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In the network of employees and employers in the emerging institution of the Parisian department store, men and women depended on each other for survival in the workplace. Such interdependence is a microcosm of the bourgeois French society during that time, which Emile Zola wrote of in The Ladies’ Paradise, the eleventh book of the Rougon-Macquart series detailing middle-class life. According to Professor Brian Nelson, “The department store in The Ladies’ Paradise is a symbol of capitalism, the experience of the city, and the bourgeois family” (Zola x). Through his usage of characterization, Zola uses the development of the Parisian department store as a microcosm of the economical and societal changes taking place in the larger bourgeois culture of France. In Zola’s book as in life, female characters tipped the balance scale of power in their own direction, robbing men of the power they had previously used to manipulate women to their advantage. The department store began as an expansion of the small family- owned draper’s shop but soon grew to be a capitalist power in the French economy. By the twentieth century, in order for to be considered a department store, an establishment needed to be “… organized by merchandise departments with administrative subdivisions corresponding to physical segregations of merchandise” as opposed to specializing in single commodities like the shops lining the streets of Paris in the early to mid-nineteenth century (Hower 68). Using this as a universal standard, Aristide Boucicaut created the first true department store in 1852, which soon “…boasted four departments, twelve employees, and a turnover of 450,000 francs a year” (Zola ix). Likewise, the owner of the fictional department store in The Ladies’ Paradise, Octave Mouret, builds his visions of a prosperous business. He inherits a small draper’s shop and, using his pecuniary power, buys more space to expand the shop. The end result is the Ladies’ Paradise, a gargantuan store enveloping all of the original small specialty shops, creating a retail monopoly in Paris. In order to generate astonishing revenue, Mouret’s Ladies’ Paradise employs techniques to create spontaneous desire by playing on customers’ sense of sight, which would help women, who make up the majority of department store customers, realize their independent desires for femininity. The first thing one sees when one walks into a brightly lit department store is the displays. In an appeal to his customers’ sight, Mouret throws brightly colored scarves in heaping piles on a display in the front of the store. According to Elaine Abelson, “Subtlety was not an attribute of merchants in the late nineteenth century. If there was color used, it appeared in massive displays” (44). Such flamboyancy attracts women wishing to release their own creativity, suppressed by the male-dominated society. The lack of harmony in the displays portrays Mouret’s belief “…that customers should have sore eyes by the time they [leave] the shop” (Zola 44). Unbeknownst to the customer, Mouret has her under his control because the colors and disharmony exerts power on her consciousness and, ultimately, her purse. Not only does Mouret use his displays as a psychological attraction to women, the disorganization of related departments also indirectly appeals to sight. For example, Mouret purposely situates the store during a large sale so that the cloth department and the ladies’ wear department are on two opposite ends of the store. If a woman decides to buy a coat instead of the material for a coat, she is “…forced to go through departments where [she]’d never have set foot, temptations present themselves as [she] pass[es], and [she] succumb[s]” (237). Mouret’s innovative idea materialized in the nineteenth century and still survives today. As people walk through a department store, they see things that they would have never passed had the store not been organized in such a manner and will sometimes succumb to passing temptations. This creation of spontaneous desire condenses all shopping habits into a pure societal love for spending. When there is such a variety of methods to create desire, the actual desire created in the women also varies, ranging from psychologically healthy to torturously unhealthy. Zola captures each type of craving in one character, specifically in one of the upper middle-class women who regularly shop at the Ladies’ Paradise. First, Madame Bourdelais manifests the psychologically healthy type of desire, the love of shopping combined with thriftiness. In the words of Uwe Spiekermann, “Indeed, the woman was always attracted by the low prices and special offers which were the constant theme of advertisements. Thus, shopping in the department store seemed to be the sacred duty of a woman who was supposed to run her household as economically as possible” (Crossick 141). Mothers were the stereotypical bargain-hunters because of the need to save money for their children’s future. Contrary to a housewife’s thriftiness, Madame Desforges, an extremely refined middle-class woman, buys only house wares at the large stores “…because she dresse[s] with such extreme elegance” (79). Akin to today’s window-shoppers, Madame Desforges’ friend, Madame Guibal, walks the aisles of the Ladies’ Paradise without ever buying anything, “…happy and satisfied by merely feasting her eyes” (79). All three of these women are able to control their desires in the interest of money and finesse. On the other hand, Madame Marty, married to a teacher earning a low salary, successfully squanders her husband’s salary 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 women’s 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 store’s 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 Marty’s 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 person’s 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 psychological impulse to steal regardless of need, became an utterly new phenomenon in society prevalent in women, the general group who shopped at the department stores. Kleptomania first appeared to be harm to society that happens only when women are allowed to be independent, further supporting the old-fashioned belief that women needed male supervision. Most thieves, like the character Madame de Boves, possessed enough money to pay for what they stole, rendering the possibility of destitution leading to shoplifting moot. Psychologists attempted to explain shoplifting as a sign