84 pages • 2 hours read
N. D. Wilson100 Cupboards
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
Cupboards
The story centers around 100 cupboards, each with a door different in color, shape, and locking mechanism. Henry and Henrietta discover most of the cupboards hidden behind plaster on the wall of Henry’s attic bedroom: “All of it was made up of small cupboard doors” (44). Each door leads to a different place, except when they lead nowhere, and many lead to different worlds altogether. One cupboard, big enough for a person to crawl through, sits in Grandfather’s room. Henry and Henrietta begin to figure out how to use this cupboard to visit the worlds inside the ones on the wall.
Magical cupboards and cupboards are recognizable symbols from many children’s novels in which they serve as portals to different worlds. Readers may recall Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland approaching the small door in the rabbit hole and, after drinking a potion, entering it into a different world. Or they may recognize in Grandfather’s cupboard similarities to the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, in which a family of young children explores an alternate world through the back of a wardrobe. In these books, as in Wilson’s, readers learn that incredible, diverse landscapes are hidden within the trappings of the everyday. Even in our normal houses and gardens, the magical is accessible behind every door.
Baseball
Baseball recurs in the story as a bonding experience between Henry, the boys in town, and Frank. Baseball is a classic symbol of Americana, and Wilson deploys it to illustrate the normalcy of Henry’s life (both the character and the town). Frank utilized baseball to assimilate into the new world when he emerged from the cupboards, and he helps Henry to do the same. He buys Henry a baseball glove; his and Henry’s shared interest in the sport hints at their common heritage as visitors from the cupboard worlds. Henry’s willingness to try baseball anticipates his willingness to explore the cupboards—it’s a symbol of his desire to make more friends and have more adventures.
Baseball also becomes a symbol of Henry’s willingness to move beyond his comfort zone. He risks the social perils of playing a game about which he knows nothing. Somehow, he manages from the start to be at least mediocre at it. This opens an opportunity for him to make friends with the best player in town, Zeke, who later uses his bat to good advantage in a fight with the witch Nimiane.
Mailbox
One of the cupboards is a mailbox that gets letters and postcards from different worlds. It’s the first cupboard Henry opens and the first to indicate that the cupboards lead to different places. Over the course of the novel, Henry receives various communications via the mailbox that indicate the interactions between and moods within the different worlds, including their current judgements of Henry himself.
The mailbox serves as a type of gateway to the other worlds, one through which Henry can safely learn about them without the dangers of actually visiting them. As a symbol, the mailbox represents the power of words. Through the letters and written correspondence he finds in the mailbox, Henry learns much about this adventure he’s on, including the roles of other characters like Nimiane and Grandfather. Much like the symbol of the doors, the mailbox presents readers with the accessibility of adventure within one’s normal life, this time through words.
Grandfather’s Room
The Willis girls’ grandfather, Simon, lived in the Willis house until he died two years before the story begins. His room was locked under a magic spell, and Frank’s best efforts fail to open it. The difficulty of accessing the room from the outset promises readers that what lies behind the door is important and worth locking away. It also indicates that the room will become a stage for later events. When Henry and Henrietta finally open it, it serves as a symbol that sometimes puzzles cannot be solved through logic but creative thinking and chance.
When Henrietta discovers the room’s secret resident, a member of the Faerens named Eli FitzFaeren, it opens a new door—literally and figuratively—onto an entirely new storyline. Henry and Henrietta study Grandfather’s journals, found in the room, to understand the cupboards. They also utilize the cupboard to access other worlds, for better and for worse. While it is the many doors of the cupboards that lead them to new worlds, it all begins when they step through the door of Grandfather’s room. As indicated from the outset, it is Grandfather’s room that serves as the epicenter of the story’s action.
