Women and Literature Essays

Women and Literature Essays Women and Literature Essay Women and Literature Essay The book under consideration goes by the name of â€Å"The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands† and was written by the rather infamous author by the name of Mary Seacole. Basically, what is to be presented here from the book is the fact that Seacole presented her help during the Crimean war which was rejected on the base of her race, as the times back then were very biased. The book was written by her in the year 1857 and presents to the readers an extremely interesting autobiography of a Jamaican woman, who came to be known as a rival of Florence Nightingale all the way through the period of the Crimean War. During the war she had presented the offer of helping out as a nurse and that too voluntarily but her offer was rejected completely on the base of her race. Impervious, Seacole got started autonomously to the Crimea where she where she performed an outclass task as doctor as well as a mother to injured soldiers at the same time as running her big business, known as the British Hotel.An eyewitness to a great number of battles, she presents to us flamboyant accounts of how she put up with sickness, onslaught and other adversity at the Crimean battlefront, getting past the discrimination. In the introduction that has been presented to us in the Penguin edition, Sara Salih knowledgeably goes through the metaphorical complications of Seacoles book to discover the sumptuousness of her story.AnalysisVoyager, industrialist, healer as well as a woman who belonged to a rather interesting background, Mary Seacole is a remarkable and mesmerizing figure, transgressing all traditionalist limitations. Mary Seacoles standing after the Crimean War definitely contended that of her corresponding person Florence Nightingale but for a very lengthy period of time she was an over and done annotation in history, and this almost certainly was related to the fact she did not belong to a while middle class family, but was as a substitute the progeny of two race s, her father being a Scottish person and her mother was a black Jamaican woman. Mary Seacole, since the time of her birth was a born healer as well as a woman who had remarkable energy, and with these skills she triumphed over bureaucrat unresponsiveness and ethnic prejudice as she endeavored to prove her significance as a Nurse on equivalence with Nightingale herself. Seacole voyaged extensively before arriving in London, where her proposal to help as a nurse in the war was met with discrimination and snub.Seacole made efforts completely on her own without taking help from anyone and went out to the battlefield, and she put her life at risk to bring console to the injured and dying armed forces; and turned into one of the first black woman to make a blot on British communal life.But at the same time as Florence Nightingale has worn-out in times gone by, Mary Seacole was downgraded to murkiness until very lately.The book under consideration is one that tells us in her own words abo ut her travels, her occurrence, and her life as a lady in color living in a time of prejudice, narrow-mindedness and racial detestation. The book definitely is a very good read and presents to the readers in its many pages a woman of bravery and ethical assurance that whatever she did all the way through her life and every step that she took was right. She did no wrong. It can be said that with her efforts Mary Seacole optimized the Crimean War in a manner that Nightingale never could achieve. This book is one that should be read in schools so that everyone could learn from her bravery. Mary Seacole is to a certain extent an indefinable stature for the reason that she never got to retain any official appointments as well as due to the fact that she did not leave behind a great body of printed works. As has been mentioned previously this book written by her was first published in 1857.As known to all, Mary Seacole was born in Kingston, Jamaica in the year1805. She was the daughter of a Scottish army officer and her mother was a liberated black woman who held up the responsibility of a boarding house in Kingston. Marys mother also helped out people who were sick. Later on all of her knowledge was passed on to Mary who later also turned into a doctress.In the year 1850 Kingston was smacked by a cholera epidemic. Mary Seacole, with her herbal medicines, played an imperative function in dealing with this sickness. She also compacted productively with a yellow fever eruption in Jamaica. Her distinction as a medical practitioner cultivated and she was soon performing operations on people who had knife and gunshot injury. During one trip to Panama she helped take care of people throughout an additional cholera epidemic. Mary performed an autopsy on one casualty and was as a result gifted to learn further about the way the disease assaulted the body.Later on in the year 1853 Russia invaded Turkey. Britain and France, worried about the increasing power of Russia, went t o Turkeys support. This divergence came to be known as the Crimean War.At the time when the Crimean war took place in the Crimea, some of the divisions from Jamaica were hurled there to brawl. Correspondents, like Times journalist, William H. Russell, wrote back reports related to the horrifying state of affairs for the unwell and injured. Nearly twenty thousand British soldiers died during the Crimean war out of which only about three thousand died in the battle field while the remaining seventeen thousand died due to the break out of diseases over there. Recruitment took place and Florence Nightingale was taken upon so as to put in order and educate nurses to toil in the armed forces hospitals of the Crimea. As soon as Mary Seacole heard about the conditions that were taking place, she believed that her familiarity with tropical diseases was fundamental to Britains war labors.As Mary was very fond of her boys coming from Jamaica, she wished to adhere to the contingents she was fam iliar with from Kingston in Sebastopol. Gathering all of the fulsome letters of commendation from armed forces doctors in Jamaica, Seacole came into London in the year 1854. she started off by applying to the War Office for the position of hospital nurse since in her own terms she said, â€Å"knowing that I was well fitted for the work, and would be the right woman in the right place (Seacole, p. 123). This was the first time when her assistance was rejected on the base of her race. After that she submitted an application at a range of military offices as well as at Florence Nightingales institute. Even though there was an enormous scarcity of appropriate women to depart to the Crimea as nurses, her application was rejected by everyone. As a final point, acrimoniously dissatisfied that not a soul seemed to desire the aid she was generously offering, Mary wrote in her biography, â€Å"Doubts and suspicion rose in my heart for the first and last time, thank Heaven. Was it possible t hat American prejudices against color had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs† (Seacole, p. 126).Disinclined to acknowledge trounce, Mary took on a business called the British Hotel, not many miles from the battlefront. This was the place where she vended food and drink to the British soldiers. By this way she was able to gather money so as to pay for the medical healing she provided to the soldiers (Seaton, P.1).ConclusionIn the light of the above discussion we can hereby culminate that Mary Seacole was a very learned person, but was declined to be taken up in Florence Nightingales team due to her ethnicity which was not linked to a middle class white family.