Two married young girls of low social standing experience financial difficulties. Both are pretty and feminine. The marriage of one is happy despite an obvious slid towards poverty, while the other does not exhibit the mutual love and care between the spouses. Both narratives predominantly pivot around the female characters voiced by an impersonal narrator. The stories of Guy de Maupassant and O. Henry have a few decades between them. While similar in structure, the stories, however, have the endings with different qualities of surprise: “Gift of the Magi” has a happy ending of a fairy tale, while “The Necklace” has a bitter aftertaste of a sharp coming to terms with reality. Placing their characters in similar economic and social circumstances Maupassant and O. Henry evolve their stories in different ways to show how different two types of women live in their marriages and consequently how their marriages can be based on a tender feeling of love or the lack of it.
Plot Summary and Allusions
Being published in 1884, “The Necklace” alludes to two literary characters at once: Cinderella and Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Protagonist Mathilde Loisel is highly unsatisfied with her social standing, like Madame Bovary, but because she has only good looks and not a kind heart she loses even those modest material possessions that she had, “as a Cinderella tale in reverse”. Madame Loisel is described as a pretty and charming girl who believes that pleasant appearance should define a girl’s status. Therefore, it is the highest injustice of fate that she had to marry “a little clerk,” which is a natural thing to do for a girl from an ordinary family with no dowry. The Loisels are not poverty-stricken. They could afford a servant and they have food and clothes. Monsieur Loisel could even save up for a riffle. However, Mathilde Loisel dreams of more servants, finer food, and a more refined society. She is ambitious and vain and longs for envy, admiration, and attention from the upper classes. Mathilde Loisel never appreciated what she had and, therefore, she lost it not gaining anything instead. Her husband is portrayed as a caring spouse who is eager to pamper his wife with his modest means and even refuses the long-awaited shooting with friends just to let his wife have a pretty dress. The story implies many “if only”. If only Madame Loisel told her affluent friend about their predicament with the necklace, if only she stayed at the building after the ball to wait for her husband to find the carriage, if only she agreed to decorate herself with fresh flowers but not borrowed jewels. However, the bottom line is that Madame Loisel’s discontent with her life brought the ten-year financial hardship and strain on her husband and her while their means could have allowed them their little bourgeois happiness.
In stark contrast to Madame Loisel’s bitterness and irritation with inadequate means, O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” portrays the couple who overcomes the burdens of poverty with love and care. “The Gift of the Magi” was written by O. Henry in 1906 in his characteristic manner of lighthearted humor depicting the everyday life of people with modest means. With few details, the writer depicts the poverty of Della and James Young by mentioning that they pay for the flat $8 out of $20 earned. By carefully rendering the shabby settings and mentioning their old clothes the author underlines that the husband and wife sacrifice their only valuable possessions. Not being able to save more than $1.87 Della decides to sell her long gorgeous hair. She receives $20 and buys an elegant platinum watch chain as a Christmas present for her dearly beloved husband. Despite living in very pinched circumstances Della is not as miserable and desperate as Mathilde Loisel. On the contrary, O. Henry (1995) clearly states Mrs. Young’s love for her husband:
… a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling – something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned b