The Ladies’ Paradise

by Émile Zola
(trans. Brian Nelson)
Perspective by
Karen Lynch
Cover image: Tom Martin, 2006 (with minor manipulation).
Original image sourced via Creative Commons.
 2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES 3

The Ladies’ Paradise

by Émile Zola
(trans. Brian Nelson)
Perspective by Karen Lynch
Edited by Marion White

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4 2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES
 2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES 5

The Ladies’ Paradise

by Émile Zola
Perspective by Karen Lynch

branch degenerates into poverty, madness, or

Introduction to the text
The early events of Émile Zola’s life will prove
both interesting and an important reminder to our
students that initial failure does not predict one’s life
outcomes, and may even be the key to outstanding
success. Having twice failed his baccalaureate in
science in 1859, Zola put aside his earlier ambitions
of becoming an engineer and found work at one of
France’s most important publishing houses, Hachette
and Company. Here Zola launched a writing career,
with dual outputs in politically engaged journalism1
and novels and short stories embedded in social
realism.
The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames)
appeared, as was custom at the time, in serialised
form in the French periodical Gil Blas and was
published in novel form in 1883. This is in fact the
eleventh novel in what has come to be known as
The Rougon-Macquart series, which spanned twenty
novels. A very brief overview of the scope of this
project will cast further light on the overarching
themes and moral message of The Ladies’ Paradise.
However, it must be stressed that the text functions
well as a ‘stand-alone’ novel and is treated as such
for the purposes of this study. The Rougon-Macquart
family descend from three children, one legitimate
and two illegitimate, of an insane woman. The
legitimate Rougon branch prospers, although it is
through cunning and betrayal, while the illegitimate
alcoholism. Throughout the series Zola explores
and propounds ‘scientific’ notions of heredity in
terms of character tendencies and life outcomes.
Characters’ fortunes are expressed against the
backdrop of France’s Second Empire (1852–1870)
which is variously portrayed as diseased, corrupted
and debased as well as dynamic, modern and
visionary. Novels of the darker cast include The Kill
(1871) which examines the amorality of the nouveau
riche Rougons and the ruthless mad rush for property
in the new Paris fashioned by Haussmann. Another
grim work, L’Assommoir (1876) is based on slum life
in Paris and the misery of alcoholism. The latter was
a breakthrough novel for Zola, making him quite
wealthy and securing his place in the first literary
circles of his time. Nana (1880) is a novel about a
precociously immoral prostitute turned courtesan
whose sexual power and exploitation poison
the entire body-politic of France, metaphorically
representing what Zola saw as the degeneration
of the Empire and the build up to war. Nana, the
daughter of the alcoholics Gervaise and Coupeau
from the previous novel L’Assommoir, epitomises
Zola’s belief in the powerful influence of heredity and
environment in the shaping of individual characters.
Octave Mouret the co-protagonist of The Ladies’
Paradise is a hereditary mix of both the Rougons and
the Macquarts and this goes some way to explain the
comparative optimism at the heart of this novel.
As was his journalistic practice, Zola studied the

The most famous episode of Zola’s political life, The Dreyfus Affair of 1898, will be well known to many. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish
1

army officer, falsely accused of passing French military secrets to Germany, was convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment.
When subsequent testimony confirmed Dreyfus’ innocence beyond doubt, Zola wrote the open letter now known after the banner headline
‘J’Accuse!’. Zola’s letter outlined the officer’s innocence and exposed the deceit of high-ranking military officials who conspired to keep the
innocent man in prison in order to preserve the authority of the army. Following this publication, Zola himself was charged and was forced
to flee to political exile in England in 1898, returning after he was vindicated in 1899.
 6 2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES
workings of department stores meticulously in
preparation for this novel. The Ladies’ Paradise is
largely modelled on department store Le Bon Marché,
and Mouret on the proprietor, Boucicaut, who
embraced new and fiercely competitive commercial
methods such as ‘ticketing’ (labelling items for
easy comparison with competitors and eliminating
the practice of haggling), ‘sales’, ‘returns’ and, of
course, ‘displays’. From the opening scenes of The
Ladies’ Paradise, the department store is beheld
by co-protagonist Denise as visually mesmerising
and emotionally seductive. Denise, the honest and
sensible working-class provincial girl, gapes in awe at
the ‘giant fairground display’ of merchandise and can
barely drag her gaze away from the bright lights and
enchanting window arrangements of the store. This
visual seduction of Denise, which Zola details as her
gaze takes in item after item, display after display, is
an important element of the text which will be dealt
with in more detail in another section.
In his novel, Zola was capturing the rise of the
new capitalist era of large-scale production and
consumption. The immediate relationship between
commodities and consumer culture, particularly the
new phenomenon of discretionary female spending,
is one of the central concerns of a novel that borders
at times on being a sociological study of female
consumer behaviour. Mouret knows that his success
lies in ‘conquering’ women, enslaving them to the
desire for products. Women are seduced to spend
through lavish display, profusion of goods, and the
new methods of selling (mentioned above) that made
buying appear easier. In an era of ‘pay day lending’
and the new phenomenon of ‘after pay’, Mouret’s
methods are chillingly prescient. However, while
Zola clearly underlines the ruthlessness of the sales
techniques, he refuses to condemn Mouret, his
store, or this new capitalist era. The Ladies’ Paradise,
the titular ‘hero’ of the novel, is portrayed as an
irrepressible life force that ultimately ensures the
salvation of those individuals who have the wits to
join its forces. Those who resist and cling to the ways
of old commerce are doomed.
The Ladies’ Paradise explores the ramifications
of what we could call economic Darwinism; an
economic evolution, or even revolution where those
who can adapt to the new economies of scale and
new modes of commerce can survive or, as in the
case of the large department stores, thrive, and those
who can’t—the smaller shopkeepers—will become
extinct. As with Darwin’s evolutionary theory, there
is a sense of amorality at the heart of this text, where
it is inevitable that ‘the new way of business … such
a powerful current … [will] carry all before it’ (p. 195),
where it is only natural that the strong will crush the
weak. Even more challenging, however, is the text’s
overall approval of this new commercial era, which
kills off the traditional artisans and shopkeepers of
the old Paris.
Perspective on the text
In a letter which outlines the ideas for this novel, Zola
said that he wanted Au Bonheur des Dames to be a
‘poem of modern-day activity’. He explains his marked
change of tone and tenor from previous novels in
the Rougon-Macquart cycle as ‘a complete change
of philosophy: no more pessimism; don’t show the
stupidity and melancholy of life, demonstrate on the
contrary its continual labour, the power and gaiety of
its birth-giving. In a word, go with the century, express
the century, which is a century of action and conquest.’
He explains the idea of a department store ‘absorbing,
crushing all the small businesses of a neighbourhood.
But … I will not weep for them; on the contrary, for I
want to show the triumph of modern activity; they
are no longer of their time, too bad for them! They are
crushed by the giant.’ (Ramazani 2007, p. 126).
The giant is captained by Octave Mouret. Mouret’s
commercial daring is brutal, instinctive, risky, creative
and ultimately triumphant. He is the Nietzschean
‘Übermensch’ (‘Overman’) whose entrepreneurial
brinkmanship has him staking everything. His
second in charge, Bourdoncle, attempts prudence and
caution, but this is dismissed by the text as lacking
in vision and nerve; Bourdoncle will always stand
in the shadow of Mouret’s genius. Mouret’s will is
triumphant and these triumphs are literally translated
or embodied in the growing empire of the store,
which, in turn metaphorically embodies modern
Paris, or even the modern state. His strenuous form
of enterprise is blessedly joined by good luck. Mouret
is used to triumph, but his success has not made him
venerable or kind. He strategically courts women to
gain access to their powerful connections, he does not
spare a thought to dismissing his employees on the
slightest pretext during the slack season, and overall,
his business model is one which preys on women—
the department store and its sumptuous displays
will eventually conquer even the most economically
thrifty housewife. This business model is variously
presented as seduction, entrapment, and predation.
Zola draws the reader’s attention to this sub-textual
violence early on. One of the first images we have of
the shop window display, through the eyes of Denise,
is that of shop mannequins with ‘missing heads

