Dela Cruz, Pia Bernadette · piabernadette · Oct 29, 2014
The story The Gift of the Magi follows the story of a young couple who are madly in love but suffering from the inability to provide the “perfect” gift for each other due to a lack of finances.The main characters in The Gift of the Magi are named Jim and Della; they are a young happy couple who have found themselves living in poverty. At the beginning of the story we are introduced to Della, who is meticulously counting all the money that she has been able to save for her husband Jims Christmas gift. Della is crying with despair over the fact that the amount of money that she has saved will not by her anything that she deems worthy of giving her beloved Jim. It appears that Jim and Della once had a greater salary, one that they were proud of, and one that deemed Jim worthy of having the name "Mr. James Dillingham Young." It also appears that since the drop in Jim’s income their hopes of giving a present worthy of their beloved has been dashed too.
The Gift of the Magi has three different themes. The themes portrayed in this work are poverty, generosity, and love.
Poverty is the main theme in the story. Within the first paragraph of the story we know that theYoungs are very poor. Porter launches us into their lives by writing
“One dollar and eighty-sevencents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time bybulldozing 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.”
Generosity is a major theme in Gift of the Magi.Clearly, any story that focuses on gift-giving as itsmajor plot-line must deal with the concept of generosity. However, Porter is interested in somethingdeeper than superficial generosity of giving a gift that comes easily. He is interested in generosityborn out of a love so deep it transcends reason or wisdom. Love, such as we see between Jim...