Hawthorne uses the oxymoron "girl-widow" when describing The Widow Wycherley at the peak of her supposed transformation into a young woman.
But they were young: their burning passions proved them so. Inflamed to madness by the coquetry of the girl-widow, who neither granted nor quite withheld her favors, the three rivals began to interchange threatening glances.
A widow, or a woman who has lost her spouse to death and has not chosen to remarry, is generally imagined as an older woman and certainly not as a "girl" who has not yet reached the age of marriage. In using the oxymoron "girl-widow," then, Hawthorne brings together two words with contrasting associations—one with advanced age and the other with adolescence—to emphasize the dual nature of the Widow Wycherley at this moment in the story. The narrator, though declining to provide specific details, recounts that she has lived a long and difficult life, including the loss of a spouse and an unidentified "scandal" that leads to her social ostracism. Nevertheless, at this point in the story, she appears and behaves in the manner of a silly and flirtatious young person poised to enthusiastically repeat the mistakes that have left her so unhappy in her old age.
