Untimely Old Age and Deformity in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall

Abstract

While previous studies have debated the extent to which Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall values the disabled, this article argues that the novel’s treatment of disability cannot be separated from its treatment of gender and old age. Operating at the nexus of disability studies and aging studies, this article situates Scott’s novel as a key text in the history of disability. Writing in a century that was fascinated by the vagaries of human aging, Scott radically revises her culture’s principal assumptions about female old age. Whereas other eighteenth-century authors cast female aging as a process of undesirable deformation, Scott suggests that old age and disability benefit her heroines by bringing them into contact with the timeless realm of the divine. The novel therefore enriches our understanding of disability in the eighteenth century and beyond, demonstrating the powerful ways in which disability, gender, and temporality intersect.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.