O. Henry presents an odd conundrum in contemporary short fiction. He lends his name to one of the most prestigious prizes in the genre (winners include Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Updike, Carver, Oates), but contemporary authors, especially in universities, often look down upon his sentimentality, breezy narration, relatively shallow characterization, and predictably surprising endings. Happily, there is a solution to this dissonance. O. Henry’s enduring popularity should not obscure that his better stories amply reward deeper reading. His most popular story, “The Gift of the Magi,” achieves a profound resonance, primarily through biblical allusion, both obvious and subtle, at once inviting and endlessly provocative, proliferating far beyond the title. The nexus of biblical allusions, finely attuned to the details of the story, evinces a sophisticated command of Scripture, which in turn enlarges the story of a few pages to a true work of art that is so much more than a cute and clever irony.
The title makes the first biblical allusion, precise, unmistakable, pointing to a single verse, really less than half a verse, from the nativity of Jesus:
And when they [the wise men, magoi in Greek] were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh. (Matthew 2.11 KJV)
The entire biblical episode of the Magi is brief, just thirteen verses, but to O. Henry’s original readers it was (and still largely is) well known, beloved, and enormously influential. With just two key words, the reader is prompted to recall the details of the full passage: the long journey, the guiding star, the jealous king, and of course the wise men and their highly particular gifts. But having staked the allusion from the very start, O. Henry sets it aside until the story’s final paragraph. Until then the allusive title, at first the single word “Gift,” serves as more of a general subject heading for what follows, a dramatization of the modern phenomenon of Christmas gifting, particularly the twin challenges of finding just the right gift for the beloved and then finding a way to pay for it.
On Christmas Eve, Della comes to a double epiphany: she would sell her lush hair to buy a luxurious chain for Jim’s gold watch. The narrator casually adds, seemingly just a random association, this allusive observation:
Had the Queen of Sheba lived in the flat across, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty’s jewels and gifts. Had Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard with envy. (619)
One of the most notable figures in the Old Testament, Solomon is featured in numerous books (1 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs) as lead protagonist or traditional author, sometimes both, along with significant appearances in books ranging from Samuel and Psalms to the gospels. He personifies, literally, the qualities of wealth and wisdom. The Queen of Sheba is a much briefer character, figuring in just one episode, sudden, cryptic even, both coming and going; nonetheless, she too is well known, proverbial, and magnified by both imagination and tradition. In tandem Solomon and the Queen of Sheba have come to suggest a love story. All three of these subjects—wealth, wisdom, romantic love—meet at the thematic core of “The Gift of the Magi.”
With his quirky humor, for worse or for better, O. Henry first engages Solomon for his wealth, re-imagining the ancient magnificent king as an apartment janitor in early 20th-century New York City, with his treasures gathered not in the Temple or Palace but “piled up in the basement.” But there is a subtle sense to this peculiar twist. The allusion to Solomon (and later to the Magi) is inherently comparative. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus sets the precedent, alluding to Solomon as the paragon of glorious wealth:
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? (Matthew 6.28-30)
The construction runs a fortiori: Solomon was wondrously wealthy, and yet the simple lilies are more splendid than him, and yet again the peasants listening to Jesus on the Galilean hillside (and the generations of readers ever since) are of far greater worth than those same lilies, and so two degrees higher than Solomon. So, too, Jim and Della and their prized possessions stand superior to Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. But between Sermon and short story, the tone has shifted. As the middle term, the lilies invest the biblical analogy with sublime beauty, while O. Henry’s “janitor” and “basement” storage bend toward bathetic comedy, though the structure remains the same.
