The Ruined Maid

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination and sexual content.

With her poise and self-confidence, as she struts around the city streets in her fetching outfit, ’Melia takes pleasure in turning conventional sexual morality on its head. She sees no need to explain herself with tedious self-justification but instead satirizes her situation with the sixfold repetition, over the course of the conversation with her friend, of the word “ruined,” brazenly applying such an unenviable condition to herself. ’Melia is succinct and witty in her expressions, with the poem implying the sort of things she must have done to acquire “such fair garments, such prosperi-ty” (Line 3), even if her naïve friend seems not to. Through ’Melia’s transformation, Hardy questions conventional sexual morality in Victorian society.

If ’Melia were to accept the Victorian moral code, she would be going around head down and ashamed, beaten down by a system designed to control a woman’s sexual behavior. Quite the opposite has occurred, however. ’Melia has broken the rules but found a way of flourishing in spite of it. Instead of being a “ruined maid” in the accepted, non-ironic sense of the phrase—that is to say, disgraced by her illicit involvement with a man outside of marriage—she is using the man (or men) to her own advantage.