The theme of protecting one’s reputation at all costs is prevelant in the stories of the middle-class women portrayed throughout Millenium Hall , the Utopian novel written by Sarah Scott which was published in 1762.
One of the characters, Miss Melvin is placed in a very difficult situation, and accused of associating with the son of a local farmer, in a devious plot designed by a jealous mother-in-law. The suspicion alone of bad conduct forces her to accept a marriage proposal because “reputation is so delicate a thing” and “the woman who is suspected is disgraced” (Scott, 124). She marries Mr. Morgan out of duty to society and obedience to her parents, in the face of her Christian belief system, and the hereditary knowledge that her mother had also married out of duty, to honour and obey. Forbidden to have her school friend, Miss Mancel visit her, she lives a difficult life until released of this bondage by her husband’s death.
Miss Mancel, in the care of an aunt since infancy, is well educated in a boarding school, by the sponsorship of Mr. Hintman. Referred to as “the handsome lady” (Scott 135), for her striking beauty, she is a victim of a forbidden relationship in her reciprocol love for Mr. Edward Lampton. His grandmother, Lady Lambton’s chief objection, besides that of lack of fortune is “the obscurity of her birth” (Scott 138). This obscurity, which affects Miss Mancel’s reputation in the eyes of Lady Lambton is removed when she is reunited with her real mother, the wealthy, Mrs. Thornby who had inherited forty thousand pounds at her second husband’s death. The match, now acceptable in the eyes of Lady Lampton is doomed when fate plays its unfair hand in the death of Sir Edward. This story is evidence that reputation and appearance mean more than people’s happiness and plays into the class system.
Lady Mary Jones, an orphan at ten years of age, is influenced by her rich, widowed aunt, Lady Sheernes, whose “lightness of conduct” sheds doubt on her reputation, but whose rank and fortune protects her. Lady Mary, “the object of general courtship” (Scott 174) narrowly escapes the shame of an illicit marriage to a Welsh gentleman, who was already married, by the intervention of fate in the form of an accident which keeps her incapacitated for two weeks. Lady Mary almost loses her reputation once more with the seduction of Lord Robert and has to take some lessons in morality from a “modest young lady” who is “well presuaded there is something so respectable in virtue, that no man will dare to insult it” as long as she behaves with propriety (Scott 183). Left penniless at the death of Lady Sheerness, Lady Mary is saved from ruin by a relative, Lady Brumpton. On receipt of ten thousand pounds at her death, Lady Mary’s heart is “so touched with the greatness of divine mercy, “that her mind [takes] a more serious turn that common,”( 194) and she retires to a more quiet way of life.
The stories of these women along with those of Mrs. Selvyn and Mrs. Trentham exposes the extreme difficulties of middle-class women who are restricted by conventions of behaviour in a patriarchal society and who are ruined if their reputation is in question.
PS I loved this book although I agree with the narrator when he says that the reader may “wish we had done it sooner, and may think that [he] has been too prolix in [his] account of this society” (Scott 249).