(which) were replaced by large price tags with pins
stuck through them into the red bunting round the
collars’ (p. 6). These decapitated figures are multiplied
by mirrors so that the street itself seems filled ‘with
these beautiful women for sale with huge price tags
where their heads should have been’ (p. 6). The image
is deliberately confronting, a blunt objectification
of the female form translated into commodity. Here
the reader is confronted with the full force of Zola’s
intention. Instead of shying from new commerce’s
brutality he glorifies it. In a feminist appraisal, Barbara
Vinken argues that Zola is portraying Mouret and his
department store as Life itself: ‘To live, Life must kill …
The triumph of Octave Mouret … lies in the logic of
things, which is the fatal logic of Life itself ’ (Vinken
1995, p. 249).
The only check on Mouret will be Denise. This quiet
and unassuming provincial shop-girl will eventually
have Mouret, and the entire Ladies’ Paradise, at her
feet. Denise, the working-class shop-girl will marry
this captain of industry. One interpretation, strongly
suggested by the narrative itself, is that marriage
of the worker with a reigning member of the
bourgeoisie will produce a harmony where the needs
of the workers blend more seamlessly with the amoral
logic of capital. One of the interesting questions
(from a literary perspectives point of view) is to
what extent we can accept that Denise’s ‘humanising’
reforms will actually create this balance and harmony,
transforming the Ladies’ Paradise, it is implied by Zola,
into a Utopian ideal, the model of rational, productive
but also empathetic modern industry.
Denise begins her time at the store as an inept and
naive shop-girl. The silk dress that she wears as
her uniform hides a life of privation, misery and
exhaustion: ‘poverty in a silk dress’ (p. 125). It is
through these experiences that Zola can portray the
lot of the exploited worker, who is often portrayed
in the text as a mere cog ‘caught up in the workings
of the machine’ (p. 134) where ‘the useless cog was
calmly thrown aside’ (p. 154) when the season turns
quiet. The machine dehumanises the workers and
strips them of their personalities and personal lives;
thrown together at such close quarters the men and
women of the Ladies’ Paradise are too exhausted,
preoccupied or deliberately pitted against one another
in the system of commissions to think of each other
with desire or affection. In the time before Mouret’s
obsession with her, Denise also faces the seasonal
axe of retrenchment. She feels like ‘a grain of millet
beneath a powerful millstone … utterly forlorn at
feeling herself so insignificant in that huge machine,
which would crush her with its calm indifference’
(p. 155).
2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES 7
After being dismissed from her position Denise may
well have succumbed to the same fate of many of her
predecessors—the fallen woman, the street walker—
had it not been for the kindness of the umbrella maker,
Bourras. This kind but eccentric craftsman invents
work for Denise despite his straitened circumstances
living in the shadow of the giant store. Like Denise’s
own uncle, Baudu the draper, Bourras’ livelihood is
threatened and ultimately destroyed by the Ladies’
Paradise. Both are sworn enemies of the new style
of commerce and the store itself, but their desperate
attempts to cling to their old ways are doomed, their
protests, their pride and their counter-measures
completely futile. Denise may weep for them, but her
own interventions, once she is in a position of power
with Mouret, are futile. She negotiates a generous
settlement for Bourras for his business, but the old
man refuses to be bought, arguing that it would ‘be
too much to expect them to give charity to the people
they murder!’ (p. 386). The nobility of his refusal, and
his dignity in the face of defeat, is muddied by the
perversity and futility of his stand. When his shop
is literally torn down, our last glimpse of Bourras is
of him receding into the crowded street—forgotten,
anonymous. For her uncle, who has already lost his
family as well as his business, she can only offer him a
job in the very place that has destroyed him, and even
Denise feels sick with ‘pity and resentment’ at the
thought and is relieved at her uncle’s refusal. Despite
the kindness and decency of Bourras and the horrible
suffering of her uncle and his family, Denise, the
moral voice of the text, will still stand firmly by the
side with the new ways. Denise, who is presented as
having an ‘invincible gentleness’ (p. 121), weeps for the
impending doom of her friends and relations, yet her
‘shrewd, rational, Norman mind’ (p. 354) understands
this ‘natural development of business’ (p. 194) and
even that those who could not compete were the
‘necessary sacrifice; every revolution demanded its
victims’ (p. 376).
As for her fellow workers, Denise will use her powers
to try to ‘plead the cause of the cogs in this great
machine’ (p. 355). However, importantly, Denise
does not do so for sentimental reasons, ‘but with
arguments based on the employers’ own interests’:
give everyone ‘a fair share of the profits according
to merit’, ‘replace mass dismissals with a system of
leave given during the slack seasons’ (p. 356). While
Zola states that these sorts of reforms were ‘the
embryo of the vast trade unions of the twentieth-
century’ (p. 356), the reader is left wondering whether
worker’s interests are truly served. Zola’s optimistic
view expresses some sort of utopian reconciliation
between workers and bosses. However, Denise’s
 8 2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES
complicity with capital leaves readers questioning the
likelihood of such a happy reconciliation.
Another consideration that carries a range of
perspectives and questions concerns the role of
women in this text. We have already considered the
business model of Mouret’s which centres on the
seduction and exploitation of women, and this will
be further canvassed in the next section. However, a
competing narrative which arose in this era is that of
the new ‘public woman’. The role of the housewife had
been largely restricted to the domestic environment
in the early nineteenth century, and unescorted
ventures out of these environs were only considered
unproblematic during independent outings to church
(Rocha et al, 2014, p. 63). In this context then, the
department store offered itself as a new public space
where women could venture out alone, or together,
in what was largely considered a ‘feminine’ space.
The various spaces, including the reading room
detailed in Zola’s novel, offered women the freedom
to become female ‘flaneurs’—wanderers, at least
within the confines of the shop, who take pleasure in
the spectacle of these spaces, enjoying the displays,
watching people, meeting together. One could spend
hours of leisure in these spaces, which were designed
to hold their customers there for lengthy periods
of time; free entry, the provision of food and other
comforts, together with the sumptuous displays and
profusion of goods to be marvelled at, all combined
to this end. In fact the first public toilet for women in
France was built within Le Bon Marché (Rocha et al,
p. 64). Mouret knows that his economic success rests
on providing welcoming comforts for women:
Mouret’s sole passion was the conquest of Woman.
He wanted her to be queen in his shop; he had
built this temple for her in order to hold her at
his mercy. … He racked his brains night and day
for new ideas. Already, to spare delicate ladies
the trouble of climbing the stairs, he had installed
two lifts lined with velvet. In addition, he had
just opened a buffet, where fruit cordials and
biscuits were served free of charge, and a reading-
room, a colossal gallery decorated with excessive
luxury, in which he even ventured to hold picture
exhibitions. (p. 234).
However, the freedoms allowed this new public
woman are deeply compromised by these comforts
as well. Women may roam unaccompanied by their
husbands or male escorts, but Zola’s portrayal of the
public woman is also sexualised. Woman, no longer
under the protection and control of the domestic
sphere, becomes sexualised in a public space, a
creature of desire who is easy prey for Mouret’s
‘cunning snares’. Woman is refused the absolute
freedom of the detached male Flaneur, who merely
watches; women buy, and the buying is often seen as
frivolous, vain and excessive.
The other notion of the public woman is that of the
shop-girl. Free from the ties of marriage or children,
the shop-girl occupies an uncomfortable space
between mere worker and the ‘lady’ she imitates
in order to serve her predominantly middle-class
clientele. In this way shop-girls form a nameless class,
a class of women who cannot be identified along
patrilineal lines as mother, sister, or wife. Vinken (1995,
p. 253) notes that the shop-girls’ social indeterminacy
turns out to be a moral problem; with starvation wages,
shop-girls were practically reduced to taking paying
lovers—a suggestion passed on to Denise by the
kindly Pauline, but a practice which, of course, carries
connotations of prostitution. The negative portrayal
of Clara is also a case in point. While Mouret can
take any shop-girl or courtesan into his sexual favour
without negative connotations, Clara’s sexual exploits
are deemed morally bankrupt; Zola here is clearly a
man of his time in perpetuating what we now consider
as startling hypocrisy. Clara is dealt the fate of the
literary ‘whore’ of the era: ‘Clara had disappeared a
month ago; according to some she had run off with the
husband of a customer, and according to others, she
had gone on the streets.’ (p. 407).
There are two examples of professionally successful
women in The Ladies’ Paradise. The first is Madame
Aurélie. Successfully earning twelve thousand
francs a year, she is the matriarch and head buyer
of ladieswear, and a rare exception—a married
working woman, whose husband and son also work
at the store. Yet she and her family are negatively
portrayed throughout the novel. Her success, like
her independence, is seen as a negative disruptor
of the patriarchal family unit. She earns more than
her husband does, and refuses to be called by her
married name, which ironically is Lhomme (the
man). Monsieur Lhomme, intimidated by his wife,
is portrayed as a pathetic and ridiculous figure; her
son Albert is bad at his job and a wastrel. The family
rarely spends time together, an implication that as a
working woman, Madame is unable or uninterested in
keeping together a close nuclear family. The second is
Denise. After her initial failure and debasement that
amounts to martyrdom, Denise becomes exceptional
at her job and moreover, a visionary and an innovator,
along the lines of Mouret. However, Denise’s success
and the translation of her innovations into reality
are of course entirely dependent upon Mouret’s
infatuation for her. Unlike Madame Aurélie’s success,