of restrained sexuality and femininity. Having been repressed for such a long time, women needed a way to let their innate instincts out. “[Viennese psychologist Wilhelm Steckel] thought that the root of all cases of kleptomania was frustrated sexuality. This could be easily demonstrated by looking at the choice of objects stolen. These were either sharp objects, like pencils or umbrellas, or things into which something could be inserted, such as stockings, gloves, rings or fur coats” (Crossick 149). The symbolism of the items being stolen proves that women needed a way to display their sense of sexuality. In such an ordeal, women must equate something tangible with feminine power, and Zola chooses material goods. The items the Ladies’ Paradise sells define female sexuality for the women shopping there. Mouret creates the notion that women could restore femininity by buying goods from his store and sadly, they accept it. In one specific example, Mouret holds a widely advertised white sale, when he drapes the store from ceiling to floor in white, the color that represents purity and virginity. Women flood his store, snapping up white items because white symbolizes the purity they once had. But material goods, especially clothes, were such inappropriate substitutes for purity. Beth Schelle observes, “Clothing is a poor substitute for freshness because after it is worn, it loses its newness, and the women must again empty their purses in the attempt to buy back their lost virginity” (4). Through this, Mouret throws the women into a vicious cycle of endless purchasing, flaunting his power over all women. Each character in The Ladies’ Paradise derives power from separate but related entities. Octave Mouret extracts power from the knowledge of what his customers want. He knows that they want to buy goods and merchandise at low prices, but he also knows that the root of that desire is the need to display their instinctual behaviors. He builds his department store accordingly, as a place that seems to cater to women, leading them into a false sense of power. “In the shops, Woman was queen, adulated and humoured in her weaknesses, surrounded with attentions, she reigned there as an amorous queen whose subjects trade on her, and who pays for every whim with a drop of her own blood” (77). The blood represents the money women spend at the department stores, but the total spent on commodities amounts to a great deal more than a drop. Zola makes it known that Mouret is out to manipulate women into using their own sense of power against themselves. A ruthless and calculating business tycoon, Mouret exploits the female desire without the slightest misgiving. “They all belonged to him, they were his property and he belonged to none of them. When he had extracted his fortune and his pleasure from them, he would throw them on the rubbish heap for those who could still make a living out of them” (77). Mouret’s calculated actions deceive all but one obstinate salesgirl, Denise Baudu. Denise, a plain and oft-ridiculed salesperson in the ladies’ wear department derives her power from her virginity. Her unwillingness to submit to Mouret’s cries of love gives her power over all of the workers in the department store. Contrary to the inherent human selfishness, Denise uses her power to improve working conditions for the workers, including maternity leave for pregnant women, more assistants to help with back-breaking work, etc. Her purity is the root of her power, but the benevolence that results from her initial power draws even more respect for her from her co-workers. She is the “revenge of Woman” against the department store’s attempts to manipulate women and reduce them down to mere francs and pieces of lace (Zola xvi). In a larger history, Denise is a representation of the small group of women in the late nineteenth century who rebelled against old-fashioned male domination. Her influence, like the power of unconventional women in the 1800s, is limited but serves as a foundation for independent women of the future. But still, there were masses of meek, submissive, and ignorant women who blindly followed along with tradition. They derived their aforementioned power from people like Mouret. For his circle of customers, he creates the sense of power through his store. According to Beth Schelle, “[The store] offers women what they most want, control over their own bodies” (7). This unfortunately backfires in Mouret’s face because the freedom of the women in the book poses challenges to the male power base. Mouret gives women what they want so that he can use them to his advantage, but they find other ways of using their newfound liberties. Lisa Tiersten agrees that “…the visibility of bourgeois housewives posed challenges to male authority” (Crossick 124). With the ability to decide for themselves and live independently, women attained the power, whether consciously or subconsciously, to take men into their wrathful clutches of revenge for their previous exploitation. Power in society is officially divided among class rankings, but the male- dominated Parisian society of the late nineteenth century began to crumble underneath the pressure applied by the changing attitudes of French women. Men opened the pathways to their own loss of power through the attempt to fully exploit feminine desires. Each character in The Ladies’ Paradise serves to show a facet of the metamorphosing Parisian society. As no worker can survive without interdependence, Mouret, Denise, and the Mademoiselles who shop at The Ladies’ Paradise could not have formed the powerful entrepreneurial revolution in society without each other. Bibliography: Abelson, Elaine S. When Ladies Go A-Thieving. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Crossick, Geoffrey, ed. Cathedrals of Consumption. Brookfield: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1999. "Emile Zola." Literary Lifelines. Danbury: Grolier Educational, 1998. 202-203. Hower, Ralph M. History of Macy's of New York. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1943. Lancaster, William. The Department Store: A Social History. New York: Leicester UP, 1995. Miller, Michael B. The Bon Marché. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981. Schelle, Beth. The Ladies' Paradise: Selling Women, Power, and Lace. Sweet Briar College. 13 Nov. 2001 . Zola, Emile. The Ladies' Paradise. Trans. Brian Nelson. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Word Count: 2269
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