Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring 2011), pp. xxx-xxx. © University of Tulsa, 2011. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved. A Creole Contagion: Narratives of Slavery and Tainted Wealth in Millenium Hall Nicolle Jordan University of Southern Mississippi Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millenium Hall (1762) foregrounds women’s vulnerability in the face of forced marriage and economic dependence, and as a result it has generated an array of feminist interpretations. 1 A utopian community on a remote Cornwall estate founded by six women who pool their resources, Millenium Hall becomes an exclusive space whose female inhabitants devote themselves to philanthropy, undertaking the causes of the poor and victims of injustice. Two seemingly unrelated details—a narrator recently returned from Jamaica and an enclosure for dwarves and giants on the women’s estate—have led critics to bring the novel into conversation with imperialism, noting that Scott’s “feminotopia” resonates with concerns beyond the plight of women. 2 Though seemingly peripheral, the narrator’s colonial past in fact reveals a particularly intriguing unease with the colonies. Furthermore, as we discover halfway through the story, in an easily overlooked aside, the inheritance of one of the Millenium Hall women, Miss Mancel, came from a fortune acquired in the New World. This wealth affords her the means to help found the utopian community. In this essay I will argue that the presence of colonial wealth, though easily overlooked in a work that focuses on charitable women, betrays an underlying anxiety about slave labor. By noting how fortunes acquired in the colonies compromise the health of the men who earned them, I suggest that the novel offers evidence of Scott’s apprehension that colonial wealth may be deeply tainted. It may even be a source of moral contagion and physical deterioration whose effects can be mitigated only by a process of inheritance and transmission. Though Scott does not intend to indict her heroines for participating in the colonial economy, her novel nevertheless makes it possible for readers to make that indictment. As we will see, in a novel obsessed with the financial histories of the women who eventually combine their wealth for mutual benefit, it becomes all the more sig- nificant that wealth acquired in the colonies has deleterious effects on its original male owners. Informed by Edward Said’s seminal reading of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), my argument maintains that seemingly incidental allusions to the colonial periphery encode anxiety regarding colonialism’s brutal reality. 3 Indeed, written a half-century before Austen’s novel, Millenium Hall offers us an opportunity to consider different mani-