The famous visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon in Israel is recorded in the Old Testament in 1 Kings 10. Both the Queen and Solomon were exceedingly rich. The Queen is strongly impressed by King Solomon's wisdom, power, and wealth. When she is ready to depart she gives him presents of great value.
And she gave the king an hundred and twenty talents of gold, and of spices very great store, and precious stones: there came no more such abundance of spices as these which the queen of Sheba gave to king Solomon.
O. Henry is using the wildest exaggeration when he compares Della and Jim Young to the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. He is suggesting that these famous biblical figures who were so wealthy would envy Della's treasure of her beautiful long hair and Jim's treasure of his gold watch. O. Henry here is probably introducing a biblical motif because he intends to end his story with another reference to the Bible, the story of the three Magi who brought valuable gifts to the infant Jesus in the New Testament.
"The Gift of the Magi" is obviously a Christmas story intended for a Christmas issue of the newspaper. O. Henry was a notoriously heavy drinker who consumed two quarts of whiskey a day and wrote many of his stories in New York saloons. It seems likely that when he was writing this story that he was both uninhibited in his choice of words and under deadline pressure to get something on paper. The hyperbole regarding the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon is just one indication that O. Henry was giving free rein to his great imagination as well filling up space to meet a certain word-quota.
Further evidence that O. Henry was writing under deadline pressure is found in the fact that he repeats the following information four times:
ONE DOLLAR AND eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies.
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present.
Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim.
This certainly sounds like a writer who is filling up space to meet a quota and being careless. O. Henry probably did not proofread his manuscript after he had finished it but hurried to the newspaper office to hand his copy to the printer. Nevertheless, as Hamlet tells Horatio:
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well...
O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" became his best-loved and more frequently anthologized story.
No comments:
Post a Comment