Because Solomon is such a large looming figure, the allusion is largely conceptual, but that one word “treasures” does sound an audible echo and trace a textual legacy from Kings through Matthew into O. Henry’s story. 1 Kings recounts how Solomon ruled over the glory days of the united kingdom and the construction of the Temple: “And Solomon brought in the things which David his father had dedicated, even the silver, and the gold, and the vessels, did he put among the treasures of the house of the Lord” (1 Kings 7.51). Matthew’s passage comes to its narrative and poetic climax when the Magi “opened their treasures” (Mt 2.11) and brought forth their iconic gifts. With its own allusive echo of “treasures,” even if “piled in the basement,” “The Gift of the Magi” aligns all three texts: ancient, very ancient, and modern. So juxtaposed, Solomon and the Magi are of a type—royal, wealthy, and wise—and so, too, O. Henry begins to imply, are Jim and Della Young.
All three narratives—of Solomon, of the Magi, of Della and Jim—feature treasured things, and the three stories agree that their characters’ wisdom is greater than their wealth, or rather, that their wisdom is their true wealth. Solomon’s story is the longest and most thorough and thereby helps clarify the others. His riches are grounded in his wisdom. In his dream encounter with God, given an open-ended gift, Solomon asks for “an understanding heart.” The Lord is pleased, and because Solomon asked wisely, God also gives him “that which you hast not asked, both riches and honor” (1 Kings 3). The parallel account in 2 Chronicles 1 immediately sets forth to measure this intangible wisdom by material wealth: 1400 chariots, 12,000 horses, the value in shekels of prime specimens, the first of scores of numbers to describe his extraordinary riches. 1 Kings would even number his wisdom—3000 proverbs (exceeding the count in Proverbs) and 1005 songs—but these fall short. Solomon’s wisdom runs still deeper, immeasurably so. In an often-overlooked application of one of Scripture’s profoundest similes, “And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding exceeding much, and largeness of heart, even as the sand that is on the sea shore” (1 Kings 4.29). The following verse—”And Solomon’s wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the children of the east country, and all the wisdom of Egypt, for he was wiser than all men” (4.30-31a)—strangely anticipates the Magi and invites O. Henry’s typological reading (notice once again the comparative ascending to the superlative) of these kings. Even more uncannily, the reference to Egypt aligns with the very next passage in Matthew 2, the escape to Egypt, as if not only O. Henry were reading in Kings but Matthew was as well.
In Scripture Solomon is a far larger character than the Queen of Sheba. In the Old Testament she appears in but this one episode (told twice), and we never even learn her name. In the gospels, Jesus adds just one more verse to her lore as the Queen of the South. But in “The Gift of the Magi,” the allusion pointedly begins with the Queen of Sheba, and she is magnified still further by the story’s focus on Della. In 1 Kings 10 and 2 Chronicles 9 she reaffirms the Solomonic complex of wisdom and wealth. Much as the Magi will, she makes a long pilgrimage, hers from Sheba in Southern Arabia, “to prove” (that is, to test or challenge) Solomon “with hard questions” (1 Kings 10.1). After Solomon answers all her questions and passes all her tests, she marvels: “thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard. Happy are thy men, happy are these thy servants, which stand continually before thee, and that hear thy wisdom” (1 Kings 10.7b-8). The wealth is no small part of the wonder, but it is the wisdom that comes both first and last. In Matthew Jesus extracts precisely the same emphasis when he addresses the Pharisees: “The Queen of the South shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here” (Matthew 12.42). Jesus’ allusion to the Queen seems to come out of nowhere—unless one holds the prior allusion to Solomon and the lilies in mind—then it completes a perfect balance. And as with Solomon and the lilies, Jesus makes another complex comparison: the Queen of the South was wiser and more receptive than you Pharisees, even as I am wiser and greater than Solomon.
For O. Henry’s purposes, the inclusion of the Queen of Sheba points to a particular passage and adds to Solomon’s familiar complex of wisdom and wealth the crucial element of gifting. Though Solomon hardly needs anything, she is so impressed that “she gave the king a 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.” In return, “King Solomon gave unto the queen of Sheba all her desire, whatsoever she asked, beside that which Solomon gave her of his royal bounty” (1 Kings 10.10, 13). The exchange can be read as just near eastern customs and politics, but generations of readers have surmised a fonder relationship here, and if so, then treasure is their mutual love language.
