The Furnished Room

Table of Contents

Learning Goals

About the Story

Author

The setting

Genre, Themes, Symbolism

Plot

Characters

Story

Activities

Credits

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Learning Goals

Identify and enjoy features of classic literature.

Analyze interactions among discourse elements that constitute a genre.

Acquire vocabulary and grammar structures in context.

Develop higher order thinking skills to spot clues, make inferences, think critically and draw conclusions to pose arguments in answer to writing and speaking prompts.

Engage in individual and collaborative group work in integrated language skills.

About the Story

“The Furnished Room”, a tragic short narration by O.Henry , was published in fragments in 1904. Later in 1906, it was collected as one whole piece in his The Four Million copy. It was Featured in American Literature collection of Halloween Stories.
The Furnished Room was featured as The Short Story of the Day on Wed, Oct 09, 2019.
It has been included in most "best of" collections of his works. The story is also found in many ghost-story anthologies.

The twentieth-century American literature had its strings coiled around the aftermath of pre and post World War 1. Although existentialism provoked America around 1946, it was quite a bit of debate from a century ago. The chaos of the War not only targeted the general body of most countries, it wrecked the people, the relations and the entire social dependency.

Author

O. Henry, pseudonym of William Sydney Porter (born September 11, 1862, Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S.—died June 5, 1910, New York), he was an American short-story writer whose stories idealized the everyday lives of regular people in New York City. His stories often had surprising endings and used humour, gloom or irony to portray the effect of coincidence on character.

William Sydney Porter (O.Henry) Biography timeline.

Genre
It is a melodramatic tale.
The themes are isolation and loneliness , connection, desperation, love, selfishness, torment and honesty.
Narrated in the third person by an unnamed narrator the reader realises after reading the story that Henry may be exploring the theme of connection.
Symbols
The city-setting is presented as a place of restless movement, where transient humans with no permanent homes flit from one room to another. This rootless nature of people that the city cultivates is brought out by the use of plant imagery where the man-made red-bricked district’s artificiality is contrasted with the lack of all that is natural and wholesome.
On an individual level, the dark, inner room represents the repressed part one’s psyche that the supposedly civilized city-norms bind within an individual. The room is an arena where this repression finds its release. It is, as it were, a region where the Jungian Shadow Side of one’s personality finds its expression. This is reflected in the imagery of violence, brutality and lust that is used to describe the room.
The room is thus a setting of psychological release not only in terms of an individual, but also in terms of meaningful, intimate relationships that one forges with others and that makes a house a home.
The setting of the room is also symbolic of isolation and loneliness that the city life brings along with it, where, without meaningful relationships to sustain oneself, one feels stranded and lost. This is reflected in the imagery of a shipwreck that O. Henry uses to describe the contents of room left by its earlier occupants.

Genre, Themes, Symbolism

The Plot

A young man searching for his lover rents a furnished room near the theaters where the girl, an aspiring singer, may be working. Weary from months of searching, he sits down to rest when the room suddenly fills with the sweet fragrance often worn by the girl. Convinced that she has been there, he begins to search the room for any traces she may have left behind.
He takes the room and pays for a week in advance. As the housekeeper is leaving, he asks if she remembers a young girl, an aspiring singer named Eloise Vashner. The girl is fair, of medium height and slender, with reddish gold hair and a mole near her left eyebrow. The housekeeper seems not to not recall such a girl, and points out that stage people change names as often as they change rooms.
Suddenly, the room fills with the strong, sweet fragrance of mignonette. The rich odor blows in like a wind, entering the room like a living visitor. The young man answers "What, dear?" as if he is being called. He springs up and turns around, and is enveloped by the rich scent. It is the fragrance she loved and wore, and he cries out "She has been in this room."
Read on and you will find what happens next...