Hopper created a world of glass, which captures and encapsulates his disquieted relation to his subjects. His people are constantly defined in relation to windows: they look out of their windows, broodingly or vacantly; or we look in at them, framed in the windows of their offices, parlors, diners, or bedrooms.

There is a visual but only surface likeness between Hopper's glass-enclosed settings and the great department stores that created a new consumer culture at the turn of the century. Massing acres of goods under one roof, Macy's and Gimbels and the other new stores tempted browsers to look and to want and perhaps to buy. Their elaborate display windows, which alternated with open doors, promised the satisfaction of possession.

Moses King exulted that the blocks and blocks of shop windows were uniformly "fascinating, alluring, irresistible," a "magnificent panorama of mercantile display." And in Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser created fiction's most famous windowshopper, a young woman whose whole destiny is permanently fixed with her first glance into a department store window display.

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