however, Denise’s rise is celebrated. Once in Mouret’s
favour, Denise first conquers ‘her department’ (p.
330) and then the entire store: ‘The reign of Denise
was beginning.’ This is the Cinderella moment
for this virtuous girl who has steadfastly refused
Mouret’s advances, eventually forcing him into an
offer of marriage. The obvious feminist reading of
the patriarchal binary of Madonna/Whore will be
of interest to many students and will be explored in
more detail in the Literary perspectives section.
Features of the text
As many critics have pointed out, the primary
character of The Ladies’ Paradise is the store itself.
Having exhaustively studied department stores
such as Le Bon Marché, Zola offers to the reader an
internal and detailed perspective of this new entity.
Some critics consider this as a kind of an ‘historical
account’ or ‘romanced documentary’ of innovative
entrepreneurial practices that heralded the beginning
of a new consumer-centric era. One of the most
prominent features of the novel is Zola’s detailed
description of sumptuous display together with
the shifting dimensions and the additions of the
store itself. In its final form, it is envisioned as the
‘cathedral of modern commerce’ (Rocha 2014, Cullen
2009) filled with light and space:
There was a vast expanse of polychrome
architecture, bright and new, and heightened
with gold, which heralded the din and glare
of the business inside, attracting the eye like
a giant display blazing with the most brilliant
colours. On the ground floor, so as not to kill
the effect of the materials in the shop-windows,
the decorations were somber … their severity
lightened by gilded tablets; and everything else
was of plate glass in a framework of metal—
nothing but glass, which seemed to open up the
depths of the galleries and halls to the daylight of
the street. But, as the storeys rose up, the tones
became brighter and brighter … disappearing into
infinity. (p. 390).
Just as Haussmann’s architectural redesign of Paris
was pulling down the old networks and streets, and
constructing great new boulevards running through
the city, so too the public interiors of the Ladies’
Paradise echoed the spirit of this age on the cusp
of modernism. Haussmann’s design would enable
greater traffic for commerce, and Mouret harnesses
this project to his expanding store. However, whereas
the Haussman project had the purpose of opening
up the boulevards to provide order, and demolishing
2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES 9
the mazes of streets that had enabled revolutionaries
to construct barricades, Mouret, in contrast, wants
to create a riot and a throng of crowds and confusion
that would more resemble the streets of the old Paris.
The awe inspired by the building itself deliberately
echoes that felt in places of worship, but Zola’s
depiction is distinctly different from the sombre
echoing cloisters of a church or cathedral. The
openness, light and space, together with the allusions
to perspective, bring to mind the heroic projects of
the age, and look forward to the bold concept of the
Eiffel tower (1887) that would come to represent a
new post-Revolutionary France.
The space of spectacle that is the building itself and
its repeatedly reconfigured displays and departments
conceals those spaces of the store not available to
public gaze or scrutiny. The luxury of the salons
is contrasted with the cramped shabbiness of the
sleeping quarters. The tempting delicacies served
to customers deny the utilitarian function of the
vast kitchens. The careful arrangement of display
items belies the existence of basements where bulk
merchandise is received and dispatched in a circular
process of engorgement and disgorgement. Each
of these spaces, however ugly, is highly efficient, a
necessary part of the ‘machine’ that is the modern
department store. Zola uses the term ‘phalanstery’
at times to describe these other spaces, a term that
holds the positive connotation of the Utopian theories
of Charles Fourier. According to Brian Nelson, this
was based on the idea of ‘the self-sufficient, co-
operative community, (the phalanstery), free from the
constraints and trials of urban industrial civilization’
(p. 435). The extent to which Zola portrays a
community in The Ladies’ Paradise that responds to
individual needs is, of course, highly contestable.
The overriding imagery of light, space, energy and
efficiency of the Ladies’ Paradise, and its positive
evocation of the future, is starkly contrasted against
its primary victims—the shopkeepers and their
livelihoods. In the opening sequence where Denise’s
gaze is captured by the dazzling enticement of the
window display, she finally turns back to the shop
front of her Uncle’s modest but once thriving drapery
shop, the Vieil Elbeuf. She sees a shop with ‘prison-
like, half-moon shaped windows’ that are ‘black and
dusty’ and a door which ‘seemed to lead into the
dank gloom of a cellar’ (p. 7). The ‘old-fashioned
way of business’ (p. 15) is symbolised by the literal
decay of the shop, the mould, the stench and the
strained relationships within its gloomy interior. Zola
repeatedly contrasts the bright energy and newness
of Mouret’s store with the empty, dark and cramped
 10 2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES
interiors of the old shops. The inhabitants of these
stores, the representatives of old commerce, suffer
terrible fates. Geneviève, Denise’s cousin, loses her
betrothed to his infatuation with Clara from the
Paradise even as her father’s shop declines. Her slow
grieving and painful death in ‘frightful agony’ (p. 367)
embodies the ‘degeneration . . . of old commercial
Paris’ (p. 365). The mourners at Geneviève’s funeral
procession are all ‘the monster’s victims’ (p. 367), the
small tradespeople of the neighbourhood, coming
together not only in sympathy but also in a futile and
mute protest against the department store that has
crushed them. Madame Baudu shortly follows her
daughter. As she lies dying, she keeps a fixed stare
on the bright lights of ‘the monster [that] had now
taken everything from her’ (p. 383). Even in death,
her eyes remain wide open ‘filled with the vision
of the triumphant building’ (p. 383). Uncle Baudu is
left wandering alone in an abandoned shop. Whilst
emphasising the pain, misery and ultimate impotence
of the shopkeepers, Zola’s narrative sides with
Denise’s understanding. She is grievously sorry, she is
horrified. ‘My God! What tortures! Weeping families,
old men thrown out into the street, all the poignant
dramas associated with ruin!’ (p. 375). However, she
sides with Mouret and his store, sensing in him a man
with a vision who is ‘merely carrying out the task of
his epoch’ (p. 375):
It was impossible to keep one’s dead, after all, they
must be buried; and with a gesture he swept away
and threw into paupers’ grave the corpse of old-
fashioned business, the greenish stinking remains
of which were becoming the disgrace of the sunny
streets of modern Paris. (p. 375).
Three major sales—the Orient sale, the March Sale
and the White Sale—are spaced evenly throughout
the book at chapters 4, 9 and 14 respectively. Zola
uses each sale to focus on his central concerns of
every aspect of modern commerce. Each sale enacts
a literary simulation of the visual overload and giddy
confusion faced by the female shoppers. Zola’s writing
here is at its most dense. The oriental theme of the
first sale is described in such exhaustive detail that
the reader becomes, literally, disoriented, unable
to keep up with the litany of names, objects, places,
designs, colours, arrangements. Furthermore, the
theme of the ‘exotic orient’, and what Edward Said
later termed ‘Orientalism’, metaphorically embodies
Mouret’s own stratagems to allure women, to conquer
women, with hints of the forbidden, the illicit and
the well-known adage that ‘sex sells’. Mouret, along
with his creations and products from the Levant, is
‘seduction personified’ (p. 376):
First of all, the ceiling was covered with carpets
from Smyrna, their complicated designs standing
out on red backgrounds. Then, on all four sides,
were hung door-curtains; door-curtains from
Kerman and Syria, striped with green, yellow, and
vermillion; door-curtains from Diarbekir, of a
commoner type, rough to the touch, like shepherds’
cloaks; and still more carpets which could be
used as hangings, long carpets from Ispahan,
Teeran and Kermanshah, broader carpets from
Schoumaka and Madras, a strange blossoming of
peonies and palms, imagination running riot in a
dream garden. (p. 87).
The layering effect of Zola’s writing is later
paired with Mouret’s own strategy of deliberately
disorienting and frustrating his shopper in what may
be the first published account of the Gruen effect.
In preparation for his March Sale, Mouret suddenly
realises that the layout of his store is too logical and
forces his staff into a drastic last-minute redesign:
Listen, Bourdoncle, this is what will happen …
First, this continual circulation of customers
scatters them all over the place, multiplies them,
and makes them lose their heads; secondly, as they
have to be conducted from one end of the shop to
the other—for example, if they want a lining after
having bought a dress—these journeys in every
direction triple, as they see it, the size of the shop;
thirdly, they’re forced to go through departments
where they’d never have set foot, temptations
present themselves as they pass …’ (p. 237).
And it is all as Mouret predicts; the group of
bourgeois women who are introduced as Mouret’s
customers and objects of prey do indeed ‘lose their
heads.’ Madame Marty, who has come in intending
only to buy a piece of braid (or shoelace according to
some translations), ends up buying well beyond her
means and finishes her expedition with ‘the dilated
eyes of a sick woman … unhinged by the neurosis
caused by big shops’ (p. 267). However Madame
Marty has already been introduced to readers as
a shopaholic who keeps her teacher husband in
near poverty and eventually drives him mad. More
impressive is the ‘fall’ of Madame Bourdelais who
is known for her sensible ways and her devotion to
economy. But in the March sale she is finally caught
in the buying frenzy, trapped by Mouret’s appeal to
mother love. ‘I’m furious. They get at you through
your children now!’ (p. 262).
The consumer traps of the fantasy world evoked by
department store sales sets up ‘an insatiable interplay
between desire and deprivation’ (Bowlby 2009, &
2001, p. 34). In such a scheme, fulfillment is fleeting,

