to satisfy her ravenous desire. Her obsessive compulsiveness for shopping leads to familial destitution later in the book. Finally, the most destructive form of desire, both to the store and to the woman, is kleptomaniacal longing, found in Madame de Boves. She bear[s] a grudge against the goods she [cannot] take away, which she solves by simply slipping things into her coat sleeve (79). Between these five women, all very different but connected by the department store, Zola summarizes the gamut of womens desires. [The department store] is why women [shop] for the pure joy of it, and then torture themselves because they cannot have everything they want (Schelle 1).Logically, because they were unable to fully satisfy the desire generated by the stores new techniques of persuasion, customers in the Parisian department stores devised other ways to obtain material goods. Some, like Madame Marty, fell into the trap of buying too many unnecessary goods to restore their inhibited femininity. Zola portrays almost all of the women shoppers desire in his description of Madame Martys passion. She was known for her passion for spending, her inability to resist temptation, no sooner did she set her eyes on the slightest piece of finery than she would let herself go and the flesh was conquered (62). The over-consumption led to a boost in the French economy and a revelation of female behaviors but also a sharp decline in the quality of life of many families. Because of one persons love for spending money, an entire household would be swept into dire poverty. Sometimes, instead of buying merchandise, some women were inclined to steal the goods, justifying their crime by offering the observation that they were simply retrieving what was rightfully theirs. These women refused to involve their families in their extravagance but had to fulfill the overwhelming desire that surpassed the amount of money available to them. This is how kleptomania, a psycholog...
