Fictions of the Gift in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall

Abstract

In this familiar passage, Sarah Scott outlines a socioeconomic and a literary vision that had been many years in the making.1 Although A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent (1762) offers the best-known articulation of Scott’s utopian hopes for women, society, and the novel, her earlier The History of Cornelia (1750) and A Journey through Every Stage of Life (1754) had imagined philanthropic schemes and ideal societies that foreshadow those elaborated in her more famous work. The novel’s sequel, The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), would similarly take up the themes of charitable activism and societal remodeling explored in these earlier texts by tracing its hero’s efforts to emulate Millenium Hall’s example in a series of projects, which prove, through fictional dramatization of authorial intent, the power of exemplary narrative to produce social and political change. However, Millenium Hall remains the most utopian of Scott’s novels in its vision of a self-sustaining economy ideologically and geographically distanced from the labor and marriage markets in which heroines commonly suffer. Here, women’s work—from philanthropy, domestic oeconomy, and teaching, to spinning and carpet making—is the currency of everyday life. Carried out for the “confidence” it inspires and the “affections” it produces, rather than for material gain, the women’s labor finds its reward in the exchange of “free” and transformative “speech,” bestowed by God but ordinarily “contaminated” by the self-interested desires of commercial society.KeywordsMarriage MarketMoral EconomyGift ExchangeReciprocal CommunicationCreative ForceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.