18 pages • 36-minute read
The Ruined Maid
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Background
Literary Context: Female Sexuality in Hardy’s Work
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, sexual content, and death by suicide.
Hardy was acutely aware of the miseries that can arise from a zealous insistence on moral rectitude, particularly in matters of sexuality and marriage, especially concerning women. This was why he was on ’Melia’s side in “The Ruined Maid.” Thirty-five years after writing that poem, and in the same year as its publication, Hardy returned to the same theme in the short lyric poem, “A Daughter Returns” (published in Hardy’s Winter Words in 1928). The poem shines a light on another “fallen” woman who was not as fortunate as ’Melia appears to have been—or perhaps shows what might have happened had ’Melia ever decided to return home.
“A Daughter Returns” is told from the point of view of the father, whose daughter returns home after a one-year absence. She now looks and sounds quite different, with “dainty-cut raiment, earrings of pearl,” and a different way of speaking, which echoes ’Melia’s appearance and bearing in “The Ruined Maid.” Knowing she is no longer “innocent” (i.e., not a virgin), her father turns her away, telling her not to return. He says he will still think of her from time to time, but the flurry of ominous weather images that follow make it clear that these thoughts will be negative and bitter.
Another “ruined maid” turns up in Hardy’s poem “The Chapel-Organist” (1923). A young woman loves to play the chapel organ even though she is paid only a pittance. When the deacons hear rumors about her behavior with men and want to dismiss her, she persuades them to allow her to play for no wages. Sometime later, she is spotted coming home with a lover at dawn, and this time she is fired. She persuades the deacons to allow her to play just once more, and she performs brilliantly at the Sunday service. However, she is so broken by the moral censure and the loss of the job she loves that after she finishes playing, she dies by suicide by swallowing poison.
Hardy’s most famous ruined maid is Tess Durbeyfield, in the tragic novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Tess is a country girl who, at the age of 16, is seduced by the wealthy Alec d’Urberville. The child she bears him dies in infancy. Four years later, Tess falls in love with Angel Clare, a gentleman, who asks her to marry him. On their wedding night, Angel confesses that he once had a brief affair with an older woman. Tess forgives him and then feels compelled to make her own confession about her past. The idealistic Angel is unable to forgive her, even though her mistake was similar to his. The double standard is obvious (men are never described as “fallen” or “ruined” through sexual experience) but Angel insists that he must reject her now because she is not the same woman with whom he fell in love. After they separate, Tess works on a farm, but, poor and desperate, she allows Alec back into her life, even though she is still married to Angel. After Angel unexpectedly returns from abroad, Tess kills Alec in a fit of rage and is later arrested and hanged.
In all of these works, Hardy demonstrates a marked interest in female sexuality and the rigid social double standards that surrounded women’s sexual behavior in 19th-century England. In exposing how women were judged or ostracized for having sex before marriage, his work criticized both the strict policing of female sexuality and masculine hypocrisy.
Historical and Cultural Context: London in the Mid-19th Century
Hardy was living in London when he wrote “The Ruined Maid,” and at the time music halls were a popular form of entertainment. They featured a variety of acts, including songs, dancing, acrobatics, comedy routines, and male and female impersonators.
One stereotypical comic song told of a country girl who came to the city and was soon schooled in the seductive arts, learning how to survive and flourish in her new urban environment—in other words, a girl who takes ’Melia’s route to a fashionable, if “ruined” life. In the music hall, such songs were considered to be harmless fun, guaranteed to put a smile on the faces of the audience.
Popular though they were, music halls were also often the target of moral conservatives, who believed that the women who danced and sang in revealing costumes (by Victorian standards, that is) encouraged immorality. Such critics would also complain that sex workers would walk up and down the aisles, seeking out new customers. It is estimated that in the mid-19th century, there were about 80,000 sex workers in London. Some of the more fortunate among them became courtesans, whose clients were wealthy and often came from the upper classes. A few courtesans became famous. These included Catherine Walters, also known as “Skittles,” who was mistress to many politicians and aristocrats. In the 1860s, Walters was something of a celebrity and would attract admiring crowds as she rode in her horse-drawn carriage in Hyde Park.
While not every sex worker could become a successful courtesan, many were able to improve on their former economic situation, even if they were subject to moral condemnation by the respectable middle classes. Many working-class urban women were employed in factories or domestic service, which paid only low wages. Poverty was often the result. For such women, sex work might be seen as a way out of a dispiriting or hopeless situation. Their underpaid jobs were the equivalent of the exhausting and poorly rewarded agricultural labor that virtually forced ’Melia in the poem to seek a better, more comfortable life through sex work. Victorian sex work was, however, not without its risks: Poor sex workers were often vulnerable to violence and abuse, including, most infamously, some of Jack the Ripper’s victims.
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