Gifts of Pain Made through Hard Sacrifices: A Critical Analysis of The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi is about love and sacrifice. It is a bittersweet reminder that objects are not as important as the people whom we know and those whom we love. The story, itself, of course is famous for the two desperately poor sweethearts who want to buy each other gifts for Christmas. He wants to buy her combs for her beautiful fall of hair and she wants to buy him a chain for the beloved pocket watch he always carries. They work very hard and on that Christmas Eve they each present their beloved with the gifts, so carefully and preciously chosen. In order to fulfill this want, she sells her hair to buy him the chain and he sells his watch to buy her the combs. They sacrifice that which has been most loved by them for each other - and the gifts they want to give each other that Christmas Eve. The story manifests the futility of their coincidental sacrifices that give both nothing but frustration. He finds the chain he receives useless without a watch to connect it and she finds the combs useless without a long hair to wear them. O. Henry presents this dramatic situation as the culmination of his story. He recalls the simplicity of the gifts chosen by the Magi to offer Baby Jesus on his birthday and conveys his philosophy about presents being exchanged for Christmas. The title of the story is an allusion to the noble feelings exchanged between Baby Jesus and the Magi on the most important day in the Christian calendar. Images of Poverty The story of Della and James opens with Della’s meticulous counting of her saving of change that amounts to “One dollar and eighty-seven cents.” The painful stories behind every one of those coins suggest that she is constantly compelled by her poverty to quarrel with the vendors in the market for the sake of a penny or two. Her passionate conflicts with them over the balance money of one or two pennies are not events she is happy to remember, but poverty conjures them up for her in her daily life to make her lose her decent deportment in public. “Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied.” Though it says that she bulldozes the others, the shame she suffers in return implies that it is she who gets bulldozed in the process. Each time she quarrels with somebody, she loses her dignity and grace for a triviality. And that affects her image very badly. Here O. Henry applies a powerful paradox through the result of her behaviour adopted in the events of quarrelling. The enormous machine image of poverty developing from her meagre saving overarches other images that depict her mood and reduces her personality of awe-inspiring elegance to one of quarrelsome defiance. Poverty rules not only her conduct but also her entire system of thinking and behaviour. Her helplessness is obvious in her compulsion to “flop down on the shabby little couch and howl” and her “moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating” suggests an image of defeat. All these recurrent physical-emotional actions that mime failure and frustration take away an enormous part of her innate beauty and elegance. The inner behaviour suggested thus in terms of Della’s struggle for existence is aggravated by the surroundings of her new life in a “furnished flat at $8 per week” of which the quality is meant for “the mendicancy squad” as a result of the heavy salary reduction her husband has suffered in his job. O. Henry satirizes the capitalist system by the contraction of “Mr. James Dillingham Young” to “a modest and unassuming D” for which the shabby treatment he receives from his workplace as a regular employee is unquestionably responsible. As images of modern life he uses the post box which collects no letters from anybody and the alarm button which