briefly obtained in a purchase, a swift rush of blood
to the head. Madame de Boves’ inability to purchase
because her husband denies her money, fuels her
angry bouts of kleptomania that are sub-textually
expressed in terms of sexual frustration. Zola uses
Madame de Boves to suggest that kleptomania is a
kind of biological inevitability. Naturally prone to
weakness and unable to curb their desires, women
will yield to temptation, and those without the means
to buy will steal. Mouret’s view, which appears to be
paired with Zola at this point, is that in conquering
women he makes them succumb to their weak
natures. Shoplifting is inevitable in the paradigm of
desire and consumption in the modern department
store.
The final ‘white sale’ is written with the same layering
effect which details the profusion of described items
of the previous two sales. Leading to the novel’s
conclusion, there is an interesting paradox in the
connotations of whiteness explored throughout
this last chapter. White here is ‘evocative both of
the tabernacle and of the bedroom’ (p. 398), ‘the
voluptuous white of Woman’ and ‘the guileless white
of children’ (p. 410). The white theme foreshadows
Mouret’s offer of marriage to Denise. Denise is now
in her full power, her repeated rejections of Mouret’s
advances may have looked like the cunning of the
‘slyest prostitute’ (p. 331) but were, Zola carefully
points out, innocently intended: ‘If these were skilful
tactics, she was not aware of it, and she would
ask herself in despair what she could do to avoid
giving the impression that she was trying to catch a
husband.’ (p. 401). Denise is pure-hearted, and a true
virgin bride. The entire department store is abuzz
with the drama of Mouret’s frustrated courtship of
Denise and bets are being placed for and against the
marriage. Meanwhile, as Denise traverses the store,
all ‘fell back while [she] passed by’ (p. 412), and the
profusion of the ‘hymn of praise to white’ (p. 398),
this ‘dazzling whiteness of a paradise’, evokes a scene
‘where the marriage of the unknown queen was being
solemnized’ (p. 426). This, of course, is the reign of
Denise, her victory and reward for her moral purity.
Her innocence and sexual naivety are symbolised in
the motif of whiteness as purity.
However, in this same chapter Zola uses whiteness
to evoke sexual excitement, dishevelment and
violation, and all this is paired with connotations of
violence. Once again, the mannequin, the fantastical
parody of the female form, is used to symbolise this
violence. The white silk corsets on display are on ‘an
army of mannequins without heads or legs, nothing
but torsos lined up, their dolls’ breasts flattened
2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES 11
under the silk; they had the disturbing lewdness of
the disabled’ (p. 409). The association of whiteness
with underclothes, undressing and (female) flesh is
made explicit where ‘the luxury déshabillé began, a
déshabillé strewn across the vast galleries, as if an
army of pretty girls had undressed as they went from
department to department, down to their satiny skin’
(p. 409). The undergarments are described in detail,
from white cuffs and scarves to petticoats, chemises
and bloomers, all heaped together to suggest ‘the
voluptuous white of Woman’ (p. 410).
In this final sale we find the most extreme forms
of consumer desire. Overwrought desire for objects
is likened to sexual promiscuity and even sexual
deviancy. Seduced by the finery, Zola portrays his
female shoppers as willing victims who leave the sale
‘with the secret shame of having yielded to temptation
in the depths of some sleazy hotel’ (p. 427). Mouret’s
final conquest is the discovery of Madame de
Boves’ thievery, which has escalated over time. But
this debasement of the aristocrat—a symbolic
representation of Mouret’s victorious and remorseless
entrepreneurship which relies on ‘conquering’
women—is also paired in his mind with his final
capitulation to Denise, ‘the woman who would come
to avenge the others’ (p. 327).
Possible uses in the classroom for
Unit 3: Form and transformation
Area of Study 1:
Adaptations and transformations
The 1929 film Au Bonheur des dames (directed by
Julien Duvivier) is a significant early silent film
version of The Ladies’ Paradise. Some excerpts from
this film can be found on YouTube, and may be of
interest to students and teachers discussing how the
form of a text influences meaning. Whilst modern
audiences may find the aesthetics, and particularly
the melodrama of this version off-putting, it remains
consistent with the original text. The film particularly
focuses on the bustle of crowds, the dominance
of industrial change, and on the vast scale of the
operation (something that is completely lost in the
most recent iteration in the BBC’s television series,
The Paradise). It places the events of the novel in an
early twentieth century context, exploring aspects of
modernity and commerce of the era. In the opening
sequence, we see the saturating advertisement
strategies employed by the store; in one instance
a plane litters the streets with advertising pamphlets
to the delight of the recently arrived Denise.
 12 2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES
The Paradise (BBC 2012) is probably going to garner
more interest from teachers and students alike.
The series transfers the location from Paris to an
unspecified town in northern England; while this
decision may seem merely expedient given the target
audience, there is evidence to suggest that Britain’s
first department store—Bainbridge’s—opened in
Newcastle on Tyne in the mid-nineteenth century.
However, from the outset it must be noted that this
version takes drastic liberties with the original text,
transforming the department store into the kind of
‘phalansterian’ ideal that is simply not evidenced in
the original text, albeit hinted at in the marriage of
Denise and Mouret. There are no summary dismissals
of staff in this version; staff are not the dehumanised
‘cogs’ in the wheels of the enterprise—all are one
great happy family, albeit slightly dysfunctional.
Denise is not sacked, but voluntarily leaves after
declaring her love for Mouret; she sets forth to
rally the shopkeepers opposite into some state of
competition against her former employer. Mouret
himself is not the ladies’ man from the novel who
invites shop-girls to his bedroom on whim. In this
version, Mouret is allowed one night of ‘weakness’
with Clara, whilst still acutely grieving for the loss of
his wife. Clara is transformed from ‘store whore’ to
heroic single mother, her gruff exterior hiding a heart
of gold. The series itself is unable, or uninterested, to
represent the store as a vast enterprise. The sets are
simply too small, and the shoppers too few. Crowds,
and the swarming of crowds—so central to Zola’s
creation—simply don’t exist. Perhaps the only true
remnant remaining from the original is the overriding
interest in consumerism as desire, and even, at times,
as neurosis. Episode Two introduces a character,
Mrs Brookmire, who smothers the pain of her recent
separation from her husband with erratic shopping
sprees. Episode Five introduces a ‘Ladies after Dark’
sale to sell lingerie in an enticing, exotic and exclusive
manner to ladies of fashion.
Suggestions for assessing Outcome 1
The following suggestions allow students to complete
an assessment task within manageable conditions.
These suggestions relate only to The Paradise, the
BBC (2012) adaptation.
1. Compare the representation of a character in the
novel with the corresponding character in the
television series.
Such a response should consider: the role the
character plays in each text; the background
information that is given, implied or withheld
in each; the impact that contemporary social
expectations have on interpretation. Of particular
interest is the more sympathetic view of Clara, the
pseudo-feminist presentation of Denise, and the
more ‘female friendly’ and democratic rendition
of Mouret.
2. Consider some aspect of the novel that is so
significantly changed in the film version that the
impact is to change the meaning.
As mentioned above, the BBC adaptation does not
convey some important aspects of Zola’s novel:
the behaviour of crowds and the sheer size of the
store and the de-individuation of the workers.
The Paradise is merely on a family scale; every
staff member is known to management, and their
personal lives are of deep consideration when
decisions are made.
3. Consider the role of consumption and desire
in both texts.
As discussed, the BBC adaptation remains true
to the adage that ‘sex sells’, and is able to convey
this in a multitude of ways. There is, firstly, the
seductive detail of costuming and set design;
the almost instant chemistry between Mouret
and Denise; the several enticements designed
to lure shoppers. In Zola’s novel, much of this
sexual charge becomes heightened in frenzied
crowd scenes during sales; something that is not
evidenced in the television series.
Area of Study 2:
Creative responses to texts
Teaching ideas
Before creatively responding to it, students need to
understand the point of view, context and form of
Zola’s novel, and how the ideas, characters, situations
and language (which, of course, is translated from
the French) convey his central thematic concerns.
Written in close third person, the force of the gaze
roaming the store is a predominant feature of the
text, and Zola will often embody this gaze in one
character. Mouret and Denise are frequently used
as the roaming eye, but so too are a number of the
female shoppers. The spatial dimensions of the store
are almost always constructed from a particular point
of view. Zola’s use of forceful imagery and symbolism
should also be impressed upon students. Imagery of
light and space are used repeatedly in the depiction of
the Ladies’ Paradise, where images of darkness, decay
and cramp are used to describe the small shopkeepers.
This imagery frequently pairs the store with life
and progress, and the small traders with death and
regression. Other symbols represent the violence of
Mouret’s intention in his project to ‘conquer women’—
particularly the figure of the mannequin.
 2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES 13

