“The Furnished Room” is set in New York City’s Lower West Side, and the turn-of-the-century setting shapes the story. The late 19th century was a period of rapid urbanization, and New York City is presented as unnaturally crowded and yet isolating. Much of the story is dedicated to describing the furnished room itself, which is crowded with old decorations and the remnants of previous guests much in the way the city is run down and crowded with people. The children who left fingerprints on the wall are described as “little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air,” positioning the furnished room (and, by extension, all of New York City) as an urban prison distanced from nature. The city also features buildings and furniture of different ages, yet all of them are equally decrepit. These descriptions, especially the reference to “musty effluvium” from the underground vaults mixing with the smells of linoleum and mildew, strengthen the idea that New York City has many layers, and all of them are rotting.
The story also shows how city life cheapens and commodifies the relationships between people. Mrs. Purdy, the housekeeper, does not tell the young man about Eloise’s death in the furnished room because renting rooms is how she makes a living. She contributes to the young man’s sense of isolation for her own profit, and though she does this to maintain her livelihood, the narrative is not sympathetic to her. The young man compares her to a “worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers,” which emphasizes how in big cities, individuals become nothing more than fodder for landlords and other community members who profit from their neighbors.
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Urbanization and City Life 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.
To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers.
He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of today buried to-morrow in ooze and slime.
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.
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.
It was Mrs. McCool’s night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched it and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of those subterranean retreats where housekeepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.