The romantic reading is more eisegesis than exegesis—the text does not spell it out—but some striking expressions paired with Solomon’s broader character converge to suggest something more than political tribute. Solomon is the traditional author of, and co-lead within, the Song of Songs, also titled The Song of Solomon from its opening verse, perhaps the world’s single most beautiful and influential poem of romantic love. Elsewhere Kings and Chronicles recount how Solomon was fond of foreign women and wives, by the hundreds, including pharaoh’s daughter, whom he married. So why not the Queen of Sheba who does not seem to have a consort? In this context, certain expressions in 1 Kings 10—“and when she was come to Solomon, she communed with him of all that was in her heart” (10.2b)—seem to suggest more than a botany tutorial. In this context, just before she returns to Sheba, the mention that “king Solomon gave unto the queen of Sheba all her desire” (10.13a) takes on a deeper meaning. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim extrabiblical legends all extrapolate that the Queen returned to Sheba with child, who became Menelik, the legendary founder of the Ethiopian dynasty. O. Henry’s allusion builds upon this long tradition of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba as royal lovers and enriches it still further with Jim and Della.
So grounded, “The Gift of the Magi” is now ready to turn to its own exchange of gifts and the title allusion, almost. But first O. Henry drops one more biblical allusion. After Della has sold her hair and bought the watch chain, and just before she faces Jim, “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.’” There is no specific allusion here, just the evocation of a broad biblically consistent tone to prepare the allusions to come. A moment later Jim enters and stands amazed. Della begins to explain her cut hair:
“You needn’t look for it,” said Della. “It’s sold, I tell you—sold and gone, too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,” she went on with a sudden seriousness, “but nobody could ever count my love for you.”
Two allusions richly intersect. In Matthew 10 Jesus assures his disciples, “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows” (Matthew 10.29-31). In yet another a fortiori construction turning upon sublimely simple imagery, the passage assures the compassionate providence of God. Pivoting upon the key word count, the allusion shifts to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous sonnet (even while writing for a popular audience, O. Henry’s stories abound with poetic allusion, from Shakespeare and Milton to Keats and Tennyson, and here Browning): “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Della seems to dissent from her own allusion: “but nobody could ever count my love for you.” In truth, Browning’s poem already turns upon itself, as lively sonnets often do (as Jesus’ own accounting does in the front half of the double allusion), resolving to count only to find herself multiplying uncountable superlatives, “to the depth and breadth and height / [that] soul can reach.” Finally, the sonnet gushes toward an incalculable love forever growing through timeless eternity.
Note among Jesus’ images above the glancing detail of the farthing, like Della’s pennies. Coinage is a kind of counting and valuation. So the story begins: “One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents was in pennies.” Like the wealth of Solomon, “The Gift of the Magi” abounds with numbers and prices seeking to put a value on things: $30 salary, then $20; $8 rent; $20 hair; $21 watch chain; 87 cents that remain, mostly in pennies. And as with Solomon in Kings (or a MasterCard commercial turning upon what is “priceless”), all these numbers specify the value of things, some quite large, only to be rendered insignificant by greater immeasurable qualities.
