“The Furnished Room” is a Realist short story. Realism as a literary convention emerged as a rejection of Romanticism—rather than telling unbelievable tales of heroic adventures, Realist writers sought to capture the everyday realities of ordinary people. As a Realist story, “The Furnished Room” captures the ways that low-income people in New York City actually lived at the turn of the 20th century—in derelict tenement housing with short-term furnished rooms.
The story can also be considered a work of Naturalist literature in that it is a work of Realist literature that specifically focuses on the lives of working-class people who are trapped by their harsh financial circumstances. One of the key qualities of Naturalist literature—a type of writing that emerged in the late-19th century—is its centering of the idea that people’s fates in life are predetermined. For example, in “The Furnished Room,” the young man strives for five months to find Eloise, but he never succeeds. Similarly, Eloise herself strove to find success in the theater world and failed, ultimately leading her to take her own life. Naturalist literature like "The Furnished Room" depicts stories of failure and loss, of hope turning into hopelessness.
Though O. Henry’s story is a Realist and Naturalist one, there are also some qualities in “The Furnished Room" that are reminiscent of ghost stories. In particular, the way that the dead Eloise seems to haunt the young man once he is in the furnished room grants the story a Gothic quality.
