But beyond that obvious point there is also a commentary on the stingy husband who, failing to provide generously for his wife, is deprived of that which he would have kept to himself.

Once upon a time, Juha bought three pounds of meat, brought it home, and told his wife, “Prepare this meat for my dinner.”  Then he left and went to the coffeehouse.

Juha’s wife prepared the meat and waited a while for her husband to return.  He was gone a long time, however, and she became hungry.  “Well,” she thought, “he won’t notice if just a little piece is missing,” and she cut off a morsel of the meat and ate it.

Still Juha didn’t return.  His wife took another little bit of the meat, and then another, and another.  Before she realized it, she had eaten the whole three pounds.

Finally Juha returned, and by this time he was very hungry.  He entered the house and told his wife, “Quick!  Bring me the meat you have prepared for my dinner!”

"Oh, husband," she said in a tone of distress.  "The cat ate the meat!"

Furious, Juha took the cat and weighed it on his scale; he found the cat to weigh exactly three pounds.

And he asked his wife, “If this is the cat, where’s the meat?  And if this is the meat, where’s the cat?”

Polygynous marriages, especially where a new wife is considerably younger than her predecessor, often create turbulent domestic situations.  “The New or the Old?” casts Juha as a young man who punishes his father’s young wife for disrupting the household.  He manipulates her into what is held in the traditional culture to be the submissive role of a woman in a sexual relationship, and tricks her into committing adultery, thus negating her power over him and his mother.

When Juha was a young man, he lived with his mother and father.  His father married a young girl who was Juha’s own age and brought her to live with him and his old wife.  Because his new wife was young and pretty, he became like putty in her hands.  She soon began to boss Juha and his mother, making their lives intolerable.  So Juha said to himself, “By God, I’ll show this woman whose house this is!”