Madam Knight’s Journey: Bad Rivers, Spangled Skies & Terrifying Darkness (Short Paper)

[Jay Jay]

Madam Knight’s Journey: Bad Rivers, Spangled Skies & Terrifying Darkness

I have tentatively chosen Sarah Kemble Knight’s The Private Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York for the focus of my conference paper in the hopes that I will discover ecofeminist characteristics within the text not yet discussed by early American scholars.  The journal was written from 1704—1705 and existed in manuscript form until 1825 when Theodore Dwight published it.  Knight records her journey from Boston, Massachusetts to New Haven, Connecticut with a side trip to New York along what is described by Sargent Bush, Jr. as a “rustic” but “increasingly well traveled” road (69).  The road from Boston to New Haven is traveled in five days, but Knight does not return to Boston right away, wintering in Connecticut for almost five months.  Knight’s experience with rural America provides modern readers with a fascinating glimpse into an America caught between the Massachusetts Bay Colony foundation and the American Revolution (70).

Modern readers are not the only audience that has benefited from her writing: Knight’s record of her absence from Boston “was written not for publication but for the amusement of a private circle of relatives and friends” (74).  In 1825 Dwight published the manuscript and shortly after, the manuscript his transcription is based upon was destroyed, leaving scholars with no original source for comparison.  Bush, Jr. reminds us that the reclaiming of Knight by Dwight is important because Dwight and his contemporaries were attempting to establish an American literary tradition and heritage (78-9).  The 1820s coincide with the creation of the myth of the American wilderness, spearheaded by James Fenimore Cooper, and Knight’s journal showcases the contrast between urban and rural America of 1704—1705.  The last lines of Dwight’s introduction are evidence of the transformation from rural frontier to urban landscape in one hundred and twenty years:

Over that tract of country where she travelled about a fortnight, on horseback, under the direction of a hired guide, with frequent risks of life and limb, and sometimes without food or shelter for many miles, we proceed at our ease, without exposure and almost without fatigue, in a day and a half, through a well peopled land, supplied with good stage-coaches and public houses, or the still greater luxuries of the elegant steam boats which daily traverse our waters. (86)

The landscape is spoken of in terms of transformation, from an empty and dangerous wilderness to a peopled and heavily traveled land that has been conquered, subdued and tamed.  Replication of Knight’s hazardous journey is no longer available to those living in Boston or New Haven of the 1820s.




Available scholarship on Knight’s journal focuses on the picaresque and the picaresque tradition, Knight’s use of language, her use of satire and comedy, class issues, and cultural issues.  There is scholarship available that could prove helpful to my project: Peter Kratzke’s article “Sarah Kemble Knight’s Polemical Landscape” in CEA Critic, and the book chapter “The New England Frontier and the Picaresque in Sarah Kemble Knight’s Journal” by Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodoala in Early American Literature and Culture: Essays Honoring Harrison T. Meserole.  I have not yet discovered whether or not either of these authors identity ecocritical or ecofeminist aspects of Knight’s journal, but their remarks on the landscape and environmental conditions could propel me in the right direction.

The essays from Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy call attention to the importance of examining both the human-human relationships and the human-nonhuman relationships in literary works.  Knight’s journal includes both types of relationship, as she encounters a wide variety of people and covers over two hundred miles during her journey.  The human-human relationships are enriched by the complexities of race, ethnicity, class and economic status.  Further complicating these human-human relationships are the locations of the inhabitants: urban landscapes and the backwater frontier landscape.  Rivers in particular are hazardous obstacles and several times Knight narrowly escapes drowning.

