The Role of Space, Money, and Travel in O. Henry's New York Stories
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THE ROLE OF SPACE, MONEY, AND TRAVEL IN O. HENRY’S NEW YORK STORIES by Cristen Hamilton APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ___________________________________________ Rene Prieto, Chair ___________________________________________ Patricia Michaelson ___________________________________________ Jessica C. Murphy ___________________________________________ Nils Roemer Copyright 2017 Cristen Hamilton All Rights Reserved For my mother THE ROLE OF SPACE, MONEY, AND TRAVEL IN O. HENRY’S NEW YORK STORIES by CRISTEN HAMILTON, BA, MA DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES - STUDIES IN LITERATURE THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS August 2017 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to my chair, Dr. Prieto, for challenging me to really get to the heart of O. Henry’s works, being patient with me, and helping me adhere to a rigorous submission and revision schedule. I would like to thank my committee: Dr. Michaelson, Dr. Murphy, and Dr. Roemer, for their helpful comments and criticisms on my work. I also wish to thank the members of the UTD Writing Group: Jenny, Ray, Madhavi, Lance, and Thomasina, whose suggestions and encouragement were most helpful in the writing process. I am much obliged to Ande for watching Emma so I could get some research done in North Carolina and my parents for taking me on a family vacation to Greensboro and funding my research. I am grateful for Arthur G. Erickson and Tim Cole from The Greensboro Public Library for helping me find a place to start my research, as well as answering my questions about citations, the staff at the Austin History Center for dragging out box after box of materials on O. Henry, and the tour guides at the O. Henry Museum for offering new insights into the author’s life. In addition, I wish to thank Elise Allison at The Greensboro History Museum for answering my questions about artifacts in the museum and the staff at The O. Henry Hotel for their kindness and excellent hospitality. Additional thanks goes to Diana Secker Tesdell, publisher of the annual O. Henry Prize Stories. Most of all, I would like to thank my mother, whose financial assistance and moral support made the completion of my dissertation possible. February 2017 v THE ROLE OF SPACE, MONEY, AND TRAVEL IN O. HENRY’S NEW YORK STORIES Cristen Hamilton, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2017 ABSTRACT Supervising Professor: Rene Prieto The aim of my dissertation is to contend that O. Henry deserves a higher place in literary history than previously given to him by critics. Although most critics dismiss him as a popular writer who operates mainly on formulas to get to his signature “surprise ending,” these formulas are really a subtle means used not only to criticize social norms, but also to suggest social changes that needed to be made in America at the turn of the twentieth century. In order to argue this, I grouped thirty of O. Henry’s New York short stories, the bulk of which contain female characters, into themes of space, money, and travel. My dissertation provides a study of the literary representations of New York City generated by O. Henry, particularly with regards to these three thematic elements and the way female characters in his stories grappled with these themes, as well as how society dealt with such female characters in the context of space, money, and travel. Through close readings and computational analysis, specifically in the form of word frequencies, I discovered O. Henry was a writer who was seriously committed to social reform in America at the turn of the century, especially with regards to women. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...............................................................................................................v ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................................vi INTRODUCTION.……………......................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 WOMEN’S SPACE IN THE CITY........................................................................29 CHAPTER 2 MONEY MATTERS...............................................................................................90 CHATPER 3 TRAVEL AND TRANSIENTS............................................................................144 CONCLUSION............................................................................................................................201 WORKS CITED..........................................................................................................................213 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.......................................................................................................223 CURRICULUM VITAE..............................................................................................................224 vii INTRODUCTION The first time I read O. Henry’s iconic tale “Gifts of