55 pages • 1 hour read
Émile ZolaThe Ladies' Paradise
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1883A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Birth of Consumerism
The Ladies’ Paradise is set in Paris in the mid-1800s at the moment when the department store was becoming popular in Europe. The department store embodies a broader move toward a consumerist culture in which the acquisition of goods, particularly those not necessary for survival, became a means of demonstrating status. The customers at The Ladies’ Paradise spend money as a way of signaling their wealth and status to others. The department store gathers different types of shops under one roof. Whereas customers previously visited different stores to buy lace, silk, and other items, they can now purchase everything in one place. The department store is made possible by changes in the economy and production, as Mouret finances expansion through complex financial arrangements while he stocks the shelves with goods from a variety of manufacturers. He turns his store into a model of consumerism, making the necessity of shopping into a pastime in itself. Mouret understands that in an affluent society, the act of shopping is more important than whatever is being sold. He gives them the opportunity to make consumption glamorous, fun, and enviable.
Each of the large stores in Paris controls a swath of the city and, importantly, displaces the smaller businesses that were once there. The novel portrays the birth of consumerism and the death of the old system. Denise bears witness to this change. She intends to visit her uncle, whose family owns one of the smaller specialized stores that is being displaced by The Ladies’ Paradise. The Baudu family store is the product of many generations of hard work. Baudu inherited the store from his father-in-law, who inherited it from the generation before. These generations found success in selling their products to individual customers in a specialized manner. That age is dying, and Denise arrives just in time to see the final death throes before Paris transitions to a new era. The suffering of Baudu, Bourras, and the other small business owners provides a juxtaposition to the rise of consumerism. They are the past, quietly pushed aside in favor of consumerism.
Denise exists on the border of the old and new. She worked in one of the smaller stores and has an affinity for the small business owners whom she is related to and who employ and house her. Although she empathizes with their suffering, she deems it to be part of a necessary sacrifice. Denise, like Mouret, believes that consumerism represents the future. She mourns the deaths of Genevieve and Madame Baudu but refuses to turn away from The Ladies’ Paradise and the consumerism it represents. The department store is like an organism, producing cheap and convenient consumer goods but eating up the small businesses around it. Denise sees this organism as embodying a bright new future, which causes regrettable but necessary suffering on the way.
Changing Gender Roles
Gender is an important theme in The Ladies’ Paradise. Mouret built his empire by creating a store at which women want to shop. He believes he has the right to extract as much money from them as they want to spend. While he claims his store is “a temple to Woman” (77), he does not worship or revere women. Mouret enjoys a string of romantic affairs while refusing to commit himself emotionally to any woman. Mouret dedicates his life to pleasing women and flatters them endlessly, but only as a means of enriching himself. His flattery serves the purpose of extracting as much money or pleasure out of any given woman that he can.
The customers of The Ladies’ Paradise are almost entirely upper- and middle-class women. Working-class women cannot afford to shop there, while the men in the novel are uninterested in shopping. The store is built to appeal to women with money to spend, so the store functions as a mirror of their beliefs and values as well as of Mouret’s. He believes they are obsessed with finding a deal, so he lowers prices. He believes they are easily flattered, so he hires charming male sales assistants. He believes they are easily persuaded, so he designs the layout of the store in such a way that the women will become lost and will thus spend more money. Mouret views his customers as lacking the intelligence to know they are being patronized. Mouret’s supposed temple to the idea of woman embodies his understanding of his customers, and, to some extent, he is proved right. Madame Marty, in particular, is so enthralled by the store that she spends herself into ruin. Madame de Boves is so obsessed that she feels compelled to steal, risking her family’s reputation. Even Madame Desforges, who is more interested in Mouret than shopping, cannot stop herself from spending money in his store even when she is at war with him. Each franc spent in The Ladies’ Paradise is, in Mouret’s view, a vindication of his views.
Mouret’s ambitions are confounded, however, when he meets Denise. She defies everything he believes about women, showing herself to be a logical and shrewd businesswoman. Denise refuses to subject herself to Mouret. While he has many lovers, he rarely shows affection for the women in his life. The only woman who is afforded his empathy is his dead wife, whose portrait watches over the rise of his business from inside his office. Mouret sleeps with many women and, in doing so, treats them as though they are disposable. Denise refuses to become his lover and, in doing so, makes him even more obsessed with her. She repudiates his beliefs about women, and he finds her business acumen and modern sensibility highly attractive. The novel thus portrays a double change in gender roles. Women emerge as the leading consumers in a new age of material abundance and also as key marketers and advertisers to these same women.
Emerging Class Differences and Class Consciousness
The portrayal of Paris in the 1800s reveals important class differences. The Ladies’ Paradise brings together poor employees and wealthy shoppers, thrusting them into the same physical space and thereby illuminating the stark differences between the classes. Denise and her brothers are working class. They arrive in Paris as penniless orphans, and they are taken in by their equally destitute extended family. The Baudu family were once prosperous business owners, but those days are gone. They live in a gloomy hovel in the shadow of the store that put them out of business. The Ladies’ Paradise grows by destroying the smaller businesses that once thrived in the neighborhood. Mouret and his class (including the management and investors) enjoy the profits, while the working-class employees barely scrape by living in fear of being fired and not being able to pay their rent. The contrast between the classes is seen in the contrast between the employees and the customers and owners of the store and in the physical environment in which they work and live.
The novel portrays the tea parties at Madame Desforges’s house as illustrative of the upper-class lifestyle. There, women gather together to chat about their latest purchases while the men make business deals that will alter the futures of many people who are not present. In these luxurious settings, Mouret secures the funding for the expansion of his store, which will impoverish men like Baudu and Bourras, who would never be invited to such occasions. In contrast, the poor people eat in barely lit rooms, happy to treat themselves to a second serving of fruit for a special occasion. Looking from their dingy homes at the glowing exterior of The Ladies’ Paradise, they are conscious of their class differences.
The more time they spend together, however, the differences between the classes begin to dissolve. The more time the sales associates spend working in the store, the more they begin to mimic the aesthetics of the wealthier customers. They adopt the same makeup and clothing, performing the aesthetics of wealth while still scrimping to pay their rent. The intersection of class at The Ladies’ Paradise reminds the working-class salesgirls of their position, giving them the opportunity to study and mimic their customers but without the wealth that would change their class position.
Denise is conscious of her class. She does not believe that a wealthy man like Mouret would marry a salesgirl. The expectations surrounding their class differences would never allow it. Denise’s fate provides one of the novel’s few examples of class mobility. The ending implies that she will escape her working-class past and enter into the upper class as Mouret’s wife. While Denise elevates herself, few others do. There is a long list of working-class people left dead or destitute in her wake, suggesting that the price of social mobility is paid in suffering. Denise’s wealth is built on the suffering of her peers.
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