The Lumber Room Symbol Analysis

In the story, the lumber room symbolizes wildness and imagination, and the aunt’s decision to bar the children from this room represents her affinity for propriety and orderliness. In upper-class English homes, the lumber room was used to store extra furniture and unused knickknacks. This seemingly uninteresting room is described as a place of great mystery and wonder in the story. The aunt does not allow the children inside, and even refuses to answer their questions about it. Nicholas is very curious about this forbidden place and concocts an elaborate plan to enter it. When he succeeds in doing so, he is struck by the contrast between the “wonderful things for the eye to feast on” that he finds there and the aunt’s “bare and cheerless” house. He is particularly fascinated by a tapestry that depicts a hunting scene and he also admires other unusual objects he finds, like a candlestick shaped like twining snakes, a teapot shaped like a duck, and a book containing pictures of exotic birds.

Interestingly, all these objects have some association with animals or birds, suggesting that the lumber room is a place of wildness as opposed to the decorum of the rest of the house. Also, Nicholas interacts with these objects by imagining them into life. The tapestry is “a living, breathing story” to him, and he “assign[s] a life-history” to a mandarin duck he finds in the bird book. In the lumber room, Nicholas is free to make the imaginative leaps that his minds yearns for, away from the aunt’s prescriptions of behavior and thought. The adults keep children away from this room because they don’t want them to be freethinkers. In the story, the other children don’t attempt to attain this freedom of thought, but Nicholas, with his wit and bravery, tries and succeeds. He seems to be touched by the special wild, captivating quality of the lumber room even after he leaves it. When the family is at tea at the end of the story and is sitting together in stony silence, lost in their own personal miseries, Nicholas is quiet like the rest but floats above their discomfort, thinking about the story of the tapestry.