Teachers will also draw attention to Zola’s layering and Suggestions for assessing Outcome 2
enumeration technique to describe the overwhelming
The following suggestions allow students to complete
profusion of consumable items, particularly at play
an assessment task within a manageable timeframe.
during one of the sales. A further point of interest for
The suggested word length for written responses is
students is Zola’s tone of amorality. Finally, if students
1000-1500 words. The reflective commentary, worth
create a text within the same historical timeframe,
20% of the marks for this Area of Study, enables
historical accuracy and appropriate vocabulary could
students to comment on the connections between the
be an interesting challenge.
original text and their response. Oral presentation of
Students could go to a department store and write the commentary is highly recommended as a way of
down as many objects as possible, noting details such fulfilling the oral component of the Study Design.
as colour, texture, brand, placement of the items.
1. Create an original piece of writing, presented in
They could brainstorm symbols and motifs and their a manner consistent with the style and context of
connotation in the text: Zola’s novel. (Students could use their observations
of consumer culture, perhaps in its current online
Symbol- Connotation Quote from the text
context, to create a piece of journalistic prose, or
Motif
a short story, after the style of Zola.)
‘Woman’ Both positive ‘He was resisting
2. Reframe/modify/extend a character, and work the
and negative: the irresistible
character into a selected scene from the novel. (For
the ‘eternal logic of facts; he
example, the unsympathetic portrayal of Clara,
feminine’ who would rather have
especially for those who have seen the far more
will ‘have her died than give in,
positive rendition in the BBC series, might prompt
revenge’. Denise overcome with
students to rewrite a scene that casts this character
as saviour of sudden bouts of
in a more positive light. In a similar vein, students
both Mouret rage against Denise,
might want to consider the character of Octave
and the store. sensing that she
Mouret in the predatory fashion that is given over
On the other was the revenge,
to the store walker Jouve.)
hand, woman and that, on the day
is the victim, he married her, he 3. Create an additional scene or add to an existing
the neurotic would be broken one. (A potential scene, never shown but only
shopper who like a straw by the alluded to in the novel, could be a confrontation
falls willingly Eternal Feminine.’ between one of the small shopkeepers—Bourras,
into the snares (p. 402) or Baudu or a made-up character—and Octave
of the store. Mouret. Other potential scenes include a further
‘Women pale with exploration of the Ladies’ Paradise by Denise or
desire were leaning another worker when the store is closed. Students
over as if to look at could also create an additional Sale day with an
themselves.’ (p. 104) original theme.)
‘By now Madame 4. Recast an aspect or scene using first person
Marty had the narration. (Rewriting a key scene using first
animated, nervous person enables fresh insight into the character and
face of a child that their perspective. Denise’s arrival in Paris at the
has drunk undiluted beginning of Chapter One, or her extreme poverty
wine.’ (p. 267) as explored in Chapter Seven, are possible scenes
Money of interest.)
Silk 5. Write from the store’s perspective using close
third person or first person. (Given that the Ladies’
Innocence
Paradise is the titular hero of the novel it would
Paradise be an interesting but challenging project to write
Cogs from the store’s point of view. The store could be
‘Ernestine’ characterised in various ways but a perhaps a more
obvious one is casting the store as an amoral entity.
Godlike, the store watches over the behaviour of its
customers and the fall of its rivals.)
 14 2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES
Possible uses in the classroom for
Unit 4: Interpreting texts
Area of Study 1:
Literary perspectives
This section will outline three major perspectives
through which to examine views and values in
The Ladies’ Paradise. However, it must be stressed
that some very rich critical material really defies a
literary perspectives ‘brand’—Walter Benjamin’s work,
specifically, The Arcades Project is one case in point
and will be considered separately.
Marxist perspective
Zola’s study of the new age of capital provides
an excellent opportunity for students to explore
and engage in a classic Marxist perspective. The
salespeople of the Ladies’ Paradise exemplify the
Marxist notion of ‘alienation’ within capitalist modes
of production; alienation from self, from the products
they sell, and from the means of production itself.
Alienation from self and from fellow workers
While we know that characters such as Hutin and
Favier have their own lives, dreams and hopes, all
of this is subsumed by and subordinate to, and
ultimately consumed by, the demands of their work.
In a state of alienation the workers lose the ability
to determine their life and destiny; even the private
space of their own consciousness is assailed to a
large degree, as their lives and work become dictated
by the store, and ultimately, the bourgeois class
they work for, represented by Mouret. Hutin’s life
goal, for example, has been whittled down to his
ambition to oust his immediate boss, Robineau, and
take his place. The system of commissions also pits
worker against worker, so that while some minimal
camaraderie exists, in the end all are against all.
Radically separated as the workers are, capitalism
is the beneficiary. There is no risk of a rise in class
consciousness here. As previously mentioned, Zola
often refers to the workers as ‘cogs’ in the ‘machine’
of the store. This metaphor is precisely honed to
underscore the dehumanisation of the workers; when
the machine is idle the ‘cog’ can be discarded without
any thought: ‘When the factories lay idle, the workers
were deprived of their daily bread; and this took place
with the unfeeling motion of a machine—the useless
cog was calmly thrown aside, like an iron wheel to
which no gratitude is shown for services rendered.’
(p. 154).
Alienation from the product and the act
of production
The small artisans and shop-keepers whose
businesses will eventually fail are poignant examples
of the previous era of the ‘cottage industry’ in which a
worker had control over both the product and the act
of production. Bourras’ is a case in point:
He had the pride of an artist; there was not a
workman in Paris capable of making a handle like
his, both light and strong. Above all he carved
the knobs with delightful inventiveness, always
finding fresh subjects, flowers, fruit, animals,
heads, executed in a lifelike but distinctive style. A
penknife was all he needed, and he could be seen
for whole days at a stretch, his spectacles on the
end of his nose, carving pieces of boxwood or
ebony. (pp. 187–188).
But across the road at the Ladies’ Paradise, the
products for sale and how they are produced are not
determined by those workers who make them, nor
even by the consumers who buy them, but rather by
the capitalist class who create the products en masse.
The products’ relative cheapness and functionality
will actually help to shape the taste of the consumer.
The Paradise’s line of cheap silk, the ‘Paris-Paradise’
for example, is mass-produced and sold at the finest
margin, which scarcely covers the purchase price.
Later, in a bidding war with Robineau, who boldly sets
up his own drapery business after being fired from
the store, the silk will go below cost price. Mouret
explains his thinking to Bourdoncle:
We’ll lose a few centimes on these goods, I’ll grant
you. But so what? … The main thing, my dear
fellow, is to excite their interest, and for that you
must have an article that delights them—which
causes a sensation … I want the Paris-Paradise to
revolutionize the market in a week. It’s our master-
stroke, it’s what’s going to save us and make our
name. People won’t talk about anything else, the
blue and silver selvage will be known from one
end of France to the other … (pp. 39–40).
The workers at the Paradise, alongside the
(unmentioned) factory hands at the silk factories, have
no control or interest in this product. Labour has been
transformed from the personalised, affirming activity
as described in Bourras’ work, to that of a commodity
that has exchange value (wages). Low wages and mass
production ultimately benefit the consumer and the
capitalist. Workers are driven by wage compulsion—
work is a matter of survival, and a worker can only
reject this compulsion, which amounts to forced

