There is a dichotomy in the story between the aunt’s well-ordered, rule-bound world and the losing battle it faces against the unruliness of children and nature. Everything about the aunt is prim and proper: she governs the children with a firm hand, is quick to punish them when they are “in disgrace,” and overall runs a tight ship. However, throughout the story, the aunt’s attempts at order and propriety constantly fail against Nicholas’s mischievous schemes. Because of him, the natural world keeps creeping into the household, be it in the form of Nicholas’s beast-like, wild behavior, or the frog he sneaks into his breakfast. Through this dynamic, Saki seems to suggest that conventions and enforced civility are powerless veneers against the natural wildness within human nature and the natural world.
The aunt’s world of conventions and her strict governing style only create the illusion of order and control. She spends most of her time in the story engaged in “trivial gardening operations” to ensure that Nicholas will stay out of the gooseberry garden. But her obsession with keeping Nicholas from trampling in her well-manicured garden—and thus preventing chaos from seeping into her orderly environment—is completely ineffective. While the gooseberry garden does go untouched, Nicholas instead heads right into the secrets and chaos of the lumber room. Also, in order to maintain control over her unhappy and rebellious charges, the aunt has to regularly resort to threats and punishments. This points to an underlayer of rancor and disorder in her carefully curated world. The children seem to be regularly misbehaving and her various punishments do not appear to be giving her much control over them. Her favorite punishment—that of inventing and then withholding fun trips and activities from the children who disobey her—seems to recur in their lives pretty frequently, without bringing any constant sense of order to their household.
This illusion of order that the aunt struggles to enforce is easily punctuated by forces of nature, the chief of which is Nicholas himself. In the volume of Saki’s short stories (The Complete Short Stories of Saki), “The Lumber Room” is part of a smaller collection entitled Beasts and Super Beasts. Indeed, Nicholas demonstrates enough wild energy and stubbornness of purpose to fall into either one of these categories. He emerges as the victor at the end of the story while the aunt is upset and defeated after being left in the water tank. Also, Nicholas has no fear of the aunt when he is up to mischief like putting a frog in his breakfast, showing that he is immune to her strict rules and easily dismantles the orderly atmosphere she tries desperately to maintain. The frog ruins the bland and “wholesome bread-and-milk” just like Nicholas brings disorder into the aunt’s boring household. It is also extremely easy for Nicholas to sneak the frog (which is part of the natural world) into the house even though the adults think it is impossible, showing that their trust in convention and orderliness is misplaced.
Another example in the story of the natural world foiling the aunt’s careful plans is the tide at Jagborough, where she sends the other three children in order to punish Nicholas for the frog trick by not allowing him to go with them. When the children are leaving, the aunt would like to see Nicholas shed a “few decent tears,” but he does not give her this satisfaction. She goes on to tell Nicholas that “it will be a glorious afternoon for racing about over those beautiful sands,” implying that he will miss out on a lot of fun. But when the children return, they are dejected because the tide was at its highest at Jagborough, leaving them no sand to play on. Thus, nature intervenes, and the aunt’s plan to punish Nicholas by keeping him from accompanying the other children turns into a comic failure.
The “unimagined treasures” that Nicholas finds in the lumber room is another example of the wild world that has already infiltrated the ordered household. The objects that Nicholas finds there are a veritable menagerie of birds and animals: candlesticks shaped like snakes, teapots shaped like ducks. Nicholas is most fascinated by the tapestry that depicts a hunting scene. In it, a hunter has shot a stag but is unaware that four wolves are approaching him. Nicholas is unimpressed by the hunter, who he notices doesn’t have much skill since he shot the stag at very close range, and also doesn’t have enough arrows in his quiver to fight off the wolves. While the hunter, like the aunt, thinks he has the situation under control, he is completely unaware of the chaos that is approaching in the form of the wolves. Thus, in the “Lumber Room,” Saki suggests that wildness seems to always triumph over tame conventions. Nicholas is the clear winner in the battle with his aunt, representing the victory of wildness over enforced civility.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The World of Conventions vs. the Natural World ThemeTracker
The World of Conventions vs. the Natural World Quotes in The Lumber Room
The children were to be driven, as a special treat, to the sands at Jagborough. Nicholas was not to be of the party; he was in disgrace. Only that morning he had refused to eat his wholesome bread-and-milk on the seemingly frivolous ground that there was a frog in it.
“You said there couldn’t possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there was a frog in my bread-and-milk,” he repeated, with the insistence of a skilled tactician who does not intend to shift from favourable ground.
Often and often Nicholas had pictured to himself what the lumber-room might be like, that region that was so carefully sealed from youthful eyes and concerning which no questions were ever answered. It came up to his expectations. […] [I]t was a storehouse of unimagined treasures.
That part of the picture was simple, if interesting, but did the huntsman see, what Nicholas saw, that four galloping wolves were coming in his direction through the wood?
But there were other objects of delight and interest claiming his instant attention; there were quaint twisted candlesticks in the shape of snakes, and a teapot fashioned like a china duck, out of whose open beak the tea was supposed to come. How dull and shapeless the nursery teapot seemed in comparison!
As for Nicholas, he, too, was silent, in the absorption of one who has much to think about; it was just possible, he considered, that the huntsman would escape with his hounds while the wolves feasted on the stricken stag.
