Widow Mistreatment

That's one hot widow!

"For many women, becoming a widow does not just mean the heartache of losing a husband, but often losing everything else as well."

— Cherie Blair, English lawyer, writer, and wife of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair in an article for the Guardian celebrating International Widows Day

Being a widow in fiction and in real life is hard. The spouse, someone whom you either have spent a very long time with, or whom you promised to spend your entire life with but didn't have a chance to, just died, either from a long time of suffering from disease(s) or from a conflict. This should be the time where the audience and the widow would expect sympathy and condolences from the surrounding family and community, right?

Not when this trope happens. Widow Mistreatment is a trope where family members and the community start treating the character in question worse because of their recently widowed status. This might happen for a couple of reasons: Perhaps the community and family never really liked the surviving spouse that much to begin with, and the death of their more beloved spouse finally allowed people to not keep their tongues and emotions shut. Perhaps it is superstition that the widow carried a curse that killed their spouse or a victim of a curse that killed their spouse. Inheritance is probably the biggest and most common reason for this to happen. Marriage is a contract, after all. The kids and relatives who are money-hungry enough or have a bad enough relationship with the deceased would want their share of the inheritance, and if they know they have fewer claims and less power than other members, they would not hesitate to exploit the grieving widow or treat the widow badly to get that inheritance. In more extreme cases, the widow is heavily encouraged or even forced to kill themselves in honor of their deceased spouse.

While this trope is gender-neutral and thus male and queer examples exist, it usually befalls heterosexual women due to the preference for men and the expectation that widowed men would remarry or already had multiple wives and concubines. So much so that June 23 is recognized by the United Nation as International Widows Day with the aim to bring attention to the hardships facing widows from their society in developing countries.

This trope only applies when the community and family unfairly treat the widow worse because of the death of their spouse. If the widow in question is shown to have been abusive to or killed their spouse, or be considered a suspect to the killing of their spouse with reasonable proofs and motives then the widow brought it on themselves and thus not an example of this trope.

Contrast with Black Widow and The Bluebeard, where the widow is anything but sympathetic. Also contrast with Comforting the Widow, where the widow is generally treated sympathetically, though it may overlap if the character comforting the widow has morally questionable reasons to do so. Compare to Widow Witch, where people think widowed women are witches. Can lead to Inheritance Murder if the inheritance is big enough. Can be used as world-building for a Crapsack World, for Deliberate Values Dissonance or a Kick the Dog moment for a villain as readers are extremely likely to sympathize with a grieving widow rather than the people or society that lashes out at them. However, in cultures or times that tolerate or even encourage this practice, this might cause a Values Dissonance when another culture or people from a different time period read the work and stumble upon this trope being casually described or even glorified/justified.

Since this is a Death Trope, beware of unmarked spoilers.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• In V for Vendetta, the sudden murder of her abusive husband Derek sends poor Rose Almond on a dark path, as her pension is denied, she's forced to pimp herself out to one of Richard's rivals for money (after which he himself is murdered, giving her an undeserved reputation as a Black Widow), then ends up having to get a job as a cabaret dancer, during which she's raped by her boss. All of this ends up having been orchestrated by V in order to drive her insane; convinced that the government was responsible for all her suffering, she ends up assassinating Adam Susan, sending the government into a succession crisis from which it never emerges.

Film — Live-Action

• The Nepali movie Jhola, based on the novel by Nepali author Krishna Dharabasi, is about a young woman who escaped being put to death following her husband's death.
• Die Wannseekonferenz: Eichmann and Luther explain the Cozzi Affair to Heydrich after Kritzinger brings it up. It's caused a bit of an embarassment to the Foreign Office to mistreat the widow of an Italian officer, but Eichmann insists that the Führer's directives for the Endlösing made it necessary.

