The Ruined Maid/At An Inn

Thomas Hardy

AO3 2.

• Hardy spoke for the women of the time who could not speak for themselves

  • Fallen women

  • wealth at the expense of men - prostitutes

  • Eve causing the fall of man

• Victorian realist

• Influenced by the Romantics

  • Highly critical of declining society

• Working class background made him acutely aware of class differences in London

• Interested in social reform and speaking for women

• Tragic characters

  • First wife death’s affected him greatly

AO3 3.

• Strict and moral on the surface

• Drug taking, violence, prostitution → all on the rise

• accepted that men had sex outside marriage

  • women who did so were called ‘fallen’ or ‘ruined’

  • Shunned by polite society, cut off monetarily from their families

• Opportunities and support for women limited

  • Many turned to prostitution

  • Seen as a threat to natural order → fit outside of a class or occupation

• Still under the Church of England

• Fallen women were a popular subject for art, theatre and literature

  • Aimed to reinforce the Victorian surface level values and warn against this

AO3

• At An Inn is about an unfulfilled relationship with the married woman Florence Henniker

• Caught a train together and stayed in the same compartment where she refused his advances

• Friendship survived this

  • Stayed together at the George Hotel and Hardy did get pleasure out of the staff thinking they were married

• ‘Spheres’

  • Sun/Moon

  • heavenly connotations, destiny

AO4

• Social class

  • Who so list

  • Ruined Maid

  • At an Inn

• Love and Gender

  • Ruined maid

  • La Belle Dame

  • She walks in beauty

• Gatsby

  • ‘tired of digging potatoes and spudding up docks’

  • ‘A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun out in his brain’

  • ‘now you’ve gay bracelets and bright feathers three’

  • ‘white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold tie’

  • ‘severing sea and land’

  • ‘He stretched his arms towards the dark water’

  • ‘palsied unto death the pane-fly’s tune’

  • ‘we drove on toward death in the cooling twilight’

AO5

• Marxist - Berman

  • ‘The characters’ closest relationships are not with each other, but with published, advertised, and perceived images and print’

• New Historicist - Tyson

  • ‘'although it claims to open history to all of those with the ambition and perseverance to ‘make their mark’, it is permeated by the desire to escape history’

  • ‘Gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes - a fresh, green breast of the New World’