"Objects Long Preserved" Reading and Writing the Shop Window in
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 kaleidoscope of silks and velvets, laces and jewels, rich books and music, paintings and statuary, rifl es and racquets, confections and amber-like bottles, cloisonnee and cut-glass, everything imaginable for use or luxury, massed in perfect affl uence, 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 novella 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 signifi cant cultural infl uence by the end of the century. Retailing practices were tending toward greater diversifi cation of goods in the 1860s and ‘70s, in both Europe and the United States, and “[b]y 1877 Macy’s was a full-fl edged department store” in New York City (Hower 141). By the last decade of the century, when Wharton wrote her story, large department