Author’s Note: This is my theme essay. I am writing about the theme in the short story The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry. I had found a website (http://www.americanliterature.com/short-stories) that had a bunch of short stories by various authors. This one was a recommended one, and it wasn’t sad and didn’t have anything to do with horror, so I decided to use that one for this essay. It had about three themes that all came together to make the story what it is.
What is it like to give something away to make someone else happy? You must feel a sense of pride that you did the right thing. In life, people sell things they hold dear to themselves to buy something for someone they love. In the short story The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry, it’s exactly like that, but the two people end up getting Christmas presents for each other that wouldn’t make sense to use anymore. The definition of love is "a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person.” In The Gift of the Magi, the two main characters possess a love for each other that is so strong that they are willing to sacrifice their greatest treasures for each other, with no regrets.
There are many themes that would be accurate to describe the short story The Gift of the Magi, but poverty is one of the major ones. The characters were poor, and couldn’t afford a gift for each other without having to sell something they hold dear. The fact that they were poor was something that they feared, because they really wanted to give gifts that Christmas. Della and Jim were poor but still decided that they would spend every penny they could afford to buy gifts.
Sacrifice is another theme in the short story. The two characters sacrificed something that they could’ve gotten trouble about to afford gifts on Christmas Eve. Sacrifice is a common theme within short stories and books. The fourth book in the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer which is called Breaking Dawn, one of the main characters sacrifices her “humanness” to be with the one she loves. Sacrifice is a theme that is found in many texts such as plays, books, short stories, and poems. The main thing about the theme ‘sacrifice’ is that it’s normally one person sacrificing themselves or something they hold dear to be with someone they love. In The Gift of the Magi, it’s both of the characters sacrificing something for love.
Sacrifice is a theme in the story, but here is another: Love. The two characters felt that they needed to buy each other gifts for the holiday because they loved each other. Here is a direct quote from the story: “She had a habit of saying little silent prayers about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: "Please, God, make him think I am still pretty."” Della felt that because she cut off her hair that Jim wouldn’t think she was pretty anymore. Eventually, when Jim came come and they exchanged gifts, they still loved each other.
In the story, the two characters would sacrifice their most precious things to make each other happy. The man, Jim, gets the woman, Della, a set of combs for Christmas. The conflict is that she cut off all of her long hair to get him a watch, and he sold the watch that had been in his family for a while to get her a set of combs for her long hair. Basically, the gift that Della received were combs, but she had sold all of her hair so she couldn’t really use the combs anymore until her hair grew out. Generosity is a theme in The Gift of the Magi because they were generous enough to sell their only prized possessions to make each other happy. Della and Jim didn’t regret selling their only possessions to get each other gifts, because they felt that their love for each other was more important than having long hair or an expensive watch. All themes that I mentioned were accurate for the story: Poverty, sacrifice, and love.
No comments:
Post a Comment