Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Furnished Room, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Hope vs. Hopelessness
Urbanization and City Life
Homelessness and Transience
Individual Stories and Memory
Summary
Analysis
In New York City’s Lower West Side, at the turn of the 20th century, transients without permanent homes rent furnished rooms for short periods. These people are “transients in abode, transients in heart and mind,” and most of the residences in the Lower West Side have housed a thousand such wanderers. Because so many people have lived in each house, each has many stories to tell; the “vagrant ghosts” must leave “a ghost or two” behind.
Urbanization, industrialization, and urban poverty were pressing issues at the turn of the 20th century, and by focusing on New York’s vagrants even before introducing the characters or plot of the story, the narrative establishes that these issues will be at its forefront. As O. Henry considers homelessness, he argues that unstable housing can undermine people’s mental health and sense of identity. Despite the New York City homeless population’s massive numbers, each person who’s experienced homelessness has a story to tell. Though these people are so lacking in the necessities of life that they are more like ghosts than living people, they still affect the world around them and leave stories in their wake.
Themes
Literary Devices
One such vagrant is a young man, who skulks among the houses, ringing doorbells in hopes that someone will offer him a place to stay. At the 12th house, the bell rings faintly, as if far away, and a housekeeper opens the door. The young man takes an instant dislike to the woman, who reminds him of a worm who hollowed out her home so she could feast on new tenants. Despite this impression, the young man asks the housekeeper if she has a room to rent, and she tells him that a room on the third floor has been vacant for a week if he would like to look at it.
The young man is never named, which identifies him with the unnamed masses of transients that wander the city. The housekeeper, meanwhile, is equated with a predatory worm, which indicates her role as a profiteer from the epidemic of homelessness. The young man dislikes the housekeeper, but he is too desperate for a place to stay to turn down her offer.
Themes
The young man follows the housekeeper up the stairs, through a hallway lit by “a faint light from no particular source,” and across a dilapidated carpet. Empty niches stand near the stairs, which might have once lodged plants or statues. The plants likely died in the foul air, and the building is in such disrepair that any statues of saints might have been dragged to some “furnished pit” in Hell.
The building that houses the furnished room is run down and ugly. It is a place of hopelessness, but light from an unidentifiable source still breaks through, symbolizing that the young man still has hope, despite how irrational that hope may be. The lack of plants or statues speaks to the lack of life and beauty in areas of urban poverty, and the imagery of Hell emphasizes the abject degradation of the building. The idea that Hell might have its own furnished rooms in the form of pits also hints that furnished rooms have some inherently negative quality, suggesting that the young man’s hope might not be rewarded.
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Literary Devices
The housekeeper shows the young man the furnished room. She claims the room is very nice and rarely vacant, and she boasts about the elegant and famous people who have previously stayed in the room. She interrupts herself to show the young man the gas for his lamps and to reiterate that this room is very popular. The room has apparently been let to many stage performers, and the housekeeper claims that theatre workers make up much of her tenancy. Actors help her get her share because “they comes and they goes” more than average civilians.
The housekeeper’s obsession with presenting her rented rooms as respectable further reveals her fixation on running a successful business, and foreshadows that she might conceal certain truths that would cast her rooms in a negative light. Specifically pointing out the gas lamps also suggests to the reader that they might have a more important role to play later. The room’s popularity with performers adds to the theme of identity and its relation to housing; the author implies that an unpredictable living situation can lead to an unstable identity. The housekeeper supports this notion by emphasizing that actors, who constantly change identities, are especially transient people.
Themes
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The young man pays for a week in the furnished room, and because he is tired he will start his stay at once. As the housekeeper starts to leave, the young man asks a question he has asked a thousand times before: whether a young woman named Eloise Vashner has stayed at the house. He describes her as a singer with reddish gold hair and a dark mole near her left eyebrow. The housekeeper says she doesn’t remember the name Eloise Vashner, though actors change their names as often as their rooms.
The young man is dedicated to finding Eloise, but he has no real means or method to do so. All he can do is ask everyone he meets if they know Eloise. The fact that she is a singer suggests that the housekeeper, who is so attuned to the world of show business, might know her, but the housekeeper quickly crushes that hope. Her comment about actors changing their name as often as their rooms highlights the link between variability in housing and unstable identity.
Themes
The young man is deeply disappointed. He has been searching for Eloise for five months, asking everyone he can meet in show business and attending any show he can find in hopes of locating her. The young man “had loved her best,” so now he “trie[s] to find her.” She disappeared from home, and the young man is confident that she is in New York somewhere, but the city is like “a monstrous quicksand,” shifting constantly with no foundation.
