Sarah Scott’s Narrative “No Place”: Gazing and Utopia in Millenium Hall

Abstract

Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) is framed by a male narrator for an imagined male reader, and it lacks a substantial critique of slavery, empire, or class; the status of this novel as an example of utopia is therefore an ongoing question. I argue that the utopic vision in the novel happens at the level of fictionality. Millenium Hall is about reforming the sentimental gaze of the male narrator and, by extension, the reader of the novel. Scott critiques sentimentality, particularly the sentimental gaze upon the spectacle of the suffering woman as voyeuristic and inherently sexual. In its stead, she offers a didactic and morally instructive form of looking that avoids titillating scenes of suffering. The novel disrupts and tempers sentimental plots by providing women characters a refuge from sentimentality in the form of the Hall. Renewed attention to Scott’s critique of the sentimental can challenge assumptions about the role of the sentimental mode in eighteenth-century women’s writings.