“Becoming a Part of Her Innermost Being”: Gender, Mass-Production, and the Evolution of Department Store Culture in Edith Wharton’s “Bunner Sisters”

Abstract

Abstract Written in 1892 and published in her 1916 collection of short stories entitled Xingu, Edith Wharton’s “Bunner Sisters” offers a uniquely literary perspective into an era of change in New York City’s production and commerce history. Strategically set in the 1870s, “Bunner Sisters” supplies readers with a critical commentary on the United States’ economic transition from neighborhood shops selling hand-made products to large department stores selling mass-produced, machine-made wares. Wharton locates Bunner Sisters, one of these small neighborhood retailers, in what Gary Totten refers to as “an outpost of the Ladies’ Mile bordering Stuyvesant Square”1 or, according to Wharton, a “side-street already doomed to decline.”2 Indeed, while displacing smaller neighborhood shops like Bunner Sisters, large department stores like Macy’s helped to reconfigure existing retail and consumption practices by drawing shoppers out of close-knit, familial shopping communities and welcoming them into the anonymity of the department store. Drawing from contemporary “separate spheres” ideology,3 Wharton links these economic transformations with an array of social implications, ultimately revealing how changes in manufacturing and retail practices also affect society’s attitudes towards consumption and interactions with consumable products. To these ends, Wharton repositions contemporary definitions of “public space” as an arena in which sociopolitical interactions take place, and instead characterizes it as a space where mass-produced, factory goods are made and retailed. In a similar way, she acknowledges contemporary characterizations of “private” spaces as domestic environments but also reconfigures them as the neighborhood shops and producers of pre-industrial, handmade objects.