labour—at the expense of their life and family. We see
this in Denise’s miserable first months of work in the
department store where she suffers both the physical
martyrdom of the heavy, wearing demands of the job
as well as the privation of starvation wages which
barely sustain her and her two brothers. Denise’s
misery, described throughout Chapter Five, neatly
coincides with Marx’s observations:
First, the fact that labour is external to the worker,
i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature;
that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm
himself but denies himself, does not feel content
but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical
and mental energy but mortifies his body and
ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels
himself outside his work, and in his work feels
outside himself … His labour is therefore not
voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is
therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely
a means to satisfy needs external to it … External
labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is
a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly,
the external character of labour for the worker
appears in the fact that it is not his own, but
someone else’s, that it does not belong to him,
that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another.
Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of
the human imagination, of the human brain and
the human heart, operates on the individual
independently of him—that is, operates as an alien,
divine or diabolical activity—so is the worker’s
activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to
another; it is the loss of his self. (Marx 1844, p. 30).
Exchange value, use value and commodification
Several critics, including Vinken, Hennessy and
Bowlby have centred part of their considerations of
the text on general Marxist theories of capitalism.
Bowlby, for example, notes that the novel tracks
the ‘process of commodification, whereby more and
more goods, of more and more types, [are] offered
for sale, [and this] marks the ascendancy of exchange
value over use value’ (Bowlby 1985, p. 2). The store’s
marketing of its ‘Paris-Paradise’ silk again provides an
apt example. The function of the silk itself, its actual
purpose or use value as a means to make a dress for
example, is no longer important. The Paris-Paradise
silk has become a commodity, a desirable and even
fetishised object. Its ‘exchange value’ is now not
relative to other products or a monetary equivalent;
its exchange value becomes bound up in the
consumer’s sense of self. As Hennessy remarks:
2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES 15
Zola shows us how value is based on sale-ability,
not practicality. Madame Marty, compulsive
shopper par excellence, exemplifies the pull of
nouveauté as value; she will buy anything unusual
or cute … Moreover, these pure commodities,
with no use value, are available to a larger portion
of society. La democratisation du luxe (due to
mass production techniques) insures that more
people are participating in what we know today
as conspicuous consumption, at the same time
perpetuating the commodification of merchandise
… In a slightly different bent, the popularity of
name brands today reflects the prevalence of
exchange value. The acquisition of name-brand
merchandise reinforces the consumer's desired
self-image, while the actual usefulness of the
product in comparison to generic brands carries
little weight. (Hennessy 2008, p. 704).
In explaining the Marxist perspective, teachers
should explain that while the text certainly invites a
Marxist reading, it refuses the logic of this reading
in condemning or damning capitalism. As previously
discussed, Zola acknowledges the damage and
dislocation caused by new capitalism but also
celebrates its triumph.
Feminist perspective
One obvious motif of the text is the biological
determinism associated with women and shopping.
Vinken writes extensively about this. Mouret’s
mission, the conquering of Woman, is seen as
inevitable, linked to innate feminine weakness.
Prone to nervousness and hysteria, women are the
perfect targets of manipulation, and even while
attacked directly by Mouret’s various ‘snares’, they
are nevertheless judged for their entrapment.
Woman’s role as consumer also, ironically, entails her
consumption, her near destruction. Here Zola may
also be issuing a warning about the unsustainable
nature of unchecked capitalism, where consumerism
ends up consuming itself.
How will capitalism escape its own cannibalisation?
The ‘solution’ of course is Denise. From the very
first chapter the text foreshadows the one woman
who will ‘avenge them all’, echoed throughout by
Bourdoncle, Baron Hartmann, and Mouret himself.
Denise represents the power of the ‘Eternal Feminine’
(p. 402)—a pure, virginal child-mother who will save
Mouret, and redeem capitalism from itself.
 16 2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES
Feminist considerations of Denise ultimately turn to
the well-known binary, Madonna/Whore.2 Zola sets
up his female protagonist in stereotypical fashion, by
extolling her virtue, her goodness, her nobility, her
innocence and her generosity. One of the attractions
for Mouret is that she is probably the first woman to
refuse him. Many other salesgirls—notably Clara—
who’ve ‘caught their employer’s eye’ (p. 271) and
accepted his attentions are treated with scorn.
Denise is no Eve, who would have seduced
and ruined (Mouret), but a saving Mary. She is
represented as a pieta figure, with her sleeping
brother in her lap. In the middle of a whirl of
children she finds herself rejuvenated. Denise,
alone of her sex, is not part of the female world,
but stands in determined negation to this world.
Miraculously, she is exempt from the corruption
of femininity. (Vinken, p. 261)
However, although exempt at least from the negative
of the Woman binary, Denise can only function in the
text as a saint-like figure because of this binary. In order
to understand her exceptional character, and also her
ultimate role as a saviour redeemer, we must be exposed
time and again to the conquered woman; the caprice
and immoral desire of the female shopper and the fate or
potential fates of fallen women like Clara. Denise could
not exist as a singularity without the novel’s constant
parade of feminine vices and temptations.
It is also Denise’s role to humanise the store, creating
in her union with Mouret, the future ‘phalanstrian’
ideal of community where the needs of the workers
are considered. However, as Nelson amongst
others points out, Denise does not break out of any
capitalist-patriarchal model but rather works within
it; works within it moreover, as the ‘angel of the house’
(or enterprise) and the preservation and idealisation
of the bourgeois family ideal:
At the beginning, the store is seen as a threat to
the family, that is, to the small family business
represented by the Baudus … but in the end the
family is restored, so to speak, in a form better
adapted to the new capitalism—in the form of
Octave and Denise, the capitalist and worker united
as man and wife, watching paternally over their
huge, happy family of employees. (Nelson, pxxii)
The extent to which The Ladies’ Paradise reinforces
patriarchal values is a rich area for teachers and
students to explore.
2
See Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police for an early second wave feminist examination of this topic. Arrow (2015) is useful
for introducing this concept to students.

