[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are not the only audience that has benefited from her writing: Knight’s record of her absence from Boston “was written not for publication but for the amusement of a private circle of relatives and friends” (74).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.