The enduring popularity of “The Gift of the Magi” has inspired many imitations of self-effacing ironic gifts, sometimes serious, more often silly. So Mickey Mouse sells his prized harmonica to buy Minnie a chain for her watch, while Minnie Mouse sells her watch to buy a harmonica case. Riffing even further from the original, Bert and Ernie respectively give up their beloved paper clip collection and Rubber Duckie to buy cases for the sold objects (only to be redeemed by Mr. Hooper). The silliness is apt, an admission even that no other objects work so well as the hair and watch. Like the gold (for a king), frankincense (for a priest), and myrrh (foretelling suffering and death) brought by the Magi, the hair and watch mean something. The gifts are, the narrator concludes, “wise ones.” Both Jim and Della take “a mighty pride” in her rippling, shining, cascading hair. In 1 Corinthians 11 Paul observes that hair, specifically long hair, is a woman’s “glory” (11.15). Paul and O. Henry surely knew the Solomonic celebration in Song of Songs, “Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead” (4.1). The simile may puzzle modern readers, but for ancient middle-eastern herdsmen watching their flock descend a rocky hill, the image richly suggested the descending waves and curls of long hair, essentially what O. Henry has modernized and culturally translated with “fall,” “rippling,” and “cascade.” Hair, Della’s hair, is alive, at the roots anyhow, and if cut, will grow back, given time, which is where hair and watch intersect.
The watch of course measures time, the one thing Jim and Della have plenty of, amidst their relative poverty and now absence of prized possessions. As Jim reveals the final irony of having sold his watch to buy her combs, he gently comforts, “Dell . . . let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ’em a while. They’re too nice to use just at present.” The watch is another way of counting, in this case the minutes and hours which are but the rags of time. These lovers need only each other in the blessed “present,” not the material “presents,” thoughtful as they are. They live and love in the present moment, even as they share a future that will restore the value of their sacrifices, if they can only wait “for a while.” Her hair will grow back, and maybe he can redeem his watch from the pawn shop—or maybe he can’t, or maybe he won’t, and just as well. In a significant detail, “Jim’s gold watch . . . had been his father’s and his grandfather’s.” That legacy makes the sacrifice greater, yet still one gladly given and not regretted, the willful extravagance of a personally costly gift. Across his many stories O. Henry frequently alludes to Adam and Eve, by far his most common biblical reference. In Genesis 2, the coupling of Adam and Eve, the climax of creation, concludes, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (2.24). Giving up the gold watch, Jim and Della surpass Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. In sacrificing his family watch, Jim has left father and grandfather behind to cleave unto his wife. As the other Browning bids, “Grow old along with me, / the best is yet to be,” in a fullness of time no watch can measure. Jim and Della are literally Young, with all the world before them.
So “put the chops on,” Jim concludes, as they embrace the wondrous absurdity of the present moment flowing indivisibly into their future together. The final paragraph then belongs to the narrator who completes the promise of the title allusion: “The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving presents.” The paragraph begins and ends with magi, that is, magically wise ones from the Greek and Persian, and makes nine varied soundings of the word wise, rising through “wonderfully wise” to the superlative “wisest,” an insistent three times in conclusion. And yet Jim and Della are “two foolish children” as well, “who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the treasures of their house.” O. Henry plays upon a familiar paradox, one that Scripture employs. While Proverbs tidily contrasts the antinomy of wisdom and foolishness, Paul turns it inside out, posing a series of questions: “Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” (1 Corinthians 1.20). Paul answers himself: “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise” (1.27b). Jim and Della are just such fools, their foolishness wiser than men’s wisdom, their poverty richer than conventional wealth (1.25).
There are differences to bridge between Paul and O. Henry. Paul’s paradox of foolishness and wisdom is focused on Christology and the cross. Jim and Della do sacrifice for one another, but the defining context is romantic and married love. And yet Paul’s paradox has not been entirely secularized or humanized. Though not nearly as erudite and densely allusive as, say, George Herbert or John Milton, O. Henry fairly sprinkles his stories with biblical allusions, and yet he seldom mentions God (Della’s little prayer a safe exception), strategically to avoid religious controversy, it seems, so as not to take (by 1905 standards) the Lord’s name in vain in a piece of pop fiction. But the capital letter in “Babe” discreetly asserts the divine nature of the baby Jesus, the Christ child, and serves as a banner over the whole story. That same Babe grown up would make yet another comparison, “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20.35), and here both have given. The young lovers do not abandon or really even swerve from their source. Their love harmonizes with it.
