Many Caring Marys: Feminised Care in Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Marys Seacole

Abstract

Drawing upon a growing body of research in feminist care theory, this essay argues that Mary Seacole’s representation of care in her 1857 autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, uses maternal rhetoric to reinforce a Victorian vision of care grounded in feminine hospitality and domestic comfort. The essay considers Seacole’s narrative as both a sentimentalist story that sanitises care labour through her use of the figurative ‘mother,’ and as a testimony to the centrality of care labour, so often invisibilised, in grand narratives of history. I analyse this vision alongside Jackie Sibblies Drury’s 2019 play Marys Seacole, which reconsiders Seacole’s legacy by arguing instead for an entangled, interdependent model of care relations that explicitly attends to differences in class and race. Drury’s play ambivalently explores what is both inspiring and fraught within Seacole’s original narrative; its final dramatic thrust, which finds its characters clinging to the iconography of ‘Mother Seacole’ while physically clutching onto one another, registers the inadequacy of a care model dependent upon exploited mother figures and suggests the need for lateral, multiracial, and multigenerational networks of mutual support.