ABSTRACT
The Enlightenment ideals of autonomy, happiness and freedom became central in the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, the patriarchalization of these ideals hindered women’s agency, a vital component of their well-being. In a meaningful continuum of reactions against limiting ideologies, women writers like Delarivier Manley, Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth delineated alternative female identities that escaped the reductionism inherent to patriarchal constructs of women and opened new horizons for the literaturization of feminist concerns, ideas and emotions. Highly aware of the emancipatory significance of their creative endeavours, women outlined in their writings spaces hospitable to their diverse identities. These spaces were ruled by oppositional world views articulated, among other issues, around the denunciation of female oppression and the vindication of women’s right to enjoy life and to actively participate in the public sphere. This chapter discusses how women writers exploited the communicative appeal of spatial imagery in the eighteenth century to construct hospitable loci where their ideologies could become fully functional. It especially focuses on the analysis of Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762), a narrative in which some interesting processes aimed at spatializing feminist world views converge.