Literature

• Around the World in Eighty Days: Phileas Fogg rescues Indian princess Aouda from a forced ritualistic death after her husband died.
• The Ashram by Indian author Sattar Memon is a book about a recently widowed Western man who traveled to Himalaya and saved a widow who is pressured to commit ritualistic death.
• In Hans Christian Andersen's "The Bishop of Børglum Cloister and His Kinsmen," a local noble dies and the titular bishop lies to the Pope to get him to excommunicate the widow, all so that the bishop can seize her husband's estate and force her out of her home.
• Gayatri Spivak: Deconstruction and the Ethics of Postcolonial Literary Interpretation is a critical analysis and compilation of influential Indian feminist critic, professor and philosopher Gayatri Spivak that extensively discusses the practice of sati (burning widows following the death of her spouse) and noted that this put women in a lose-lose position: Either lose their social standing, wealth and their own life or be labeled as a slut and lose her social status.
• Rudyard Kipling: The Last Suttee is a poem that recounts how the widowed queen of a Rajput ruler disguises herself as a nautch girl (a dancer who often combined artistic performances with more sexual ones) in order to pass through a line of guards and die upon his pyre.
• In Le mort vivant by Henri Djombo, after the Joseph is kidnapped by soldiers from Yangani and thought to be dead, his wife is thrown out of their house and robbed of all their common household property by his relatives.
• A Million Adventures: In The Foreign Princess, Queen Stepmother Isabella is the young widow of the current king's father. Since she is technically a relation, she has to live in the royal palace and the king has to allow it. However, due to her kind and generous nature, she is The Friend Nobody Likes in the eyes of the Decadent Court and Token Good Teammate in the eyes of the commons. She has many enemies at court and has to constantly use diplomacy and extreme caution to avoid getting killed off.
• The Odyssey: When her husband Odysseus is thought to be dead, Penelope has 108 suitors gather around her kingdom to dine and party, harass her servants, slaves, and even her son Telemachus all the while strong-arming her to find a new husband.
• Portrait in Sepia: After the death of Paulina del Valle's husband, she finds herself excluded from social and business circles, and opts to leave post-gold fever San Francisco and go back to her native Chile.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Ramsay Snow kidnapped, forcibly married, and imprisoned the recently widowed Donella Hornwood to take over her lands. She later died of starvation. However, her allies and her husband's family are absolutely furious at Ramsay for his treatment of her and the Hornwood family started a war with the Boltons.
  • Fire & Blood: Due to its high rates of Death by Childbirth and the widowers' subsequent remarriages to women in their childbearing age, especially in highborn families, Westeros frequently has young widows left with already-grown stepchildren after a nobleman's death. Initially, such widows were often stripped of their inheritance or even thrown out after their husbands' deaths, until Queen Alysanne Targaryen issued the Widow's Law that protected widows' rights.
• Wagons West: In Independence!, Claudia is not only forced to sell off the mills she inherited from her late husband but also to abandon her comfortable life in Connecticut for the wagon train life, just because her miserly brother-in-law Otto said so as the law required a man to be in charge of her inheritance. Otto even said she would need his permission to remarry.
• In the The Way of Kings (2010), Navani, the former Queen of Alethkar, lost most of her status when her royal husband was murdered seven years prior to the start of the book. Most of the women in the nobility abandoned her because her lack of status meant they couldn't get any boost in their social position from befriending her, while she's also allowed very little contact with men because as a widow, she's expected to remain faithful to her late husband.

Live-Action TV

• In The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Versace's lover Antonio is utterly ruined by Gianni's murder, as Gianni's homophobic sister Donatella fires him from her brother's company and exploits a legal technicality to cheat him out of Gianni's will. While in real life, Antonio would eventually manage to negotiate with the Versace family for a portion of the inheritance, the show ends with him attempting to kill himself.
• Harry's Law: Harry had a client whose wife was murdered and the police never found the killer. There was no evidence that he did it, no one in his life or his wife's family suspected him, and in fact the police didn't consider him a suspect, just a person of interest (which basically means the investigators were aware of his existence). But, because the world is filled with people who are too stupid to understand the difference between a person of interest and a suspect, his life was ruined because the "person of interest" label made it impossible for him to get a job or a loan.
• The Sopranos: Subverted with Big Pussy's widow Angie Bonpensiero. After her husband is "disappeared" by Tony and his crew for being a government informant, she voices her financial problems to Carmela, Tony's wife. While he initially considers helping her out, he decides to vandalize her car and tells her to come directly to him with any problems. Later on, she is forced to become a cashier at a supermarket to make ends meet. Tony takes pity on Angie and puts her in charge of Pussy's former car shop. Angie excells at the job and becomes an integral part of Tony's operation, far moreso than the other mob wives.

