초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This paper deals with Mary Seacole’s 1857 autobiography Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. Written as a travel memoir, this work records the author’s life-long achievement as a Jamaican Creole nurse and hotelier and, more importantly, as a “Crimean heroine” during the Crimean War (1853- 56). This travelogue works as a conduit for Seacole to reify and celebrate her symbolic image as a heroic figure at war. Thus, it shows as a quasi-coming-of-age story of which meaning is as predeterminedly read as “readerly,” not only to make her story a salable commodity for the British public but also to publicize her images as a symbolic figure of universal motherhood. While other critics’ interest mostly lies in Seacole’s self-narrated performance of care, this paper is engaged more in investigating the confessional mode of her writing/storytelling that facilitates her narrative desire to come true in a highly persuasive manner. Based on the assumption that the telling effect of persuasion in Seacole’s autobiography results from its narrative mode of confession, this paper suggests that her confessional narrativization enables her to reinvent a feminist subjectivity as transgressive of the Victorian norms and prejudices of race, gender, and ethnicity against colonial subjects. To this end, this paper examines the confessional mode of Seacole’s narrative strategy that engenders such an anti-ideological subjectivity of women’s agency in Wonderful Adventures. As a result, this paper shows how her autobiography, wherein her action is dramatized, works as a performative stage of confession to voice her feminist agency, while evoking the excessive pleasure of confession to make for a Victorian heroine.
