‘The

Furnished
Room’ by
O. Henry
Overview of
the story’s
genre
Today’s brief:
 Exam hand back (please SCAN your exam that
you will be submitting as an assignment – NOT
PHOTOGRAPHS). I will temporarily collecting
your exam back for reporting purposes.
 Discuss ‘The Furnished Room’
 Homework:
 Complete the questions and graphic organizer on the
story (Furnished Room).
 Read ‘Mrs. Mahmood’ and ‘Shimaji’
The Story

© 2002 www.teachit.co.uk
 Biography of O. Henry (aka
William Sydney Porter)
• American writer, super famous in the early 1900s.
• Early jobs: drugstore clerk, bookkeeper, bank teller
(interestingly!).
• Became a successful writer for a newspaper in Texas.
• Faced some trouble with the law (money problems) and
fled to Honduras for a bit.
• Wrote a collection of stories based on his time in
Honduras.
• Adopted the pen name O. Henry while in prison (where
he also started writing!).
• Moved to New York City after prison and became a
superstar short story writer.
• Stories like "The Gift of the Magi" are still popular today.
Historical Context
• City Life Boom: Imagine the Wild West, but with
factories instead of cowboys! The late 1800s saw a
huge growth in American cities as people moved to
find factory jobs.
• Rich vs. Poor: This economic boom wasn't equal
for everyone. Wealthy people got richer, while
many factory workers ended up poor.
• Tough Living Conditions: People like Ella in
"The Furnished Room" often lived in cramped,
cheap apartments with shared facilities.

© 2002 www.teachit.co.uk
By the end of
this session,
we will:
• Understand and
interpret important
themes
• Recognise the
TURNING POINT in the
story
• Infer meaning from a
character’s behaviour
Plot summary: Welcome to
New York City (The Not-So-
Glittering Kind)
• Imagine a part of New York City
that's a bit rough around the
edges.
• Many people struggle to find
affordable housing, and some
even end up homeless.
• Our story takes place in a
boarding house, where people
rent single rooms with furniture.

© 2002 www.teachit.co.uk
 Plot summary: A Desperate
Search and a Drafty Room

•A young man arrives, looking for his lost love,

Eloise, who dreamed of becoming a star.
•He's been searching for months with no luck.
•The room he gets is pretty grim - dusty, old
furniture, and some strange marks on the walls.
•He wonders if living in such a place makes
people feel angry and not care for their
surroundings.
 Plot summary: A Glimpse of Hope
and a Crushing Blow (Spoiler Alert!)

• A familiar scent - mignonette, Eloise's favorite perfume - fills the air!

• The young man desperately searches for a clue of her being there, but
finds nothing.
• He asks the housekeeper about past tenants, but Eloise isn't
mentioned.
• Downstairs, the housekeeper discusses the young man with her friend
Mrs. McCool, revealing that Eloise had stayed in the young man’s room
only last week.
• The housekeeper did not tell the young man because Eloise
committed suicide in the furnished room, and the housekeeper worried
that the news would make the young man take his business elsewhere.
• Feeling defeated, with his last shred of hope gone, he tragically takes
his own life.
 The Title

‘The Furnished Room’ Repetition of the

represents the struggle of
urban poverty and phrase, ‘furnished
homelessness. The room is room to furnished
rented furnished as its room’ in the
residents do not have the
belongings or the means to exposition.
do so themselves.

TITLE: SYMBOLIC
 The Exposition (Paragraphs 1 – 2)
 POINT OF VIEW: Third person
omniscient
 SETTING: redbrick district on
the lower West Side, NY.
 STYLE: heavily descriptive –
bleak, depressing atmosphere.
Sets the MOOD for the story.
 Semantic field of movement and
lack of permanence: ‘Restless,
shifting, fugacious’; ‘Homeless’,
‘flit’, ‘transients’ – repeated X3;
‘vagrant.
 The sum EFFECT is that the
reader perceives the characters
are the most vulnerable in
society.
EXPOSITION: impermanence
 The Exposition (Mrs Purdy, the
Housekeeper)
 Images of the predator & greed:
 Images of the predator & greed:  ‘fur’ – connotations of animal;
 ‘an unwholesome, surfeited muted/muffled sound – hiding
worm that had eaten its nut to a something;
hollow shell and now sought to  ‘throat’ – the voice box is
fill the vacancy with edible actually located in the larynx, not
lodgers.’ the pharynx, the throat. By
 ‘Her voice came from her throat; pointing out the origin of her
her throat seemed lined with fur.’ voice suggests it is a disguise –
it would produce a forced, raspy
sound which would take effort.
 These clues already suggest a
character who is not what she
seems.

EXPOSITION: impermanence
 The Exposition (The Room)
 ‘light’ without a source usually signals
 an atmosphere of the a spirit presence. ‘shadows’ signal the
supernatural and disease and unknown; what is unclear.
decay:  Details of smell - ‘rank’, ‘foul’, ‘tainted’;
 ‘A faint light from no particular sight – the colour of the mould – and
source mitigated the shadows of texture. Choices of ‘lush’ and
the halls.’ ‘spreading’ suggest an abundance of
growth of this poisonous substance.
 The stair carpet seemed to ‘have
‘viscid’ suggests touch by way of
degenerated in that rank,
meaning sticky.
sunless air to lush lichen or
spreading moss that grew in
 also, an atmosphere of emptiness –
patches to the staircase and was ‘vacant niches’
viscid under the foot like organic  the occult – repeated /d/ sound in
matter. ‘imps and devils had dragged them
forth in the darkness and down to the
EXPOSITION: impermanence
unholy depths of some furnished pit
below.’
 The Rising Action
 Note Mrs Purdy’s selling strategy  ‘It’s a room everybody likes. It never
of the quality of guests who have stays idle long.’
inhabited the room. – the ‘furry  The details will become important at
throat’ returns.
the end of the story when the two
 The key moment that sets the
women discuss the ‘pretty slip of a
rising action into effect is the colleen she was to be killin’ herself wid
man’s question to Mrs Purdy: the gas’.
‘A young girl – Miss Vashner – Miss
Eloise Vashner – do you remember
such a one among your lodgers?. .
a dark mole near her left eyebrow.’
 The narrator pauses to fill in
details about the man’s long
search – describing the city as
‘like a monstrous quicksand,
shifting its particles constantly’
RISING ACTION: Mrs Purdy denies knowing Miss Eloise Vashner
 The Rising Action
 ‘pseudo-hospitality’
 The room itself is describes as if
it were a character; again, a
 ‘hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome
mood of decay and of nothing like the specious smile of a demirep.’
being as it seems is evident.  ‘sophistical comfort’
 ‘reflected gleams’
 ‘decayed furniture’

