The idea of "fallen" woman: a feminist reading of ElizabethGaskell's Ruth and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'urbervilles

This study aims to compare the idea of a "fallen" woman in two novels, Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell and Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, in the light of feminist literary criticism. As the social structure of Victorian England was rather patriarchal, the men precisely held power and determined the discourse. The label of "fallen" or "ruined" woman created in this context was an expression used for women who had got beyond the moral boundaries. In this study, the internal and external conflicts of the "fallen" female protagonists of the novels mentioned above and their attempts to exist in the society after being abandoned or raped by men have been examined in a comparative and detailed manner. In these novels, in which gender and class distinctions are at the forefront, male characters create physical and psychological pressure on female characters by misusing their gender and the social class they belong to. Despite these pressures, female characters who are never morally corrupted, have great difficulty in maintaining their struggle for existence within society because they are excluded. Eventually, they become the victims of the prejudices and hypocrisy of the Victorian English society in the nineteenth century. Keywords: Feminism, Fallen Woman, Gender Discrimination, Gender Conflicts, Women Studies, Patriarchal Society, Victorian Era, Comparative Literature