“Objects Long Preserved”: Reading and Writing the Shop Window in Edith Wharton’s “Bunner Sisters”

In 1893, Moses King noted the appeal of New York City’s famous Ladies’ Mile shopping district from Broadway to Madison Square, “made up of the splendid temptations of the shop windows, and the groups of charming people who linger about them spell-bound.” Warning of the ill-fate awaiting “the rural or provincial purse whose owner ventures before these attractive windows,” King describes their contents as “a perfect kaleido-scope of silks and velvets, laces and jewels, rich books and music, paintings and statuary, rifles and racquets, confections and amber-like bottles, cloisonnée and cut-glass, everything imaginable for use or luxury, massed in perfect affluence, and displayed in the most attractive way possible” (843). The passage emphasizes the connections that were being made between consumer spectacle and the shoppers captivated by it. The charming and the urbane are the only ones who dare look, the passage implies,¹ and by looking, they become part of the retail display.

The year before King’s book was published, Edith Wharton wrote “Bunner Sisters,” a novella in which shop window displays are equated to human lives and relationships. Like The Age of Innocence (1920), the no-vella is set in the 1870s, “when society applauded Christine Nilsson at the Academy of Music” and the landscapes of the Hudson River School artists were in vogue (309). Within this Gilded Age setting, Wharton evokes the spectacles and meanings of New York’s retail districts, which had significant cultural influence by the end of the century. Retailing practices were tending toward greater diversification of goods in the 1860s and ‘70s, in both Europe and the United States, and “[b]y 1877 Macy’s was a full-fledged department store” in New York City (Hower 141). By the last decade of the century, when Wharton wrote her story, large department stores and their attendant window displays were a permanent fixture in shopping districts such as New York’s Ladies’ Mile.

Ann Eliza and Evelina Bunner’s shop is located in what amounts to an outpost of the Ladies’ Mile bordering Stuyvesant Square on a “side-street already doomed to decline” (309). In contrast to the attractive and luxurious department store windows that King describes, the Bunner sisters’ show window sports a quotidian display: “artificial flowers, bands of scalloped flannel, wire hat-frames, and jars of home-made preserves” (311). Although the Bunner Sisters’ window offers the “sole refuge” from the “depressing waste” of the street, the objects in the window have the “greyish tinge of objects long preserved in the show-case of a museum” (311). As the novella progresses, we learn that the preservation aesthetic of the sisters’ shop window influences their lives, yet the life narratives that the sisters create also challenge existing ideologies.² In describing the Bunner sisters’ social dilemmas and the stories they create in response, Wharton carves out a narrative space for Ann Eliza, in particular, that negotiates the consumer aesthetics of the late nineteenth century.

Edward Burlingame, an editor at Scribner’s, turned down the story in 1892 and again in 1893, noting in his first refusal that it was too long to be published in a single issue and it was not suited for serialization (Lewis 66). When it finally was published in Wharton’s short story collection Xingu in 1916, Charles Scribner thought it “just a little small for the best results in separate form” (qtd. in Lee 161). Hermione Lee concludes that the novella might have achieved higher critical status had it been published separately like Ethan Frome (161). The work is indeed worthy of study for its artistry and historical significance. In it, Wharton is more engaged with the cultural and aesthetic complications of modern life than we have normally assumed her to be in the 1890s³ and in linking the sisters’ shop window to the narratives women tell about themselves to preserve their sense of self-worth, she reveals a deep ambivalence toward the determining force of consumer culture.

If “Bunner Sisters” had appeared in 1893, Wharton’s readers would...