Mythology & Religion

• The Bible mostly averted or inverted this trope, in a case of Values Resonance. The Bible repeatedly forbids being cruel to widows and encourage its readers to take care of them and include them as valuable members in societal gatherings, and their mistreatment is considered a tragedy, a Kick the Dog moment for the character who committed it or proof that its readers have strayed from God's path:
  • Book of Exodus 22: "You shall not afflict any widow or orphan. If you afflict them at all, and if they do cry out to Me, I will surely hear their cry; and My anger will be kindled, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless."
  • Book of Deuteronomy 24: As one of the list of actions forbidden by a married man, he is not allowed to take over belongings that specifically belong to a widow.
  • Book of Job 24: Job warns that anyone who wrong barren women or widows will be cursed by God to never be protected by God and thus will always be afraid of people coming after them.
  • Book of Psalms 94: The narrator of the poem begs God to punish the enemies of the Jewish and Christians for oppressing them because their enemies committed heinous actions like "slay the widows".
  • Book of Mark 12:
    • When the non-believers Sadducees ask Jesus about an imaginary case of a widow who married all 7 brothers and they all died before siring an heir, whose wife will she be when she is resurrected, Jesus told them that all 8 of them will be reborn and thus all of their marriages are annulled.
    • Jesus warned against the hypocritical scribes who dress lavishly and are honored by the community but behind doors he "devouring widows' house".
    • Jesus also lambasts the priests for their attitude toward the poor widow who can only put a single mite, the smallest possible coin, in the collection box. He points out that a rich man giving a thousand is still only emptying the small change out of his pocket, yet expecting praise for generosity. The widow is parting with money that would genuinely make a difference to her. Who, he asked, is showing more faith and making the bigger sacrifice?
  • Acts of the Apostles 6: A major complaint of the Hellenistic Jews against the native Hebrews is that the latter overlooked widows in the daily serving of foods.

Theatre

• Being a playwriter who has an extremely prominent fascination with women and their tragedy compared to his contemporaries, Euripides has explored this trope in a few of his surviving plays:
  • The crux of The Trojan Women is the depiction of the tragedy that falls upon the women of Troy after the Trojan War, many of whom are widows. Two of the main characters Hecuba and Andromache (along with many nameless extras) are turned to sex slaves because their husbands fought against the Greek army. Andromache also witnesses her son Astyanax being thrown down a mountain because his status as the heir of Troy is too threatening for the Greek army.
  • Andromache follows the life of Andromache after being turned into a sex slave following the Trojan War, with her lamenting many times in the play about her husband and son's deaths. Her life with her captor Neoptolemos isn't easy either, with his wife Hermione taking out her frustration of her own childlessness onto Andromache.
  • Hecuba depicts Queen Hecuba's life after the Trojan War killed her husband king Priam. The play depicts her Trauma Conga Line of becoming a sex slave, her son Polydorus is betrayed and killed by King Polymester to steal the gold that was sent with him, and her daughter Polyxena is blood sacrificed on the tomb of the Greek warrior Achilles. She got her revenge by stabbing the treacherous Polymestor's eyes and killing his sons, fully knowing that she will very likely die sooner or later.
• Thoroughly deconstructed in the Mrs. Hawking series regarding the title character. The title character, Mrs. Victoria Hawking, begins the series by losing her husband, Colonel Reginald Hawking. As such, she's subjected to the social isolation described in the Real Life folder below...but the twist is that Victoria likes being left alone and having no one talk to or visit her, especially because it allows her to pursue her work as a society avenger in secret. Furthermore, she's an aromantic asexual, and her marriage to Reginald was absolutely miserable, as he "never stopped loving her" despite quickly realizing just how incompatible they were. As such, when Victoria's nephew Nathaniel tries to be extra kind and attentive to her, she considers that mistreatment and repeatedly shoos him away. Though Victoria does gradually become more comfortable with a select few people over the series, she never stops wearing black or emphasizing her widowhood to society at large, utilizing the social invisibility that comes with it to her own advantage.

Video Games

• In Eastern Exorcist, this is the backstory of Shu the Water Demon, once a beautiful village maiden whose husband died in a war, and her being subsequently made a pariah after she's branded a "jinx" by the townsfolk. When some lowlife punks force themselves on her, the villagers decide to punish Shu instead by executing her via drowning in order to have the incident covered up; Shu's residual vengeance over her mistreatment turns her into a water demon haunting the village's waterfront.

Web Animation

• Autodale: "Friendly Shadow" reveals that if a married adult dies a premature death, their spouse is branded Ugly and executed shortly after for being a widow or widower, while any children they have are given to a foster family. When the father is killed by a Freak and the daughter disappears, the mother is aware that she will become an Ugly and be executed, but the Shadow promises her that he will find her daughter.

