where Seacole is playfully (and perhaps troublingly) offered as a trade for a Russian officer’s medal speaks to the inextricable connection between her feminine and imperial natures. Seacole is both a proxy “wife” of the cheeky officer and a body linked to a war medal, and this speaks to her intersection between domestic and militaristic modes.
<29>In the pages shortly after her encounter in Tchernaya described above, Wonderful Adventures weaves together collective feeling and public patriotism even more powerfully through Seacole’s body:
Before leaving the Crimea, I made various excursions into the interior, visiting Simpheropol and Baktchiserai. I travelled to Simpheropol with a pretty large party, and had a very amusing journey. My companions were young and full of fun, and tried hard to persuade the Russians that I was Queen Victoria, by paying me the most absurd reverence. When this failed they fell back a little, and declared that I was the Queen's first cousin. Anyhow, they attracted crowds about me, and I became quite a lioness in the streets of Simpheropol, until the arrival of some Highlanders in their uniform cut me out.
My excursion to Baktchiserai was still more amusing and pleasant. (162)
In many respects, this scene of “absurd reverence” and the impersonation of Queen Victoria evokes the festivity and upended authority of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. However, this passage also marks the culmination of Seacole’s affective imperial femininity. The soldiers’ collective sense of hilarity is framed as an emotional, natural, release after the depression of potentially facing yet “another year before the gloomy north of Sebastopol” (161), and this feeling of levity is channeled through the depiction of Seacole as the Queen, and then the Queen’s cousin. After the peace, this strong group affect, described as “fun,” “amusing,” “pleasant,” and “absurd” finds spontaneous, but hitherto unsanctioned, expression, given the emotional control often required of ideal British soldiers. As a counterpoint to this restraint, Seacole acts as an emotional familiar here, permitting and guiding the trajectory of the group’s affect. Through her body, the soldiers’ mass emotion finds sanctioned, patriotic channels that also assuage fears of the unchecked emotion of the armed forces. And while the affect of the soldiers, rather than Seacole’s own, is emphasized most here, Seacole’s body guides the build up to this emotional release in the moments preceding this incident. The feeling body cannot be healthfully excised from imperial service, Seacole intimates, and this tableau of Seacole as Queen Victoria (or Queen Victoria’s cousin) presiding over the emotional release of her soldiery cements Seacole’s role as an ideal conduit of collective patriotic feeling.
Conclusion: “he saw the tears I could not repress, rolling down my brown cheeks”
<30>I have been arguing that Wonderful Adventures’s rhetorical power relies upon a double contextualization of Seacole’s body: it is similar to those white British bodies who also feel keen patriotic sentiment and maternal instinct. But at the same time, her Creole form is deemed profoundly dissimilar because of its more attuned ability to feel and express all registers of emotion. The emotive materiality of her often wet “brown cheeks,” I have suggested, is connected inextricably to the active and patriotic “unwearying ardour” (70) Seacole demonstrates when attempting to reach the Crimea to help her soldier “sons.” And this acutely feeling body both creates and sustains patriotism within both individuals and corporate, national bodies.
<31>Seacole’s simultaneous invocations of bodily sympathy and dissimilarity are perhaps the most poignant and politically effective in a scene where she narrates the death of a physician in the Crimea. Seacole recalls:
He was a young surgeon, and … joyous as a good man should be; and when he fell ill they brought him to my house, where I nursed him, and grew fond of him – almost as fond as the poor lady his mother in England far away. … [H]e knew that he must die. … It was trying to see his poor hands tremblingly penning the last few words of leave-taking …and yet I had to support him while this sad task was effected, and to give him all the help I could. ... I used to call him "My son – my dear child," and to weep over him in a very weak and silly manner perhaps.
He sent for an old friend, Captain S— ; and … I had to listen to the dictation of his simple will…and … my poor son prepared himself to die ….He beckoned me to raise him in the bed, and, as I passed my arms around him, he saw the tears I could not repress, rolling down my brown cheeks, and thanked me with a few words. "Let me lay my head upon your breast;" and so he rested, now and then speaking lowly to himself, "It's only that I miss my mother; but Heaven's will be done." … and then with a smile and a stronger voice, "Home! home!" (60)
In this affecting scene, she acts as the dying surgeon’s nurse and as a proxy for his absent mother, and she guides the man from an earthly to a presumably heavenly “Home.” Seacole sees the surgeon off onto a realm that cannot be prepared for through military training or emotional dispassionateness. Her enactment of this role is framed as a refined and involuntary act—one expressed through “tears [she] could not repress, rolling down [her] brown cheeks.” Emotional reflexivity and “brown cheeks” are melded into a specialized emotional performance, one the soldier acknowledges and then “thank[s] [her for] with a few words.” Both Seacole and the doctor are bonded irrevocably in this moment of death, and his death—the ultimate imperial sacrifice—is guided by Seacole’s “brown” form. She is like his “mother” here yet, by Seacole’s own conspicuous insistence, she is also physically different than the man’s own British mother. This tension between Seacole’s universality and racial specificity is essential to the narration of a cohesive, yet heterogeneous, idea of imperial identity.
<32>Throughout Seacole’s text, while she denaturalizes the apparent fixity of mid-century racial hierarchies that devalued brown, black, and female bodies, her imperial rhetoric yet relies upon the idea that bodies do construct apparent systems of meaning. However, as I have been arguing, the social and political value of these systems is reassessed in Wonderful Adventures to prioritize the apparently natural and socially valuable affect of brown, female, Caribbean bodies. In fact, the affective capacity of said bodies is indispensable in the imagining of an imperial Britain. Seacole writes at a moment in the mid-century when the inclusion of brown and black bodies in official discourses of nation building was often suppressed, even while the tangible presence of such bodies in the empire’s spaces often signified violence. This is a fact Seacole herself alludes to when she bemoans “American prejudices against colour” (73) and references the black and brown bodies that Britain “once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns” (Seacole 21). Seacole’s text, then, intervenes against such paradigms of violence or erasure, as Wonderful Adventures insists instead that the feeling capacity of such racialized bodies is indispensable for a thriving imperial nation. Thus, feeling also becomes a tangible, measurable trait that structures imperial spaces and systems. Moreover, understanding Wonderful Adventures through this lens of affective meaning can help us to reassess the imperialism of the nineteenth century as an even more fluid entity, as we re-contextualize the centrality of emotion, and emotional bodies, in the project of imperial nation building. Wonderful Adventures reveals the extent to which affect in the Victorian period was not simply a moral, physical, or even social construction: affect was also inherently political.