The story reveals how hard the young man has worked to find Eloise. Concluding that the young man is trying to find Eloise because he loves her best paints an interesting picture of love, tying it directly with effort and hard work on behalf of those one loves. The revelation that Eloise and the young man are not native New Yorkers demonstrates how cities grew as people flocked to them in O. Henry’s era, and the author makes clear his dislike of urbanization by describing New York as a city that actively undermines residents’ attempts to find stability. This description challenges common arguments that homeless people are to blame for their misfortune, since O. Henry suggests impermanence is in the city’s very nature.
Themes
Literary Devices
The furnished room welcomes the young man with tired and hectic hospitality. It is full of decayed furniture. As the young man reclines on a chair, the room, “confused in speech as though it were an apartment in Babel,” tries to tell him about the diverse guests it has hosted in the past. The multi-colored rug is like an island surrounded by soiled matting, and the pictures on the walls are stock images that hang in most rented rooms. On the mantel are pieces of “desolate flotsam” left by the “room’s marooned”––trinkets and knick knacks past guests have left behind.
The reference to Babel is a Biblical allusion: according to the book of Genesis, ancient humans tried to build a tower tall enough to reach Heaven. As punishment for their hubris, God confused the humans so they could no longer understand each other, which led to the development of different languages and cultures instead of a single unified language. The “Babel” reference highlights the diversity of the room’s past tenants, as well as the room’s inability to fully connect with its tenants due to how briefly they each live there. The impersonal art on the walls adds to the detachment between the room and its tenants, and so does the description of the rug as an island and the tenants’ lost belongings as “flotsam” left behind by the marooned. The language of a shipwreck implies that only disaster can drive a person to stay in a furnished room.
Themes
As the young man spends more time in the furnished room, the signs of previous tenants make themselves obvious: a threadbare spot on the rug by the dresser where a woman walked, tiny fingerprints where “little prisoners” reached for the sun and air outside, a splattered stain where someone threw a glass or bottle, and the name Marie carved into the mirror.
The detail granted to each resident’s impact on the room serves as an acknowledgment of the importance of those people’s stories, as if to say that although this story is about the young man and Eloise, every person who passes through the furnished room is equally important. In particular, describing the handprints of “little prisoners” poignantly implies that all the furnished room’s tenants, including children, are trapped in the same oppressive systems that keep them from finding permanent lodgings.
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Literary Devices
The furnished room’s disrepair seems to have been caused by the “malice” of guests who inflicted injuries upon the room they briefly called home. The narrator suggests their “resentful rage” may have come from the lack of a permanent home that they could call their own, since “a hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.”
The furnished room’s tendency to kindle anger in its inhabitants makes clear the detrimental emotional impact of homelessness. Even a hut, the simplest form of housing, is preferable to a rented room if its resident owns it. Not only is a hut preferable, but such a simple dwelling could also be cherished and loved. Furnished rooms inspire only rage and frustration, since they’re not an occupant’s own space, and living in one is a constant reminder of the precariousness of one’s own life.
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Literary Devices
The young man ruminates as his room fills with “furnished sounds and furnished scents” from outside and from other rooms in the house. People laugh and cry, someone sings a lullaby, someone else rolls dice, doors slam, a train passes, and a cat yowls. The man inhales the breath of the house, which is dank and musty as odors from “the underground vaults” mix with the smells of linoleum and mildew.
Again, the story gives time and attention to the disparate lives of various New Yorkers. Describing the scents and sounds of these other people’s lives as “furnished” suggests that all the residents of the Lower West Side are in some way related to the business of furnished rooms, whether they rent rooms themselves or simply live in the unsteady impermanence New York forces on all its residents at this time.
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Literary Devices
The house’s odors are disrupted by the smell of an herb, mignonette, which comes “with such sureness” that the scent “almost seemed a living visitant.” The young man cries out as if the smell calls him. It clings to him, and he reaches for the smell, which has confused his sense of time. He wonders if the odor could have called him. He tries to convince himself he heard a sound, but it is the smell that has embraced him.
The story’s personification of the mignonette is strange and has a startling effect on the young man. At this point readers don’t know why the young man reacts this way, but it’s reasonable to guess that the herb scent has something to do with Eloise. The confusion of his senses and perception of time create a mystical atmosphere, adding to the idea that Eloise is in some way haunting the furnished room.
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Literary Devices
The young man is certain that Eloise has been in this room, since mignonette is her favorite smell and she wears it often. He searches the room for “the smallest thing” that she may have owned or even touched. He ignores hairpins and a woman’s hair-bow, discarding them as “indistinguishable” and “uncommunicative” because they are used by too many women to hint at an identity. He finds a handkerchief and presses it to his face, but throws it away when he realizes it smells of heliotrope, not mignonette.
