The Ruined Maid

Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Ruined Maid” is an example of a dramatic monologue, which features a conversation between two women in late Victorian England. One is a farm girl and the other is a former farm girl who moves to the city. In the poem the farm girl speaks to Melia, the city girl, and notices how she has changed since her move to the city. The first girl—unidentified by name and yet living on a farm—addresses the other girl, named Melia, who answers in all but one stanza, the last one. The first girl has three lines of the quatrain, and Melia is given a one-line response in which she uses the word “ruin” in a couple of different ways.  Melia explains in each of the six stanzas of the poem that these changes indicate how she has become a “fallen woman.” The term fallen woman in Victorian culture applied to woman who were considered prostitutes, unmarried women who engaged in sexual relations with men, victims of seduction, adulteresses, as well as lower-class women who broke the rules.  

At this time there is a thin line between high prostitutes and well kept women. The poem clearly shows the freedom that is gained from being a prostitute compared to a factory worker that may work 15 or more hours of very hard labor that ruins the body. This work was also very dangerous since no protection was really offered in the factories. Despite all of the hard work and long hours, factory jobs could barely provide someone with proper amount of food and a livable sleeping area.

The country girl shows envy when admiring the prostitute and shows desire to escape to the city. Melia shows that her life used to be old fashion and full of work that was way too hard on a woman. She has replaced her old job for a different kind of labor called “sex” and she states that it has many advantages, like more food, more money, comfortable place to sleep at night, beautiful elegant clothing, etc. Melia seems to have an easier life from the “honorable” farm girl and Melia seems to enjoy her life even though she is doing something that is considered totally wrong and a sin in her society. Why is it that the respectful hard worker lives a much problematic life full of struggles, compared to a prostitute that is sinning and going against all the rules of being the ideal “Victorian woman”?

At this time a Victorian woman, or the “angel of the house” was defined by her role within the home, because the family served as a sanctuary for the "preservation of traditional moral and religious values" ("Victoria's Past").  The qualities valued by Victorian society in the ideal female were submissiveness, innocence, purity, gentleness, self-sacrifice, pa t i enc e, modesty, passivity, and altruism.  T he middle - class Victorian woman was to have no ambition other than to please others and care for her family. A woman was to be "a monument of selflessness, with no existence beyond the loving influence she exuded as daughter, wife, and mo t h e r"  ("Victoria's Past") .

The woman of the nine tenth century occupied a position of “duality” within Victorian culture, she was either “Madonna or Magdalene”, pure or ruined, familiar or foreign.  If a woman disobeyed the rules of what the ideal Victorian woman was, whether by sexual misconduct or criminal act, she was viewed as deviant and unnatural. She represented an “unsettling anomaly that both repelled and fascinated the Victorian.” Society viewed these woman as fallen, but in reality these women were victims of seduction and poverty.

The Victorian man, similar to the woman was only allowed to have sex within marriage, but a woman had to help men control their instincts and not have sex. Even though men were urged to control their sexuality, the Victorians believed that heterosexual desire was in a man’s nature. Therefore the society pleaded ignorance about a man’s inability to control his sexuality!! A man was allowed to seduce women, and in fact it was in their “nature” to do so, but all the responsibility fell upon the women to reject this seduction or else they were damned!

In my opinion the prostitute of Victorian times had a lot in common with the poor women trying to make a living in the urban job market. Many orphans on their own or extremely poor women became prostitutes out of necessity or a means to survive. Most of these women were desperately trying to survive in a world of very few opportunities. In “The Ruined Maid” we clearly see the appeal of becoming a prostitute compared to the living of the factory worker. 

What is very interesting is that Victorian women were not judged solely by their behavior but also by the way that they looked, a woman’s poor appearance could make her seem “fallen”. But at the same time, a woman that once used to be poor, now dressed in overly elaborate clothing and beautiful appearance could be labeled as “fallen”, since prostitution was the only way to buy such clothing from a woman of a poor background. The Victorian Era was extremely judgmental on women, in fact women had only two options; she was either a virgin or she was a mother, anything other than that was subject to critique and ridicule by the society. 

 "To the Life of the Victorian Woman." Victoria's Past. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 Apr 2012.     http://www.victoriaspast.com/LifeofVictorianWoman/LifeofVictorianWoman.html