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"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. The magic lantern show provides Evelina a glimpse of a world beyond her circumscribed existence in the lowerclass 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: