Imposing Order: Sarah Kemble Knight’s Journal and the Anglo-American Empire

Abstract

On October 2, 1704, Sarah Kemble Knight embarked on a journey from Boston to New York, with a stopover in New Haven and various points in rural Connecticut, to settle the estate of a distant relative.¹ Knight’s travels, difficult for a man and almost unthinkable for a woman, arc remarkable not only for their physical rigor but also for the journal Knight kept along the way. Variously classified as a picaresque (Derounian-Stodola), a travel narrative (Martin), and a “sprightly and graphic picture of the rustic manners of the early eighteenth century” (Miller 425), Knight’s journal sits easily in each and all of these genres. Knight handily violates modern readers’ expectations of an early eighteenth-century New England Puritan woman. She is neither particularly pious nor obedient nor introspective. She is, however, both a peculiarly entitled and powerful presence in the journal—an almost regal, distanced observer of the cultural practices of her Connecticut and New York hosts, their neighbors, slaves, and servants—and an intimate physical presence, suffering and describing in vivid detail various bodily insults and discomforts as well as comforts and pleasures. Knight’s perspective encompasses both the cultural and the societal norms of the British Empire, which she embraces and inhabits, as well as the intensely physical perspective of a colonial American woman on an arduous and exciting journey. Knight offers readers a split-screen perspective: intimate and personal/empirical and official. Knight wishes to impose order—an empirical, yet also feminine order—on the disorderly bodies of the Connecticut rubes and Indians she encounters, all while conveying her own bodily experience in vivid detail.