Rooms (Diagnosis)

The term room and its different variations are used seventeen times in “Diagnosis” by Edith Wharton. Since she was interested in architecture and interior design and she had a wide range of knowledge about the rules of furnishing.[i]

Within the short story “Diagnosis” Wharton uses rooms to underline the actual situation of the characters. When Paul Dorrance reads that he does have cancer, he wishes to sit in a blacked out room - that is also what he wishes his brain to be: just black matter. But constant reminders of his cancer are in his room and in every room he enters: “Yes; it would be easier to bear in a pitch-black room, a room from which all sights and sounds, all suggestions of life, were excluded.”[ii]

Later, when Dorrance is in Vienna to see the specialist, he desires to go straight into an empty room to suffer alone (that is, in a moment of depression, before he hears that he does not suffer from cancer at all).[iii]

Furthermore, rooms are the only things where the changes occurring during the metamorphosis from the old to the new Paul Dorrance are visible. Back in his New York’s flat it is said:

“Yes - that was the only change in his life; and how aptly the change in the rooms symbolized it!”[iv]

This change is the marriage between Eleanor and him. She is now officially allowed to sleep in his bedroom whereas he has to be in the uncomfortable guest room at this moment because Eleanor is suffering from bronchitis.

Additionally, Edith Wharton describes this guest room in which Paul Dorrance has to stay now as a room where not even the winter’s sun comes in. It is a dark and cold room. One could argue that Paul Dorrance is (even in the situation where Eleanor is suffering from her bronchitis) jealous that he has to vacate the bedroom for her. [v]

[i] Cf.The Legacy of Edith Wharton's "The Decoration of Houses". Online verfügbar unter https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/edith-wharton-decoration-of-houses-interior-design, zuletzt geprüft am 15.06.2018.

[ii] Wharton, Edith; Robinson, Roxana (2007): The New York stories of Edith Wharton. New York, NY: New York Review Books (New York Review Books classics). p. 384.

[iii] Cf. Ibid. p.391.

[iv] Ibid. p.395.

[v] Cf. Ibid. p.395.