Webcomic

• A Stepmother's Marchen: Shuli von Neuchwanstein, the 16-year-old widow of Johannes struggles with this — having promised her husband she would take care of her stepchildren while having to fight aunts and uncles who desire the family's power for themselves. Unfortunately, her lack of experience forces her to take desperate and impulsive actions that leave her seen as a Gold Digger and a cheater which ultimately leads to her death. However, as the premise of the comic, she wakes up seven years earlier and works to avert this trope and become the Good Stepmother she always was in the eyes of the public.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons: Homer has always hated Ned, but ever since Ned's wife, Maude, died in "Alone Again Natura Diddily," her death has given Homer just another reason to pick on Ned (it gets even worse since he's indirectly responsible for her death in the first place). He'll often tease him about it, and one time, he even gloated about it in song. Thankfully, being The Pollyanna that he is, Ned will usually just laugh off Homer's insults.

Real Life

• The practice of Sati in the Indian region is an extreme example of this trope, where the widow is forced or heavily encouraged to burn herself following her husband's death, with the justification of honoring her deceased husband and their marriage. The tradition used to be way less extreme, with the widow "only" being neglected and cast out of her husband's family before the medieval times turning it into the fire and brimstone version it was most infamous for. This was such a controversial and brutal practice that it divided the Hindu Rajputs, who supported the practice, against the Muslim Mughals as well as the Sikh people who both opposed the practice. Modern India officially banned the practice in 1987 after the extreme outrage at the death of Roop Kanwar. However, like with any long-standing traditions, there are still some isolated cases in modern times.
• Victorian widows, especially middle and upper-class women, are expected to uphold The Mourning After for at least a year, with some regions and time period at least two, after her husband's death and practice strict social isolation. They could not accept formal invitations except from close relatives and avoided pleasurable occasions and public places except for church. Their social status also took a big hit compared to when they were married. Lower-class and working women mostly averted this practice because they had to take care of their families.
• Princess Huyền Trân was a Vietnamese princess who became the second wife of the foreign Champa king Jaya Simhavarman III / Chế Mân / Prince Harijit. After a year of marriage, she was left widowed and forced to undergo ritualistic burning per her husband's cultural tradition. This of course enraged her older brother King Trần Anh Tông who ordered his general to go to Champa with the excuse of saying goodbye to the Princess but in reality staging a rescue and bringing her back to Vietnam. The Champa royal family considered her refusal to die and rescue a disgrace and sent a general to recapture two of the districts that were ceded per the marriage contract to the Vietnamese royal family, but he failed and died in Vietnam. This further strained the diplomatic relationship between the two countries, to the point king Tran Anh Tong invaded Champa to overthrow the current king and crown the younger prince who was less hostile to Vietnam, but Trần Anh Tông's actions had a lasting impact on the two countries' diplomatic relationship for decades. Her story (especially the version where she and the general either become lovers after her rescue or were already lovers before her marriage, despite him being 40 years older than her at the time of her rescue and no historical evidence to support it) is a popular myth in Vietnam, being portrayed and referenced many times in art, poetry, music, and literature.
• This article for The Guardian by Cherie Blair that provided the page quote list out all the indignities that can be faced by widows, including but not limited to: suffering social discrimination, stigma, and even violence, being forced to "cleanse" herself by having sexual intercourse with a relative or stranger, denied inheritance and land rights, forced to drink the water that was used to clean her dead husband's body, all the while facing crippling poverty that forced her children to quit education and working, further perpetuating the cycle of poverty. Blair ends her article by listing out her Loomba Foundation create works that the widows would want and reassuring that they are not forgotten.
• During Medieval European and Colonial American witch hunts, widows were one of the more likely demographics to get accused of witchcraft, possibly because they were the only unmarried women who could possess a significant degree of personal wealth or status in that time. During the Salem witch trials, Sarah Osbourne, one of the first three victims, was in the middle of a legal dispute with her deceased first husband's family at the time of her accusation.
• Nazi Germany faced a diplomatic scandal when they deported the Latvian-Jewish Jenny Cozzi to the Riga Ghetto. Cozzi was the widow of a high-ranking Italian officer, who considered it a matter of honor that his widow be treated in the manner afforded such a woman of prestige and sent a request to the German Foreign Office demanding her safe return to Italy. Adolf Eichmann of the SS-Gestapo Office of Jewish Affairs (aka the "Architect of The Holocaust") refused the Italian request, and she was deported to a concentration camp and killed. This event was one of several cited during the Eichmann Trial to establish that he was not a mere bureaucrat but an executioner who had personally ordered the murder of numerous people.

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