SOURCE: Judd, Catherine. “‘A Female Ulysses’: Mary Seacole, Homeric Epic and the Trope of Heroic Nursing (1854-1857).” In Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830-1880, pp. 101-21. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Judd criticizes Seacole's narrative for accepting her subject status from England. She explores Seacole's text as a Homeric epic and discusses how Seacole creates a heroic self.

Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) is a crucial and problematic text in the canon of both Caribbean autobiography and nineteenth-century black women writers. Unlike Mary Prince's seminal Afro-Caribbean autobiography The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831), Seacole's narrative refuses to critique the ravages of British colonialism. Sandra Pouchet Paquet has argued that Seacole's narrative “reflects an enthusiastic acceptance of colonialism in the aftermath of slavery. In her narrative, Seacole celebrates her subject status in an empire that...