"Deformity" and Reform. Representing Disability in Sarah Scott's "Millenium Hall"

The novel "A Description of Millenium Hall" (1762) by Sarah Scott (1720-1795) is one of the most powerful literary expressions of the Bluestocking movement. Millenium Hall is a digressive narration in which the historiesof the female proprietors of the estate show how they came to inhabit a utopian female-only community where they can provide for the homeless, the sick, the helpless and the disabled. Scott represents disability as a condition of exclusion with which women can and must sympathise, as they share with “monsters” and the “deformed” a marginal and disadvantaged social status which can paradoxically become a privileged position for assessing the unfairness of the existing social order and rebelling against it. The aim of this paper is to show how the ideal community described in Scott’s revolutionary utopia reconfigures the political and cultural role of women along with that of the disabled as outsiders endowed with a powerful potential for social reform.