The phrase “treasures of their house” succinctly recalls the prior allusions and the trail of typological reading from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba through the Magi to Jim and Della. In contrast to their literal “flat,” house shades toward metaphor, such as the House of David, making Jim and Della into royals of sorts. Kings and Chronicles repeatedly impress that Solomon was the wisest of all men. But Jim and Della supersede the wisdom of their prototypes. For Solomon, wisdom begets wealth and then crowns it again. The Magi are often called kings too, though less splendiferous, more strategic in their treasure, more mysterious in their wisdom, creating some separation between wealth and wisdom. The near poverty of Jim and Della sharpens that distinction: their wisdom is their only wealth, and their sacrificial love is the living proof of that wisdom. A few chapters after the Magi, a few verses above Solomon and the lilies in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus himself invokes treasure, not a repudiation but a resituating: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6.21). We can track O. Henry reading in Kings and Matthew. He was also reading in 1 Corinthians, where, after a multi-chapter survey of virtues including Wisdom and Knowledge, Paul famously concludes, “and the greatest of these is Charity” (in the old KJV), that is, Love (13.13). In a love story that strangely enough never mentions love, it is Paul’s superlative, I suggest, that O. Henry transfers to Jim and Della’s wisdom: “Let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive and gifts, such as they are the wisest. Everywhere they are the wisest. They are the magi.” Easily overlooked, the first term of O. Henry’s title is singular, “Gift,” not gifts, neither gold, frankincense and myrrh, nor shiny chain and fancy combs. The singular unifying Gift is love itself, and these lovers have integrated agape and eros, no small achievement, while O. Henry has integrated pleasure reading and deep meaning.
The deeper one goes into the allusions the richer they become. It is an odd quirk, but typical O. Henry, that the way he characterizes Solomon and then evokes Matthew’s nativity account glancingly associates envious Solomon with jealous Herod, not just the Magi, another elevation of the wise men over worldly kings, then all of them superseded by the young lovers. The emphatic “Babe,” paired with the fruitful love affair of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba just beyond the page, intimates a growing family for Jim and Della, as the two become one flesh over the fullness of time, as their sublimely simple monogamy contrasts and corrects Solomon’s astonishing polygamy. Through allusions variously pellucid and intuitive, O. Henry’s little story generates a multitude of expansive reveries, the way great stories do.
Over 120 years and counting, “The Gift of the Magi” has earned the status of an enduring work of literary art. It will be read—and loved—as long as the English language remains alive. But is O. Henry a great writer? Should he be one of the guiding names of contemporary fiction? He is almost always entertaining, but seldom does he achieve such depth of both thought and feeling. He does so here by complex allusion that makes a short story read much larger than its few pages. Moreover, the gravitas of its sources lends their profundity to what otherwise might have truly been “a lamely related uneventful chronicle” with a clever ending. But O. Henry is no one-hit wonder. Among the second echelon of his better-known stories, “The Trimmed Lamp” follows “The Gift of the Magi” with a similar nexus of biblical allusions applied to a contemporary love intrigue, happily concluded, that rewards deeper reading. Among his hundreds of stories, he has another handful that are still widely read, not just assigned, including “The Ransom of Red Chief,” “The Last Leaf,” “After Twenty Years,” and more. Shortly after his death in 1910, not yet 48, the prolific O. Henry was esteemed an illustrious writer among the ranks of Dickens and Dostoevsky, Hawthorne and Melville, and so the O. Henry Award was established in 1919. Few hold him so highly today, but the ensuing century, especially the last few decades, have also seen Hawthorne and Melville, after a long rise, now largely reduced to a single short story each and maybe a single novel, even among English majors. O. Henry’s achievement is not the same as these vaunted predecessors, neither as dark nor as dazzling, but today his readership is as wide, in some cases wider. And at his very best, as in “The Gift of the Magi,” O. Henry has achieved something uniquely his own, ambitious, profound, charming, eagerly read, a rare combination of qualities that well befit a writing prize of which any contemporary recipient may be justly proud.