19 Jul Sarah Kemble Knight writes as one of our first homegrown tourists, traveling down the East Coast with a keen eye and a playful curiosity. Her authorial voice is one of secular truculence–consider how it compares to Mary Rowlandson’s authorial voice

Sarah Kemble Knight writes as one of our first homegrown tourists, traveling down the East Coast with a keen eye and a playful curiosity. Her authorial voice is one of secular truculence–consider how it compares to Mary Rowlandson’s authorial voice. In a discussion board post, speculate on what may be happening to the status and voice of colonial women form the time of Mary Rowlandson’s writings to the time of Sarah Kemble Knight’s travel journal. Consider also the apparent strangeness of New York to Knight’s Boston sensibility. Although in our present day time the territory between Beacon Street and Manhattan can seem like one amalgameated supercity, the spaces between the two areas were in sharp contrast during Knight’s day.

How does Knight concern herself with accounting for the people and places that fill in the gaps between the metropolitan centers of the growing nation? Knight’s description of her time in New City begins to paint a portrait of a nation already dividing itself into urban and rural spaces–similar to the Red States and the Blue States that have come to define American cultural life in the twenty-first century.

• What insights does Knight offer about different cultures flourishing in what we now regard as close proximity and about the challenge of forging one nation out of these differences and the attendant mutual suspicions?
• How would we describe Knight as a moment in the evolution of a feminist voice on this continent? What are the implications of seeing independently, of establishing a distance between the self and the worlds one visits, and of reporting one’s judgments crisply in words, even if only in a “private journal?”
• Do we transform Knight somehow when we bring her journal into the light and situate it with works that, unlike it, were written for public reading and response?