‘Knights of Matrimony’‚ Christian Duty and Millenium Hall

Abstract

This chapter offers analysis of Sarah Scott’s 1762 novel Millenium Hall through a religious and moral framework. It demonstrates that the women of Millenium Hall testify to the growing corruption of marriage as an institution among both elites and the lower orders and that the women draw upon their faith in order to escape from the institution as well as to justify their sacrifice of other women to it. While the law of the land requires their submission to the institution, Christian law allows them to be excused by sending deputies to supply their places, a fact that troubles recent scholarship pointing to the novel’s creation of a feminist utopian paradigm.