3
The Arcades Project was written between 1927 and 1940 and it became increasingly ambitious in scope. Rather than a complete work
the ‘project’ is comprised of a series of essays and fragments in no particular order, so that its current composition and editing has been
the subject of scholarly dispute. Benjamin committed suicide after fleeing German-occupied Paris in 1940 and did not live to see the
publication of his work.
The Arcades Project
Walter Benjamin’s unfinished The Arcades Project3
provides a fascinating observation into the nature
of the modern urban landscape in the age of mass
production. Benjamin’s project canvassed the
nineteenth-century aesthetic interest in the crowds
that populate the new Paris—particularly the modern
arcades which were erected in the Haussmann era.
Benjamin does not cite Zola, somewhat surprisingly,
but his focus on the representation of urban crowds
in the work of writers such as Baudelaire and Hugo,
and in impressionist painting, is definitely along the
lines of Zola’s own focus. The Arcades Project, much
like The Ladies’ Paradise, attempts to both represent
and critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-
century history. In representing bustling, cluttered
arcades, Benjamin saw historical time broken up
into a kaleidoscope of distractions, with one’s gaze
constantly drawn to displays of shopfronts, of people,
or even of the reflected self in shopfront windows.
Nicholas Rennie provides a detailed overview of Zola’s
representation of crowds in the context of Benjamin:
The novel foregrounds the correspondence
between the flow of commodities and crowds.
When Denise comes to the Bonheur to seek
employment, she at first gazes in bewilderment
not at the displays of clothing and fabrics, but at
the similarly endless stream of personnel who
hurry through the entrance to their work: ‘La
plupart filaient seuls et s'engouffraient au fond du
magasin, sans adresser ni une parole ni même un
regard à leurs collègues, qui allongeaient le pas
autour d'eux ...’ [‘Most filed in alone, swallowed up
in the inner recesses of the shop without so much
as a word or glance for the colleagues who hurried
beside them …’ p. 30]. The description recalls a
passage that Benjamin cites from Engels, in which
Engels records his impression of the crowds in
London: ‘… sie [rennen] an einander voruber, als
ob sie gar Nichts gemein, gar Nichts mit einander
zu thun hàtten … und doch fâllt es Keinem ein,
die Andern auch nur eines Blickes zu wûrdigen’
[‘… they run past each other as though they had
nothing at all in common, nothing at all to do
with one another … yet it occurs to no one even to
bestow a glance on the others’] (Rennie, p. 402).

