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. She knows how to get what she wants and she is enjoying her newfound fashionable lifestyle and affluence. 

’Melia knows very well how some might regard her, but in her view of herself she rises effortlessly above such condemnation. Each remark she tosses at her friend confirms the advantages and benefits of her new lifestyle. Her fine clothes are just “how we dress when we’re ruined” (Line 8), the plural pronoun suggesting her sense of kinship with other women who have taken a similar downward-upward path in the city. She speaks in a more refined way now because gaining “polish” (Line 12) is part of the deal when it comes to being “ruined”; all the rough country edges have been smoothed out, especially the rural dialect that would have given her origins and status away. She has entered into a life of ease too, since work is only for those how haven’t been ruined, she tells her wide-eyed friend. The easy life has also restored the beauty of her “delicate cheek” (Line 14), which had been coarsened by years of demanding farm labor. 

’Melia’s new life, as her friend observes, has also banished the anxieties and sadness that afflicted her when she was a farm girl, and now she is, in her own estimation, “pretty lively” (Line 20), all past “melancho-ly” (Line 19), forgotten like a bad dream. It seems that there is no end to the advantages of being ruined. Thus, in presenting ’Melia’s tongue-in-cheek assessment of what it means to be “ruined,” Hardy suggests that women like ’Melia do not deserve censure for taking advantage of one of the few means of social mobility available to rural women at the time.