One of my favorite things in the world has to be wishes. From the ones accessible in the real world (blowing out birthday candles, snapping wishbones, shooting stars, hitting 11:11 and making a Snapchat post) to those with roots steeped deeply in fantasy (genies, magical artifacts, Jirachi from Pokémon), I find myself enthralled with the concept. One of my favorite T.V. shows, Dragon Tales, began each episode with the chant “I wish, I wish, with all my heart, to fly with dragons in a land apart”. To quote Sandra Bullock, “I’ll do anything for free stuff”. Despite the irony of the statement, I find myself agreeing with the sentiment. Free stuff rocks. Hence, you can see my infatuation with the idea of wishes — free stuff, AND you get to choose what you want. My mom quickly shut me down when I started randomly wishing for things. “If you didn’t have to work for the free stuff, be careful. There’s no such thing as a free lunch”. We’ll see how that goes, Mom.
Before the rest of this blog, you can read this short story here. Spoilers ahead!
The Monkey’s Paw, a short story by the English author W.W. Jacobs, offers an interesting perspective on wishes. The White family, after talking to an old military friend who recently came back from India, comes into possession of an old, shriveled, monkey’s paw. Much like the oil lamp from Aladdin, the artifact can grant 3 wishes of the owner. However, the Sergeant cautions to be careful with the wishes. The last wish of the previous owner was for death. He tries to throw the paw in the fire, but the White family stops him from getting rid of it. Afterwards, he leaves the paw, and the Whites to their own devices.
Of course, who would listen when the opportunity of a lifetime is in front of you? 3 chances of wishing for anything you could want? I certainly wouldn’t stop myself. Their first wish was for $200 to pay off their house, a hefty sum back in the day, The family laughs it off, with the son Herbert laughing loudest of all, and goes to sleep. The next day, he falls to his death in machinery, and the company sends Mr. and Mrs. White a compensation check: $200. Wish granted. After the funeral, the distraught Mrs. White recalls the two wishes left on the paw, and uses one of them to wish for her son back. Shortly afterwards, there is a knock on the door. Horrified at the manner in which the first which was granted, Mr. White grabs the paw, and uses the last, final wish to wish him away.
At the time, the author W.W. Jacobs was known for his sense of humour, writing comedic stories. While also a horror story, the story also makes use of black humour, or gallows humour. In the beginning, upon hearing about the magical functions of the shrivelled paw, Mrs. White wishes, rather grotesquely, for “another pair of hands”. Later on in the story, Herbert, after making the wish, dismisses the paw with “Well, I don’t see the money, and I bet I never shall”. These words, upon his death, come true. In fact, the whole story reads as a sort of comedy: upon making a wish out of avarice, the consequences come to bear upon the unfortunate fellow, fate playing their own jokes upon the Whites. Rather than comedy for the family, it’s much more a “Haha, joke’s on you” type of schadenfreude.
Furthermore, Jacobs writes The Monkey’s Paw in a style far, far different from his norm. As previously mentioned, Jacobs was known to be a mastery of comedy — light-hearted novels about the English countryside — not this deep and macabre humor that makes up The Monkey’s Paw. According to the review by Interesting Literature, the novel was so dark that Stephen King, America’s own master of horror picked up where Jacobs left off, bringing these mangled bodies back to life and even acknowledging The Monkey’s Paw in his novel, Pet Sematary. Imagine being so spooky that even Stephen King pays attention to you.
Not only is the story so creepy that King himself picked it up and Jacobs’ usual publisher, Strand magazine refused to publish it, The Monkey’s Paw is littered with devices that are unusual for Jacobs’ works. He makes references to other stories, including 1001 Arabian Nights, one very much similar to this in regards to wishes, and consistently uses the number 3 as a symbol (3 wishes, 3 members of the White family, 3 times Mrs. White screams her desire for her son to return, and many more), it is, like said before, his own unique twist on the classic 3 wishes folktale. Although a classic trope, Jacobs brings it in a new direction, and the short story is a refreshing read. In other words, he got bored of happy-go-lucky stories and messed around with literary tropes, leaving us with this creepy masterpiece.
Unfortunately, despite the popularity and many anthropologies that The Monkey’s Paw enjoys, there exists not much literary analysis on the story itself. After searching for hours, the best I could find were Sparknotes-esque websites, and a few posts by other ameteur bloggers such as myself. When my searches took me to The Monkey’s Paw, but in CHINESE (featuring Mr. and Mrs. Zhang and with their son Guisheng), I gave up my search. However, it remains a great read, and one I hope you that you enjoyed. I guess at the end of the day, there really is no such thing as a free lunch.
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Works Cited
“A Short Analysis of W. W. Jacobs’ ‘The Monkey’s Paw’.” Interesting Literature, 13 Aug. 2019, interestingliterature.com/2019/08/15/a-short-analysis-of-w-w-jacobs-the-monkeys-paw/.
Jacobs, W. W. “The Monkey’s Paw.” Short Stories and Classic Literature, americanliterature.com/author/w-w-jacobs/short-story/the-monkeys-paw.
Samet, Peter, and McKenzie. “The Monkey’s Paw.” Mandarin Companion Graded Readers, 13 Mar. 2014, mandarincompanion.com/products/the-monkeys-paw/.
Haha, the ”in chinese” part got me. Honestly would be spooked too at that point. Anyway, “The Monkey’s Paw” sounds really interesting based on your run down of it. “You got what you wished for” is, unfortunately enough, something we have to live by in our lives and what happens due to the three wishes granted to the White family makes the story sound actually kind of funny. I have seen Pet Semetary before and this story is actually pretty reminiscent of that movie with the “watch what you wish for” theme. Sadly, the movie was not all that great but the way you put it “The Monkey’s Paw” sounds much more worthwhile.
We are all living The Monkey’s Paw. When was the last time something you wished for came true? Did it happen as it expected? Did it happen at all? At a time in my life in which a good work ethic is crucial above all, I find myself wishing more than ever. I wish didn’t have to do all this unfulfilling work. I wish I could forge my own path. I wish I could embrace the things that I love. I wish I could satiate my desire for more; I wish I had the courage to. But as I lay dying for these wishes to come true, I think back to the times I have wished before. As you said, there is no free lunch. Nothing comes solely from wishing. And when wishes do come true, reality never matches expectation. When we wish, we create an illusion to replace the world around us. We fantasize about what may be achieved when our wishes come true, but humans are notoriously bad at predicting the future. Like the family in The Monkey’s Paw, our wishes come back to bite us.
Every year on my birthday instead of blowing out candles and wishing, my mother make me say something I am going to accomplish that year. Not that imagining your wildest dreams coming true isn’t thrilling, it is just never going to happen with some kind of toll on your life. You want to travel the world, you have to work for the resources, that kind of thing. This story reminds me of the macabre version of an unlying theme in a show I used to watch, Once Upon a Time. The characters would always be warned, “All magic comes with a price”, but of course, convinced that they were capable of handling everything, the character would “wish” or take the easy way out of their problems only to be confronted with disaster later (there are 7 season of the show, you’d think they would learn). Overall, I think that the message is like you said, you can never get something for nothing and the greater the reward the greater the toll. Important for us all to remember as we plan out of aspirations for life.