In order to evaluate Knight’s journal from an ecofeminist perspective, I need a clear working definition of ecofeminism.  The definition provided by Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy in the introduction to Ecofeminist Literary Criticism serves as a guideline:

ecofeminism is based not only on the recognition of connections between the exploitation of nature and the oppression of women across patriarchal societies.  It is also based on the recognition that these two forms of domination are bound up with class exploitation, racism, colonialism, and neocolonialism. (3) 

I believe that within the journal, the exploitation and domination of nature is presented in various stages of progression and civilization—the urban Boston and the rural New Haven.  Knight has to travel at night on unlit roads, cross rivers on horseback because there is no ferry available, and must hire travel guides because she cannot navigate the roads, or lack therefore, alone.  The oppression of women in the journal is not clear cut, but the nonwhite people that Knight encounters on her travels, I will argue, can be connected to the domination of nature.  The journal exposes the effects of racism and colonialism upon Native Americans and African American slaves that Knight meets, two groups of people whose lands and labor were exploited by early Americans.

I believe there is a link between nonwhites, women and nature in Knight’s journal and that these connections are complicated by factors of race, class, and culture.  To examine these connections will involve an identification of the hierarchies for whites and nonwhites presented by Knight in her writing.  I will also need to look at the way in which nature and the landscape are described and the manner in which Knight physically and metaphorically navigates the landscape.  Also, does the narrative follow the landscape or attempt to mold the landscape to the story?  All of the above factors will play an important role in determining to what extent can I call Knight’s work an environmental text.

In The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell offers four basic characteristics of an environmental text which I will use to evaluate Knight’s journal:

1. The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.
2. The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.
3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation.
4. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text. (7-8)

At this point in the research process, I am not sure how many of these four criteria are met in the journal; I suspect that the first and fourth characteristics are, but not the second and third.  Buell also provides a historical framework which I must pay attention to: is this piece of literature constructed in the image of old world desire when it was originally written in 1704?  Or can I argue that its print publication date of 1825 by Dwight repurposes the text as literature in the image of American cultural nationalism?

From Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters I will utilize the framework of land-as-woman metaphor and imagery.  Does Knight’s language and metaphors match the land-as-woman trend that Kolodny has identified in American literature?  In the same vein, does Knight’s journal challenge the masculine domination of a feminine landscape or participate in the domination process?  As Knight’s journal falls within the time period of 1500—1740, I will attempt to locate highly sexualized language used to describe the landscape, remembering that Kolodny states it is split into the binary of filial homage/erotic desire.  Kolodny identifies differences in pastoral imagery from this time period based on geographic location: the North and the South.  Since Knight is writing from the North (Boston), will I find that her language “limit[s] the scope of pastoral possibilities” in the same vein as Northern promotional writers? (19)  Or will Knight write in the pastoral imagery of the South, described by Kolodny as “sensuously abundant ambience”? (19)  Lastly, can I find evidence of Kolodny’s claim that Americans imagine pastoral metaphors as literal, not just literary truths?

It is my hope that Knight’s journal, with its diverse and complex human population and varied landscapes, will lend itself to the application of an ecofeminist lens.  I am cautiously optimistic of success based on the explosion of ecocritical theories and scholarship, and the inventive and creative literary critical analysis produced by scholars.  Ecocritical scholarship of American literature has become mainstream in the past twenty five years, but the bulk of the scholarship focuses on nineteenth century and beyond.  There are scholars working on ecocritical and ecofeminist literary analysis of early American literature, such as Daniel J. Philippon, Tim Sweet, and Tom Hallock.  Rochelle Johnson and Stacy Alaimo provide excellent examples to follow in later American writing of the nineteenth century.  If the culturally and socially constructed link between women and nature has been in place for centuries, then surely there is value in examining early American literature of the eighteenth century, not just the nineteenth century, to discover the consequences of these relationships for men, women, and the landscape.

Works Cited:

Buell, Lawrence.  The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture.  Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1995.  Print.

Bush, Jr.  Sargent.  “Introduction: The Journal of Madam Knight.”  Ed. Andrews, William L.  Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women’s Narratives.  Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990.  67-83.  Print.

Gaard, Greta, and Patrick D. Murphy, eds. Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1998. Print.

Knight, Sarah Kemble.  “The Journal of Madam Knight.” Ed. Andrews, William L.  Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women’s Narratives.  Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990.  85-116.  Print.

Kolodny, Annette.  The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters.  Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975.  Print.