The furnished room symbolizes the struggles of urban poverty and homelessness. Furnished rooms are presented as the temporary residences of New York’s homeless population, tying them to poverty and impermanence. This connection is further strengthened by the disrepair of the young man’s furnished room, which is decorated with rotting furniture and cheap art that appears in every rental room. The young man’s furnished room is full of things past tenants left behind, and the sheer number of previous residents speaks to how widespread poverty is in the city. Despite the large number, the story does not lump these residents together as an indistinguishable mob, but instead describes each feature of the room with care. The detail of these descriptions affords attention to New York’s transients—attention that society does not grant them. However, the furnished room itself is not a positive place. Its impermanence as a home stirs rage and despair in its tenants: the furniture is poorly cared for, and remnants of fights and destruction litter the room where “false household gods” have reminded residents of their homelessness. The room sucks the hope from the young man, and did the same in the past to Eloise Vashner. As a symbol of poverty and transience, the furnished room’s negative impact on its guests signifies how these difficulties can sabotage people’s mental health.
The Furnished Room Quotes in The Furnished Room
Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself, is a certain vast bulk of the population of the redbrick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients for ever –– transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They sing ‘Home Sweet Home’ in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.
It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room had turned in fury –– perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its garish coldness –– and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was chipped and bruised [...]. Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.
Then, suddenly, as he rested there, [...] the strong, sweet odour of mignonette [...] came as upon a single buffet of wind with such sureness and fragrance that it almost seemed like a living visitant. [...] The rich odour clung to him and wrapped him about. He reached out his arms for it, all his senses for the time confused and commingled.
And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognizant of the call.
The room was dead. The essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had departed. In its place was the old, stale odour of mouldy house furniture, of atmosphere in storage.
The Furnished Room Symbol Timeline in The Furnished Room
