When mannequins lived
In 1940, John Collier imagined what existed beyond a night watchman’s notice in the after hours of a department store. “Evening Primrose” explores the secret lives of mannequins.
Every child of the Department Store Age wondered about mannequins. Why is that one missing a head? Why do they all have colorless eyes? And her, in the forbidden lingerie section: just a bra and underwear for everyone and their fathers to see? The bravest little rascals among us would touch their plastic skin when our parents weren’t looking. It was cold and scaly, a sensory shock to our curiosity.
Are mannequins’ bodies based on ones from real life?
Does it hurt when their appendages are torn off and rearranged?
Gotta be robots. Right?
I swear, one over there just moved.
Do they all come alive after hours?
In 1940, John Collier imagined they did. His “Evening Primrose”1 follows an all-too-clever poet who decides to escape the living-and-breathing world and hide out in Bracey’s Giant Emporium for the rest of his life. He need only fool the night watchman to keep his new fantasy life alive.
As you might guess, the poet soon learns he’s not alone. On his first night, he spies another mannequin’s pair of suspicious eyes, “large, flat, luminous,” across the aisle as the watchman walks by.
The eyes are slowly revealed to belong to another escapee.
He was clad in dim but large-patterned Shetland tweeds of the latest cut, suède shorts, a shirt of rather broad motif in old, pink, and grey. He was as pale as a creature found under a stone. His long thin arms ended in hands that hung floatingly, more like trailing, transparent fins, or wisps of chiffon, than ordinary hands.
If that’s not the description of a real-life monster, I don’t know what is. The mannequin compliments the poet on his first night of concealment, then shows him that there are more hiding in plain sight. Mannequins everywhere unhurriedly wake up from the store’s shadowy stillness.
At first, they seem be indulging in a collective, harmless whimsy, reveling in their abilities to hide. But circumstances in this devious short story change very quickly. What happens is scary, to be certain, but I’m most drawn in by Collier’s liberated imagination.
The author’s fantastic language casts the spell over us, describing the mannequin’s arms as “transparent fins” and its “large, flat, luminous” eyes in more chilling detail: “I have seen such eyes among the nocturnal creatures, which creep out under the artificial blue moonlight in the zoo.” Reading and rereading these narrative portraits create pure magic.
What also interests me about “Evening Primrose” is the endangered commercial time and space where the story unfolds. When I was child, the department store occupied the major retail space in the mall of my imagination. Whether it housed mannequins clad in various stages of undress or lured my family to its elaborate upper-floor Christmas exhibits, like the inimical one rebooted at the downtown Dayton’s in Minneapolis, the department store was a place to imagine shared experiences with other living people. Sure, the big, rich stores used pretty forms and elaborate displays to sell stuff. But you didn’t have to buy anything if you could resist. You could just walk around, stare creepily back at the creepy, staring mannequins, and wonder what they were really up to. And spy on other kids who were wondering, too.
Today, the department store invests less in a mise en scène that feeds public imagination. Wonderment has given way to deep discount. Digital signs promising 50% off are everywhere. Christmas exhibits have sacrificed floor space to brand kiosks where we swap out smartwatch bands. It’s all more transactional and less alluring. Do you dream of staying overnight at Target, like Collier did at Bracey’s? Or Kohl’s? You want to hide away in there? At least today’s pillows are always half price.
If we want to connect within shared imaginative spaces today, more and more, we must pay admission to get in: to see a movie, to enter a theme park, or to get lost in a videogame. Newly created simulacra exist just out of our reach, too: the movie pretends to be three dimensional when it’s not. The full theme park experience is kept at a distance by ropes and queues. The videogame is an endlessly mediated matrix of an increasingly dull thing.
And the more we pay to enter these new wonders, the more we convince ourselves that their secrets are worth the growing price of admission.
Though we can’t live in a short story, Collier’s “Evening Primrose” conjures a vivid dream space that seems somehow more inhabitable than today’s alternatives. Even though the mystery of Bracey’s Giant Emporium is forever lost to a recent American past, his story survives to grant us a freer escape into a mannequin world that feels fun, alive, and without boundary. Just consider the hint of endless possibility he creates in just 41 words:
Yesterday we had a bridge party. Tonight Mrs. Bilbee’s little play, Love in the Shadowland, is going to be presented. Would you believe it?—another colony, from Wanamaker’s, is coming over en masse to attend. Apparently people live in all stores.
If such fantasies could still be chased at the Mall of America, where a Bloomingdale’s marked the latest end of the Department Store Age in 2012, I might sneak in there after hours to restart my youthful surveillance program. It’s nice to hope that one of the remaining mannequins, frozen in the window display of another time-gone-by store, is patiently waiting to rekindle my wonder.
Collected in American Fantastic Tales: 1940s to Now, ed. Peter Straub. New York: Library of America, 2009.