"Striking Stereopticon Views": Edith Wharton's "Bunner Sisters" and Nineteenth-Century Magic Lantern Entertainment

In Edith Wharton's gritty early novella "Bunner Sisters," lowly milliner Evelina Bunner becomes captivated by the German clock mender Herman Ramy at a seemingly unlikely place: New York City's Chickering Hall, where she is enthralled by a stereopticon, a type of magic lantern that projects photographic slides onto a screen and dissolves one image into the next.¹ The magic lantern show provides Evelina a glimpse of a world beyond her circumscribed existence in the lower-class margins of Gilded Age New York and promises to be a turning point in her dreary life. Intriguingly, however, the event takes place offstage, the focus remaining on her sister Ann Eliza, who impatiently waits at home until a beaming Evelina returns to recount her adventure with the mysterious Mr. Ramy:

The evening had been brilliantly interesting, and several striking stereopticon views of Berlin had afforded Mr. Ramy the opportunity of enlarging on the marvels of his native city.

"He said he'd love to show it all to me!" Evelina declared as Ann Eliza conned her glowing face. "Did you ever hear anything so silly? I didn't know which way to look."

Ann Eliza received this confidence with a sympathetic murmur.

(299)

Although Evelina recollects the evening with a buoyant, cheerful air, her hopes for happiness with Ramy prove to be as ephemeral as the astounding images of the stereopticon. "Bunner Sisters" is thus an important text for furthering the ongoing study of Wharton's relation to visual art, mass entertainment, and material culture.² Moreover, the stereopticon, in epitomizing the deceptions exercised by Ramy throughout the narrative, operates as an emblem of illusion, fragmentation, ephemerality, and subjectivity, revealing a proto-modernist tendency in Wharton that effectively complicates the established conception of her as a literary naturalist.

Long one of Wharton's lesser known works, owing perhaps to its troubled publication history,³ "Bunner Sisters" has in recent years been the subject of considerable critical reevaluation— as a document of Wharton's formative period, as an astute assessment of prevailing gender and sexual ideologies, and as a reflection on turn-of-the-century reading habits and Gilded Age consumer culture.⁴ Perhaps most of all, the novella has gradually risen in stature because, as Donna M. Campbell suggests, it is now recognized as "Wharton's most overt exploration of naturalism and local color fiction" (180).

The naturalism of "Bunner Sisters" lies both in its plot of decline and in its documentation of a particular time and place. It is a bleak tale about two sisters, Ann Eliza and Evelina Bunner, who fall from relative security into poverty and degradation. At the novella's beginning, they inhabit a small curiosity shop selling "artificial flowers," "wire hat-frames," "jars of home-made preserves" (274), and other sundry items in a decaying immigrant neighborhood in New York City. When they befriend fellow shopkeeper Herman Ramy, he begins visiting them with increasing regularity and comes to be "as much a part of their lives as the letter-carrier or the milkman" (299). He woos both sisters, but when the self-sacrificing Ann Eliza refuses his proposal, he weds the younger Evelina. Ramy and Evelina's evening at Chickering Hall is therefore illustrative of the love triangle at the heart of Wharton's novella: Ramy invites both sisters to the lantern show, yet Ann Eliza characteristically declines, leaving Evelina to take the clock mender up on his fateful offer. With the prospect of a new job in St. Louis, Ramy whisks Evelina away from New York, and the sisters quickly lose touch. In the novella's ever-darkening latter chapters, Ann Eliza discovers that Ramy is a "drug-fiend" (351) addicted to opium, and when a dying Evelina returns home, she reveals that after the death of their newborn baby Ramy ran away with another woman. After Evelina dies, her older sister— forced to sell away much of the stock to pay for the funeral— closes the now vacant shop; the grim story ends with the newly homeless Ann Eliza facing an uncertain future...