Perhaps the least studied character type in all of Hawthorne is the "aged crone" ; "withered, shrunken and decrepit" , she appears frequently in the fiction but to little critical notice. When mentioned by scholars at all, Hawthorne's various hags, reputed witch-ladies, and scowling old maids have often been regarded as contemptible figures whose decaying, infertile bodies signal their dispensability at best, their evil natures at worst.
They cared nothing for her dignity, and just as little for her degradation" Even readers who contend that Hawthorne's work critiques the misogyny endemic to nineteenth-century U. Some critics continue to maintain that Hawthorne's work largely reinforces antebellum "true womanhood" ideals that glorify the ornamental, domestic, and procreative roles available to women only in youth.
It might seem to go without saying that Hawthorne's hags and crones reflect the antifeminist belief that aged women, having lost their beauty and fertility, serve as monstrous inversions of angelic femininity and no longer have a place or a purpose in society. But I will argue that Hawthorne perceives the "dignity and degradation" of the elderly female quite differently from his surrounding culture, and that he employs crone and old-maid stereotypes with an irony that has been little understood.
From his earliest published stories, to his children's writing and his most canonical novels, the aged crone appears in a variety of guises: servant, grandmother, witch, suspected witch, goddess, and faded gentlewoman.
In each of these roles, Hawthorne's crones possess strength, creativity, a capacity for discernment, and a mastery of language that place them in a privileged position within his fiction.