Benjamin’s work places particular emphasis on the
role of the ‘spectacle’—the overwhelming displays of
the arcades, the profusion of glass and the reflections
provided by shop windows, the parades of people—in
relation to one’s subjectivity. He is also interested in
the possibility of the fragmentation of the individual
when confronted with scenes of spectacle, repetition
and commodification. Rennie discusses the effect of
repetition in Zola’s novel, referring to the opening
chapter where Denise gazes at the headless dummies
in the store window which are duplicated by mirrors:
The decapitated figures multiplied and reflected
into the street that they thereby come to ‘populate.’
The women clients lured into the Bonheur
will likewise ‘lose their heads’ … succumbing
to the ‘névrose nouvelle’ [‘new neurosis’] of
shopping (and shoplifting) and duplicating the
effect of so many commodified bodies filling
streets and interiors alike. Threatening to turn
individual characters into virtual images endlessly
reproduced … (Rennie 1996, p. 402).
The loss of individual agency of the female shoppers,
and the refracted representations of women in the
dummies, the silk and other objects of consumption
is obviously central to the novel. Some of the central
insights of The Arcades Project will provide students
with a perspective to investigate these themes on a
deeper level.
Suggestions for assessing Outcome 1
Teachers set a task which provides students with the
opportunity to articulate their own interpretation of
the text in relation to two other literary perspectives.
1. The lives of the characters in The Ladies’ Paradise
are shaped by changes in advertising, commerce
and consumerism. Discuss.
2. The success of the department store is seen
in Zola’s novel to come at a cost. Discuss.
3. ‘Mouret was still looking down at his nation
of women.’ Does Zola in The Ladies’ Paradise
endorse or challenge male and female stereotypes?
4. Reflect on the idea that The Ladies’ Paradise
presents the success of capitalism as monstrous,
yet also as inevitable.
5. ‘[T]hey forgot their modesty, won over by his
seductive charm; whereas he, brutally triumphant
... appeared like some despotic king of fashion.’
Consider the proposition that The Ladies’ Paradise
is as much about the characters’ susceptibility to
collective consumerism as it is a critique of ideas
about conquest.
2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES 17
6. Discuss the proposition that Zola, through his
depiction of the Ladies’ Paradise, explores the
relationship between shopping and seduction.
7. Consider the proposition that the lives of the
characters in Zola’s novel are, despite the new
social and economic conditions, still defined by
class and gender.
9. ‘It's wonderful, this display, isn't it? It's like
a dream …’ Zola explores the nature of crowd
behaviour and the role of 'the spectacle' in
exploiting people's desires. Discuss.
Area of Study 2:
Close analysis
Students should be familiar with Zola’s writing style,
his use of symbols and motifs, and the themes and
elements of the text, including themes of capitalism,
consumer culture, spectacle, desire, historical
inevitability. Ideally, students will come to this Area
of Study with personal opinions regarding certain
aspects of the text.
Teaching ideas
• Students create their own sets of three passages
for close analysis. These can be presented in class
discussion. Why did the student select these three
passages? What sorts of ideas, in relation to the
characters, themes and writing style, do these
passages prompt us to reflect upon? (Not only
does this prepare students to think critically about
passages presented to them, it also generates a class
resource for practising close analysis, either for in-
class assessment or exam preparation.)
• A reversal of the above idea. The teacher selects a
major theme or concern of the text, for example,
consumerism, alienation or gender. Students then
find three passages which draw on these concerns.
• Teacher provides samples of essay responses
to this passage analysis task; students use the
assessment criteria or their own variation of the
criteria to mark the essays and provide verbal or
written feedback.
• Students submit a passage analysis essay to Google
forms (this can be anonymous if required). Once
each student has submitted, the teacher distributes
the assessment rubric and students mark and
comment on each peer essay.
 18 2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES
Suggestions for assessing Outcome 2
As always, students should prepare for this task (and
the exam) only after several readings.
Use two or more of the passages as a basis for a
discussion of Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise.
Passages for close analysis
Group 1
‘But as she turned into the street, Denise was struck
again … huge price tags where their heads should have
been.’ (pp. 5–6)
‘Mouret glanced towards the dining room … You know,
they’ll have their revenge.’ (pp. 76–77)
‘Meanwhile, beneath this coldness … broken like a
straw by the Eternal Feminine.’ (p. 402)
Group 2
‘Denise was in such danger, in the midst … she had
began to despair of ever winning it over.’ (p. 155)
‘After a painful silence it was Mouret himself … her
heart full of confusion.’ (pp. 374–375)
‘Deeply moved by the terrible sadness of the old place
… All your needs will be provided for.’ (p. 385)
Group 3
‘Mouret’s commercial genius … was describing a
costume she’d seen at a ball.’ (p. 73)
‘The crowd had reached the silk department … desire
to throw themselves into it and be lost.’ (pp. 103–104)
‘People were beginning to leave … like a cattle from
which he had extracted his fortune.’ (pp. 427–428)

References
Arrow, M 2015, ‘Damned Whores and God’s Police is
still relevant to Australia 40 years on – more’s the pity’,
The Conversation, 21 September, 2015.
Bowlby, R 2009, Just Looking (Routledge Revivals):
Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola,
Routledge.
Bowlby, R 2001, Carried Away: The Invention of
Modern Shopping, Columbia UP, New York.
Cullen, N 2009, blog, <https://puesoccurrences.
wordpress.com/2009/12/15/worshipping-
at-the-%E2%80%98cathedral-of-modern-
commerce%E2%80%99-going-shopping-in-the-
nineteenth-century/>
Hennessy, S 2008, ‘Consumption and Desire in
Au Bonheur des Dames’, The French Review, Vol. 81,
No. 4 (March 2008), pp. 696–706.
Marx, K 1844, ‘Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844’, trans. Milligan, First Manuscript,
p. 30, <www.marxists.org>
Miller, M 2013, review, ‘The Birth of the Department
Store: Émile Zola’s Au bonheur des dames and BBC’s
The Paradise miniseries’, <https://h-france.net/fffh/
classics/2329/>
PopSugar Fashion, YouTube, 1 October 2013, ‘Le Bon
Marche Tour: Inside the Birthplace of Shopping
/ Fashion Week Spring 2014’, department store
virtual tour.
Ramazani, V 2007, ‘Gender, War, and the Department
Store: Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames’, SubStance,
Vol. 36, No. 2, Issue 113, pp. 126–146 Published by:
The Johns Hopkins University Press.
2020 LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES 19
Rennie, N 1996, ‘Benjamin and Zola: Narrative, the
Individual, and Crowds in an Age of Mass Production’,
Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4 (1996),
pp. 396–413 Published by: Penn State University Press
Rocha, E, Frid, M, Corbo, W 2014, ‘Business and
Magic: Emile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames and
Modern Consumption’, ANO, vol. 11, no. 32, pp. 51–71.
Schor, N 1985, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory,
and French Realist Fiction, Columbia UP, New York.
Vinken, B 1995, ‘Temples of Delight: Consuming
Consumption in Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des dames’
from Spectacles of Realism; Gender, Body, Genre,
Ed. Cohen M and Prendergast C, University of
Minnesota Press.
Walker, D 2011, Cultures of Consumption in Modern
French Literature, Liverpool UP.
Williams, R 1982, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption
in Late Nineteenth-Century France, University of
California Press, Berkeley.
Wilson, S 2012, ‘Nana, Prostitution and the Textual
Foundations of Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames’,
Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 41, No. 1/2
(FALL WINTER 2012—2013), pp. 91–104 Published by:
University of Nebraska Press
Zola, E 2008, The Ladies Paradise, trans. Brian Nelson,
Oxford World Classics, Oxford.
The Ladies’ Paradise
by Émile Zola
(trans. Brian Nelson)

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