The young man’s desire for even the smallest thing Eloise may have touched reiterates the importance the story places on small personal objects. However, that importance is complicated by the young man’s dismissal of items any woman might have. This suggests that the miscellanea of the room are only important because of the individual stories they carry. If an item is too general, its story is lost and it loses its value.
Themes
The young man continues his search for a possession of Eloise’s, ransacking the room and investigating every feature. He is looking for “a visible sign,” but doesn’t notice that “she was there beside, around, against, within, above him….” It is from this state Eloise calls to him, and again the young man’s subconscious notices the call and he responds, despite not understanding why. As he keeps looking, he finds “dreary and ignoble small records” of past residents, but no trace of Eloise.
Though the spirit of Eloise tries desperately to make herself known to the young man, his attention is focused entirely on what he can see in the furnished room. This might represent how the mundane struggles of urban life distract people from seeing more important truths right in front of them. Additionally, the description of past tenants’ possessions as dreary and ignoble reminds the reader that although these objects carry important stories, the stories are often dismal, and the objects themselves speak to the transients’ poor quality of life.
Themes
The young man thinks of the housekeeper. He runs from “the haunted room” to a door, ajar with a crack of light through it. He knocks on the door and the housekeeper emerges. The young man asks the housekeeper who lived in the room before him, and she tells him again about the actors who have rented her rooms. She reminds him her house is known for respectability, and emphasizes that two of her guests hung their marriage certificate on the wall. The young man ignores her, hoping one of the past guests might have been Eloise under a different name, but the housekeeper describes the past tenants’ appearances and none match Eloise. The young man thanks her and returns to his furnished room.
The room is haunted both by Eloise’s spirit and the room’s past inhabitants. The young man pursues his last hope of finding Eloise, which is represented by his rush to the light behind the door. The housekeeper crushes that hope, redirecting the conversation to a topic that supports her business and its profits. The young man attempts to push through this entrepreneurial mindset and asks again about Eloise, but the housekeeper refuses to sacrifice the reputation of her business for the sake of empathy. With his last hopes gone, the young man leaves the light and returns to the dismal furnished room.
Themes
To the disappointed young man, the furnished room is “dead.” The smell of mignonette is gone, replaced with the stale, musty odor of the molding furniture. The young man’s hope has left him, and he no longer has faith he will find Eloise. He stares into the light of the gas lamp. After a while, he tears the bedsheets into strips and uses a knife to drive the sheets into the crevices by the room’s windows and doors. With this done, he turns off the light, turns on the gas, and lies “gratefully” upon the bed to die.
While the furnished room was once rendered alive by the traces of past guests and the spirit of Eloise, these vivifying forces have vanished along with the young man’s hope. The parallel between a lack of life and a lack of hope goes further, as the young man extinguishes the light, a symbol of hope, and uses the unlit gas lamp to end his life. His “grateful” acceptance of death suggests that to him, a life without hope is a worse fate than death.
Themes
The housekeeper, Mrs. Purdy, sits with her friend Mrs. McCool. Mrs. Purdy tells Mrs. McCool about the young man renting her furnished room, and Mrs. McCool is impressed. She asks the housekeeper, “Did ye tell him?” Mrs. Purdy tells her that because rooms are furnished to rent, she did not tell him, and Mrs. McCool agrees this was a wise business decision. After all, Mrs. McCool says, many people would turn down a room if they knew a suicide had taken place inside. They discuss the suicide, revealing that one week ago in the young man’s furnished room, a young woman killed herself with gas. Mrs. McCool calls the death a pity, because the girl was so pretty. Mrs. Purdy says the girl might have been pretty if she didn’t have a mole near her eyebrow.
The detail of the mole near the young woman's eyebrow confirms that the former tenant was indeed Eloise. The revelation that the housekeeper has been lying about Eloise exposes just how much she prioritizes her business and its reputation over the wellbeing of her tenants. Mrs. McCool’s support of the housekeeper’s decision shows that this perspective is not specific to the housekeeper, but is in fact endemic in the urban capitalist system of renting furnished rooms. Even their discussion of Eloise’s death treats her like merely a cog in that system, discussing her wasted beauty like it is a good that she never got to sell and relegating her importance to her suicide’s effect on the housekeeper’s business. But the biggest twist is that the young man, without ever knowing what happened to Eloise, kills himself by the same means in the same place. This coincidence suggests that there might, after all, have been some kind of supernatural connection between the two of them—but, regardless, that the despair of a furnished room was enough to explain both of their deaths by itself.
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