Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle. “The New England Frontier and the Picaresque in Sarah Kemble Knight's Journal.” Early American Literature and Culture: Essays Honoring Harrison T. Meserole. Eds. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola and J.A. Leo Lemay. 122-31. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1992. Print.
The author posits that Sarah Kemble Knight’s journal is not easily contained by “generic categorization,” and this theme of defiance continues when she states Knight more closely resembles a picaro rather than a picara within the picaresque tradition. The essay defends the idea that “Knight filters the frontier through the picaresque and presents it as literary, colonized and domesticated, ‘urbanized,’ dangerous, comic, practical and amoral” (123). These transformations of the frontier by Knight are significant because they challenge the Puritan’s dialectical view of the land. The work of Annette Kolodny claims that women viewed land as a garden to be domesticated, but Knight challenges this viewpoint by “urbanizing” the land, and emphasizing town. This urbanizing is made possible through Knight’s use of the picaresque tradition. Derounian-Stodola identifies three aspects of Knight’s writing as picaresque: popular literary terms represent Knight’s “unorthodox” view of the wilderness; stereotypical secondary characters are provided by presenting the frontier as colonized and domesticated; and the land is “intrinsically amoral” and lacks “symbolic or typological significance” (125, 128). In conclusion, Knight’s journal is not only “the earliest American female picaresque,” it also holds more firmly to the picaresque principals than later works of the eighteenth century (130).
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