Book chapter
My Own Dear Sons: Discursive Maternity and Proper British Bodies in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands
Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal, pp 181-201
2020
Abstract
In the spring of 1854 the fifty-year-old freeborn black Jamaican and self-professed doctress Mary Seacole first heard of the British engagement in the Crimea; by the following winter Seacole had traveled from the Caribbean to Balaclava to become, in her words, “doctress, nurse and ‘mother’” to the British soldiers.¹ Underscored by her insistent claim that “unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in my own way, I cannot tell it at all,” Seacole’s 1857 autobiography presented a challenge to Victorian England: the empire, she obliquely argues, not only includes me, it needs me (147). Her challenge,...
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Details
- Title
- My Own Dear Sons: Discursive Maternity and Proper British Bodies in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands
- Creators
- Deirdre H. McMahon
- Contributors
- Ellen Bayuk Rosenman (Editor)Claudia C. Klaver (Editor)
- Publication Details
- Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal, pp 181-201
- Publisher
- Ohio State University Press
- Number of pages
- 21
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- English and Philosophy
- Other Identifier
- 9780814202869; 0814202861; 9780814271827; 0814271820; 991021862752604721