Creolizing the White Woman's Burden: Mary Seacole Playing "Mother" at the Colonial Crossroads between Panama and Crimea
Journal: College literature
Year: 2017

This essay examines how the creolized formations of race, gender, and empire in Mary Seacole's 1857 memoir, <i>Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands</i>, challenges Victorian discourses on motherhood and racial purity. Seacole creates an interstitial "Creole" female subjectivity through her creolization of the racial, culinary, and medical aspects of Victorian motherhood. These nursing, cooking, and healing rituals performed by Seacole as a "doctress, nurse, and mother" during the C