RISING ACTION: Mrs Purdy denies knowing Miss Eloise Vashner

 The Rising Action
 There is a constant juxtaposition of what
 The man now becomes ‘The
appears to be beauty with the condition
guest’; the room, ‘confused in
of the furnishings:
speech’. The supernatural
reappears.
 ‘some brilliant-flowered… tropical islet’
 ‘a billowy sea of soiled matting’.

RISING ACTION: Mrs Purdy denies knowing Miss Eloise Vashner

 The Rising Action
 Note the ALLUSION to the
artwork – prints of famous
paintings:
 The Huguenot Lovers: a pair of
young lovers in an embrace. The
girl tried to get her lover to wear
a white armband (sign of being
Roman Catholic) to save him on
the St Bartholomew's Day
massacre, 1577

RISING ACTION: Mrs Purdy denies knowing Miss Eloise Vashner

 The Rising Action
 Note the ALLUSION to the
artwork – prints of famous
paintings:
 The First Quarrel: Cain & Abel
(from the Bible)

RISING ACTION: Mrs Purdy denies knowing Miss Eloise Vashner

 The Rising Action
 Note the ALLUSION to the
artwork – prints of famous
paintings:
 The Wedding Breakfast

RISING ACTION: Mrs Purdy denies knowing Miss Eloise Vashner

 The Rising Action
 Note the ALLUSION to the
artwork – prints of famous
paintings:
 Psyche at the Fountain:
overcoming obstacles to love.

RISING ACTION: Mrs Purdy denies knowing Miss Eloise Vashner

 The Rising Action
 ‘’tiny finger-prints on the wall . . .
 Details of violence in the room: little prisoners’
 ‘A splattered stain, raying like the
shadow of a bursting bomb’
 ‘scrawled with a diamond in
staggering letters’
 ‘It seemed that the succession of
dwellers ‘ ‘ ‘ had turned in fury.’
 ‘chipped and bruised’ furniture;
‘the couch, distorted by bursting
springs, seemed a horrible
monster . . . slain . . . grotesque
convulsion.’
 ‘Each plank . . . shriek as from a
separate and individual agony.’
RISING ACTION: Mrs Purdy denies knowing Miss Eloise Vashner
 The Rising Action
 ‘’there drifted into the room
 The tenant (previously the guest) furnished sounds and furnished
senses the presence of another scents’
being  ‘And he breathed the breath of
the house – a dank savour
rather than a smell –a cold,
musty effluvium as from
underground vaults mingled with
the reeking exhalations…’
 strong, sweet odour of
mignonette . . .almost seemed a
living visitant.
 ‘The rich odour clung to him and
wrapped him about. . . ‘She has
been in this room’.

RISING ACTION: Mrs Purdy denies knowing Miss Eloise Vashner

 The Rising Action
 The Housekeeper, we learn in
 The man confronts the the resolution, omits the most
Housekeeper: ‘Will you tell me, recent tenant: ‘Rooms, said
madam, . . . who occupied the Mrs Purdy, in her furriest tones,
room I have before I came?’ are furnished for to rent. I did
not tell him [that the previous
tenant committed suicide].’

RISING ACTION: Mrs Purdy denies knowing Miss Eloise Vashner

 The Climax
 ‘crept’
 The man gives up.  ‘The room was dead.’
 ‘the old, stale odour of mouldy
house furniture.’
 ‘The ebbing of his hope drained
his faith.
 ‘he turned out the light, turned
the gas full on again and laid
himself gratefully upon the
bed.’

CLIMAX: The man takes his own life

 The Resolution
 ‘subterranean retreats’ – hell
 The story’s twist is revealed: in a recalls ‘unholy depths of some
case of DRAMATIC IRONY, the furnished pit below.’ (p. 169)
young man takes his life in the  ‘worm dieth seldom. – return of
same room, as his long-lost love. devil imagery
 ‘laden with mystery’

RESOLUTION: The man had found his lost love in her presence.
 IRONY
 Identify several examples of
 The story is based on an IRONY within the story and
IRONIC plot: a young man comment on how they add
commits suicide in the same meaning to the story.
room where a young woman for
whom he has vainly searched
killed herself just recently.
 Ironic role that FATE plays in
people’s fortunes.
 Verbal irony – the description of
the room and the building
compared with the narrator’s
humorous description.
 Dramatic irony – the ending
CONFLICT

 Explore how O.
Henry develops these
 The powerful, callous ideas.
city versus the
vulnerable, romantic
individual
 The man’s psychological
world versus the reality
 Mrs Purdy (lies) versus
the man (truth)
THEMES
 Find examples of how
 Emptiness leads to the story’s setting, plot
and characters reveal
despair these themes.
 Hopelessness
 Isolation and
loneliness
 Disconnection –
the individual vs
the city
Additional Resource