The Furnished Room

Miss Eloise Vashner is one of the primary characters in the text, though she is not actually present in the story. She is the love interest of the young man and is first described as “a fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish, gold hair and dark mole near her left eyebrow” (Paragraph 12). An aspiring singer, she disappears from her unnamed home town to come to New York City. The protagonist’s search for her drives the plot.

Throughout the text, any details about Eloise are provided from the perspective of other characters. As the young man settles into his room, he detects the scent of mignonette, Eloise’s perfume. This smell drives the young man to frantically search for another indication she has been in the room. Through indirect characterization, the reader determines that Eloise and the young man were in love before her disappearance, as her scent is described as “clinging to him, wooing him” (Paragraph 23).

Eloise at first appears to be a flat character because she is only initially described by her appearance and her desire to be a singer. However, her suicide demonstrates that she experienced great internal conflict. Readers are not told why Eloise died by suicide, but the protagonist’s decision to end his life in the same way suggests she experienced similar loneliness and hopelessness in the urban environment.

As the housekeeper of the boarding house, Mrs. Purdy is a secondary character who remains static throughout the text. Nevertheless, she plays a key role in the story, serving as the impetus for the young man’s suicide when she chooses not reveal that Eloise recently resided in the same room.

The protagonist’s first impression of Mrs. Purdy as an “unwholesome, surfeited worm” suggests her parasitic nature (Paragraph 4). By renting depressing rooms to transient lodgers, she capitalizes on the alienating effects of urbanization. She is portrayed as a shrewd businesswoman in her misrepresentation of her vacant room, claiming it is rarely empty, and that she “had some most elegant people in it last summer” (Paragraph 8). Mrs. Purdy’s diction is littered with colloquialisms and grammatical errors such as “they comes and they goes” (Paragraph 10). These idiosyncrasies reveal she is an uneducated woman of a lower social status. O. Henry appeals to his middle-class readership’s inherent bias by portraying Mrs. Purdy in an unsympathetic light. By withholding the information that Eloise stayed in the room, she prioritizes profit over compassion.