Bunner Sisters (wrap up)- Emily Armstrong

Through the novel both sisters underwent enormous changes in character as they experienced the highs and lows of love, societal pressures, sisterhood, and individualism. Ann Eliza of course becomes the forefront in these changes which can be seen in the way Edith Wharton uses a rich description of the setting to open and close the novel. In class we discussed how setting played a key role in distinguishing how Ann Eliza may have felt about the world outside of her shop. When first describing it she sees the street as falling from “shabbiness to squalor” (kindle 2%). Upon the closing of the novel and following Evelina’s untimely death Ann Eliza again goes out into the street, leaving her shop forever behind, to find a new beginning. Wharton describes the day as “a beautiful morning, and the air was full of a warm sunshine that had coaxed open nearly every window in the street, and summoned to the window-sills the sickly plants nurtured indoors in winter” (kindle 97%). Ann Eliza, though completely alone now in the world, seems to face her leaving the shop as a “freedom” so to speak to embark upon a new beginning. Interpreting the vast differences in the description of setting from the start to the conclusion of the book one could say that Ann Eliza has underwent an awakening of her spirit to become a New Woman.