In this story, O. Henry uses bright, clear imagery to transport the reader to Greenwich Village. Consider this description of the view from Johnsy’s window:
What was there to count? There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick house twenty feet away. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots, climbed half way up the brick wall. The cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks.
O. Henry’s writing draws strongly on visual imagery to create a sense of place. O. Henry makes a conscious choice to engage the reader’s visual imagination, rather than playing on any other sense. There is only a passing mention of the “cold breath of autumn,” a thoroughly tactile description of the weather in New York. The visual elements here have a high degree of specificity: the ivy is “gnarled and decayed at the roots,” the vine bears only “skeleton branches,” the bricks of the buildings themselves are “crumbling.”
All of these images work together to promote a sense of decrepitude and deprivation; it is driven home to us again and again that despite its reputation as a cosmopolitan cultural mecca, Greenwich Village at this time is suffering from poverty and infrastructure challenges that endanger its inhabitants and belie its glamorous art world associations.
One wonders why O. Henry went to such length to focus on visual imagery in this scene. It is possible that, given the importance of the window in the story as a plot device, O. Henry wanted to give the reader the clearest possible image of what Johnsy sees as she lies on her sickbed. Further, this is a story about painters, visual artists who perceive the world first through sight, and continually pull from what they see for their work. In this way, visual imagery not only immerses the reader more deeply in Johnsy’s illness, but also in the day to day perspective of the artists in Greenwich Village.
