This essay will explore how Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore use the figure of the Hindu widow in their novels to articulate their contradictory ideas of gender, family, and nationhood during the Bengal Renaissance. Chattopadhyay’s 1873 novel Bishabriksha (The Poison Tree) and Tagore’s Gora, published in 1910, establish their two differing visions of what the ideal family and the nation should be, and both represent the widowed subject as complicating and disrupting these visions. The Poison Tree focuses on ideal conjugality, while Gora is interested in the portrayal of ideal maternity. In The Poison Tree, the presence of the widow signals the perceived dangers of social reform (and a move away from orthodox Hindu values). In Gora, on the other hand, the figure of the Hindu widow becomes a symbol of non-modern rigidity. In both cases, the disruptive widow must be removed in order for the idealized family unit to be restored. These widow-figures are deployed by Chattopadhyay and Tagore in distinct ways in order to establish their contradictory visions for the ideal family and nation, and the role that women are meant to play in these formulations.