the Magi” (1905), I remember cringing at the illustration that portrayed Della’s hair, right next to the line where readers learn she cuts it all off for twenty dollars. As I thought then, some girls look good with short hair, but Della looked like a boy, and my fourteen-year-old self believed that was the worst thing ever. I remember touching my own hair and wondering if I could sacrifice it for someone I loved as Della had done. Della’s sacrifice had to be made so she could afford a watch fob for her husband’s Christmas present. Even more disturbing than the loss of Della’s hair, “[which will] grow out again,” as she loses no time in telling her husband Jim, is his sacrifice of an heirloom watch to buy Della a pair of combs for hair that is no longer hers (Henry, “Gifts” 1). Selling a practical item, like a watch, could be forgiven, I thought back then, but an heirloom that had been in the family for generations? What was Jim thinking? Though I did not appreciate it at the time, a few years later I understood that he was thinking of Della and she of him: above and beyond anyone else. This is what makes “Gifts of the Magi” so poignant. The idea that two people could love each other so much that they willingly sacrifice their greatest possessions in order to make the other one happy contains all the elements necessary for a touching story, but O. Henry adds another layer when he praises these characters (via a tacit comparison) by suggesting that they are like “the magi” for having sacrificed their precious possessions (1). Grasping only years later O. Henry’s praise for these selfless deeds made me feel like an awful person for wondering, when I was fourteen, if Jim ever got his watch back. 1 In today’s world, being romantic is never tantamount to being wise. I never forgot O. Henry’s story; in fact, the tale moved me so much that I still own the paperback collection of his work I bought at the time. Twelve years passed before I came across O. Henry’s works again; this time I was sitting on the other side of the desk as a sophomore English teacher in Dallas ISD. Having been tasked with finding short stories for our next unit, the biggest dilemma for me was whether or not to add “The Red Roses of Tonia” or “Hearts and Hands” to the list, both of which were in our textbook at the time (Henry, “Red” TX18-TX25; “Hearts” 264-265). I settled on “The Red Roses of Tonia,” a tale of two men who ride through the Texas brush on a quest to find an Easter hat for the woman they love. This was a story with a love triangle, and the romantic in me was immediately interested. As in “Gifts of the Magi,” I confronted the idea of making a sacrifice for someone you love, a theme so prevalent in O. Henry’s work. “The Red Roses of Tonia” ended the way a true romance is supposed to—the hero gets the girl. Yet there was also another layer to this tale that I did not notice until one of my students confessed that she did not like the ending. When I asked her why, she said she did not like the character of Tonia because she manipulated these two men into getting her hat for her. This idea intrigued me. Good literature always generates discussion, and I was struck by what I perceived only at that point as a second layer to the story: the idea that, perhaps, women could be a “voice” spurring men to action. As I continued to read O. Henry’s stories over the years, I realized that casting women as agents of action was central to his ideology. “The Red Roses of Tonia” also appealed to my great love for Texas, where I lived the first eighteen years of my life on a cattle ranch one hundred and thirty-four miles southwest of 2 San Antonio, way out in the middle of nowhere. Though over a hundred years old, O. Henry’s descriptions of south Texas are still so fresh and true that reading “The Red Roses of Tonia” always brings a wave of longing to my heart. Descriptions of “a white gulf cloud sailing across a cerulean dome…” and “a stretch of high, level prairie, grassy and dotted with the lighter green of the mesquites in their fresh spring foliage” take me straight home (Henry, “Red” TX20). That is one of O. Henry’s greatest strengths as a writer, to capture setting so succinctly and clearly that you feel as if you are sitting in the saddle, riding through the brush on a warm Texas day. “The Red Roses of Tonia” was also, as I told my students, one of the very few works of literature in our textbook with a happy ending (if one ignored what my DISD student referred to as Tonia’s “manipulations”). When they asked me why so few stories had happy endings, I explained that it was partly due to what I call the “gloom and doom” trend, popular for some time in American literature. All one needs to do is look through the last few editions of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction or Fiction 100 in order to corroborate what I am saying. The majority of the stories included in these collections have depressing plots that typically end in some sort of death: be it the death of a character, of someone’s humanity, or of one’s faith in that humanity.