Deus caritas est. O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi

The moral of the well-known short story The Gift of the Magi appears to have a chink. The reader has trouble deciding whether to sympathize with the characters or laugh at their ruined Christmas plans. It will hardly help to attribute the story’s powerful artistic impact to the elegant plot twist alone. Meanwhile, the title of the story is only referred to in two paragraphs. The question of the text’s artistic power cannot be resolved solely by attributing it to the elegance of its plot. The Gift of the Magi features a special structure for a ‘reciprocated motion’ kind of reading, a back-and-forth trajectory leading to the discovery of the story’s deeper meaning. O. Henry was famously fond of mythological contexts, and a Biblical, or, more specifically, Nativity-related, variety of such a context helps answer the question of what gift the magi failed to give to baby Jesus but Jim and Della exchanged with each other. The New Testament maxim of “God is love” may only enjoy an elusive presence in the story, but it constitutes a crucial part of its artistic and moral system and holds the key to its comprehension.

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