This poem is based on the fate of a woman named Mary Webster, who, in the 1600s, was accused of witchcraft and hanged by the neck to die. She was left to hang through the night but was cut down the next day and lived for another fourteen years.

In the poem there is a tragic irony in the fact that, while Mary is hanging by the neck, lots of people who Mary has previously helped come to watch and offer her no help at all. Among the crowd, there is the woman whose baby Mary "cured," and another whose baby she delivered, or "flushed...out...to save [her] life." Neither woman offers Mary any help or solace, whether it be "a hand, a piece of bread, (or) a shawl / against the cold."

If one has some rudimentary knowledge of the the witch trials in the 1600s, one might also be aware of a dramatic irony in the poem. During the infamous Salem witch trials (1692–1693), women were accused of and often killed for being witches not (of course) because of any evidence, but simply because they were a little unusual or because of malicious gossip. Atwood alludes to this in the poem when Mary says that she was hanged "for living alone" and for having "tattered skirts" and "few buttons" and "a surefire cure for warts." There is a dramatic irony in the poem because the reader may be aware that the women who silently watch Mary hanging may very well share the same fate and themselves ask, as they hang, why nobody speaks up in protest or reaches out to help.