“The Country Adjacent” as Proto-Ecofeminist Utopia in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall
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This article examines the significance of the rural setting in Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millenium Hall, and the Country Adjacent (1762). As Scott indicates with the title, “the country adjacent” plays a crucial role in the female utopian community she envisages. By focusing on how the women interact with the natural landscape that occupies a significant part of their estate, it examines the ways in which Scott employs and innovates the conventions of pastoral literature not only to critically comment on the restrictive conditions of women’s lives, but also to reconsider the roles women can assume in eighteenth-century England. In addition to depicting the ladies as female proprietors who design the grounds surrounding their country house to create a natural sanctuary for both the hall’s human and nonhuman cohabitants, Scott has them exhibit an ethics of care and responsibility even as they extract natural resources from their estate for their material and economic use. In so doing, I suggest that the community Scott envisages in her novel can be read as a proto-ecofeminist utopia. By having the women engage in ecologically sustainable practices and form a harmonious relationship with nature, through which they provide each other with the protection and care they need to survive in a patriarchal society, I argue that Scott seeks to counter men’s degrading treatment of women and nature as well as tender a viable blueprint for a better society. It is from such interactions with nature that I assert we can draw the more radical implications of Scott’s text.
Abstract
This article examines the significance of the rural setting in Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millenium Hall, and the Country Adjacent (1762). As Scott indicates with the title, “the country adjacent” plays a crucial role in the female utopian community she envisages. By focusing on how the women interact with the natural landscape that occupies a significant part of their estate, it examines the ways in which Scott employs and innovates the conventions of pastoral literature not only to critically comment on the restrictive conditions of women’s lives, but also to reconsider the roles women can assume in eighteenth-century England. In addition to depicting the ladies as female proprietors who design the grounds surrounding their country house to create a natural sanctuary for both the hall’s human and nonhuman cohabitants, Scott has them exhibit an ethics of care and responsibility even as they extract natural resources from their estate for their material and economic use. In so doing, I suggest that the community Scott envisages in her novel can be read as a proto-ecofeminist utopia. By having the women engage in ecologically sustainable practices and form a harmonious relationship with nature, through which they provide each other with the protection and care they need to survive in a patriarchal society, I argue that Scott seeks to counter men’s degrading treatment of women and nature as well as tender a viable blueprint for a better society. It is from such interactions with nature that I assert we can draw the more radical implications of Scott’s text.
참고문헌 (27)
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