O. Henry and Jack London
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fashionable ladies like the legendary Mrs Van Alstyne Fisher. O. Henry resists stereotypes here, saying at the outset that he refuses to call them ‘shop-girls’ (‘But why turn their occupation into an adjective. Let us be fair. We do not refer to the girls who live on Fifth Avenue as ‘‘marriage-girls’’ ’ – which is also, of course, a shrewd hit at upper class women). The upshot of the story is conventional enough (with a slight twist): Lou finds a nice but poor young man, but holds out for her millionaire and is unhappy. Nancy gradually modifies her snobbish beliefs and marries the nice but poor young man and is happy. But the story is more than a magazine romance: O. Henry has a detailed sense of the girls’ economic conditions, their sense of style, their aspirations, and manages to give an insight into the real conditions of their lives, how they talk and how they dress. And the picture is enlivened by a sharp visual sense, moments closely observed and caught, as when the two girls meet in the park some time after their respective marriages: ‘After the first embrace they drew their heads back as serpents do, ready to attack or to charm, with a thousand questions trembling on their swift tongues.’ A large number of O. Henry’s stories explore trickery or deception, often involving revenge, whether they are dealing with urban poverty, South American gunrunning or wild-west adventure. There is a long tradition of this in American literature in the nineteenth century, and particularly in the American short story, from Native American and African American stories of trickster figures to Poe’s stories of revenge trickery (‘The Cask of Amontillado, ‘Hop Frog’, ‘X-ing a Paragrab’ to name but a few), and Melville’s novel The Confidence Man; to Twain’s ‘Hadleyburg’, and ‘Jumping Frog’ and other ‘tall stories’, and Louisa M. Alcott’s novella Behind A Mask; or A Woman’s Power. It tends to die out in the twentieth century, but survives in such diVerent examples as Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’ or Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Good Country People’. It is doubtless connected to the conditions of a swiftly changing society made up of a wide-ranging mixture of social and ethnic groups, in which the less privileged try to outwit the more privileged: the frontiersman delights to outwit the East-coast dude, countryman to outwit urban intellectual, worker to outwit capitalist, women to outwit men, and one ethnic group to outwit another. In O. Henry the genre lends itself, of course, to his predilection for clever reversals of plot; but it also continues to be a way of exploring and celebrating the rich diversity of cultural conflict. O. Henry’s JeV Peters stories celebrate the comic adventures of the traditional conman, and are also ways of pointing up, even at times satirizing, the mutual antagonisms between diVerent classes. ‘JeV Peters as a Personal Magnet’ is a relatively simple story of the duping of pompous authority, in