The Ladies' Paradise Read online

  The perceptions of the railway traveller can be compared with those of the shopper in the department store, in that the physical motion of the shopper, the symbolic motion of the goods (through accelerated turnover), and the presentation of these goods via their commodity (or exchange) value all combine to produce a relationship between subject and object which is analogous to that of the train traveller and the landscape that zooms past his window.5 The descriptions of the sales in The Ladies’ Paradise, with their swirling movement and their frenetic circulation of money, goods, and bodies, are the perfect expression of commodity culture, which, as Benjamin and others have pointed out, is a culture of speed, movement, dislocation, disorientation:6

  The great afternoon rush-hour had arrived, when the overheated machine led the dance of customers, extracting money from their very flesh. In the silk department especially there was a sense of madness … In the still air, where the stifling central heating brought out the smell of the materials, the hubbub was increasing, made up of all sorts of noises—the continuous trampling of feet, the same phrases repeated a hundred times at the counters, gold clinking on the brass of the cash-desks, besieged by a mass of purses, the baskets on wheels with their loads of parcels falling endlessly into the gaping cellars, (pp. 108–9)

  Technological change and the accelerated circulation of commodities not only affected man’s perceptions of the world but also influenced the way he organized the space in which he lived. Urban planning was informed partly by a desire to accommodate the increasingly rapid circulation of goods and their consumers. Under Napoleon III in the 1850s Baron Haussmann (1809–91), the Prefect of the Seine, launched his massive plan of urban redevelopment for Paris. His modernization of the city by means of broad, straight, strategically placed boulevards which facilitated the movement of troops reflected the counter-revolutionary political needs of the Emperor, providing a fundamental nineteenth-century example of the links between spatial planning and the institutionalization of state power; but its purpose was also to advance the bourgeoisie’s business interests by creating a more efficient transport network. Mouret longs to expand his operation so that the Ladies’ Paradise will have its entrance and a palatial new façade on one of the grand new boulevards, the Rue du Dix-Décembre. He thus curries favour with the man in charge of the redevelopment, the wealthy and influential Baron Hartmann, whose name, with its phonetic resemblance to Haussmann, is clearly no coincidence. Mouret tries to convince the Baron to develop a section of the new boulevard with an extension of the department store. If he could have found a way, the narrator tells us, he would have made the street run right through his shop (p. 236). And he succeeds in a sense in doing this by the visual openness created by his use of sheet glass and electric lighting for his ground-floor window displays, and by his system of interior traffic circulation which is modelled on Haussmann’s network of boulevards.

  The department store, the Second Empire, and the modernization of Paris by Haussmann all form part of the same general economy. Just as Mouret is able to provide a ‘healthy’ retail environment (in both physical and commercial terms) by opening up the space of the store, in contrast to the cramped darkness of the old drapery shops, so Haussmann’s opening up of Paris with his network of wide, bright, efficient arteries improved the physical and commercial ‘health’ of the city. In the modern city, the capital of the world of work, everyone is busy, everything has its function, an organic justification. For Zola, who always identified laziness and idleness with waste, the modern city’s beauty comes from its being a space in which whatever has no use has no place. The sight of the city—and by the same token its microcosm the department store—at work is for Zola a beautiful spectacle.

  For Michel Serres it is Mouret’s understanding of imperialism as shown in his mastery over space, in his ability to use the interior space of his store to his own advantage (creating an environment where he can easily dominate his female subjects), and his ability to draw together under one roof products from all over the world (exploiting the productive capacity of far-flung regions) that accounts for his success: ‘Space is necessary—and, I believe, sufficient—for control: kings, tyrants, those who have power, the ruling class, have understood, I think, that they can give up certain things, even the means of production, even energy, provided that they keep and maintain complete control over space.’7 Both Mouret and Louis-Napoleon are masters at controlling space, and thereby at controlling crowds.

  Although Zola was no friend of the real Imperial system, his symbol includes those aspects of it which promoted the public good as he saw it. He suggests that the placing of political power in the hands of a benevolent despot (such as Mouret could be, it is suggested, when tempered by the ideas of Denise Baudu, the working-class salesgirl whom he eventually marries) would ensure that certain Imperial preoccupations (such as greater prosperity through greater efficiency) would work to the general good. The Ladies’ Paradise represents an attempted marriage between bourgeois individualism, rationalized efficiency, and the common good.8

  Another symbolic (and quintessentially nineteenth-century) aspect of the store is its representation as a gigantic combustion machine, whose moving parts, the laces, the linens, the finery, the displays, seem to gain in life and vitality (as Kristin Ross has pointed out)9 in proportion to the reification of its clientele and personnel. The first view of the giant is presented through the uplifted eyes of Denise Baudu, freshly arrived from the provinces:

  Denise felt that she was watching a machine working at high pressure; its dynamism seeming to reach to the display windows themselves … A crowd was looking at them, groups of women were crushing each other in front of them, a real mob, made brutal by covetousness. And these passions in the street were giving life to the materials: the laces shivered, then drooped again, concealing the depths of the shop with an exciting air of mystery; even the lengths of cloth, thick and square, were breathing, exuding a tempting odour, while the overcoats were throwing back their shoulders still more on the dummies, which were acquiring souls, and the huge velvet coat was billowing out, supple and warm, as if on shoulders of flesh and blood, with a heaving breast and quivering hips. But the furnace-like heat with which the shop was ablaze came above all from the selling, from the bustle at the counters, which could be felt behind the walls. There was the continuous roar of the machine at work, of customers crowding into the departments, dazzled by the merchandise, then propelled towards the cash-desk. And it was all regulated and organized with the remorselessness of a machine: the vast horde of women were as if caught in the wheels of an inevitable force, (p. 16)

  The giant machine devours, disgorges, consumes, and accelerates to the point of overheating and explosion during the sales. And the master of the machine is Mouret.

  In opposition to Mouret, Master of the Machine, Emperor of Signs in his shop, and Great Seducer, stands Denise Baudu, the young working-class girl who is often seen (although I want to question this reading) as the feminist pole of the novel, the representative of the women and the workers. Denise is taken on at the Ladies’ Paradise, which, on another level, is represented as a bourgeois ‘home’ on a hugely magnified, fantastic scale: transformation and multiplication of drawing-rooms and boudoirs, dream-like proliferation of clothing and lingerie, fabulous extension of the powers of the dominant patriarchal figure. This dimension of the store is of central importance, and it would be useful to place it in the general context of nineteenth-century urban life and the meaning of urban life in terms of sexual relations.

  As Elizabeth Wilson and others have pointed out, a cause for alarm in the nineteenth century was the way in which urban life undermined patriarchal authority. Prostitution was of course the great fear of the age: it was not only a real and ever present threat, but also (as Zola’s Nana brilliantly illustrates) a metaphor for disorder and the overturning of the naturalized hierarchies and institutions of society. The prostitute was a ‘public woman’, but the problem in nineteenth-centu
ry urban life was whether every woman in the new, disordered world of the city was not a public woman. The very presence in the public spaces of streets, cafés, and theatres of unattended—that is, unowned—women constituted a threat to male power. Many commentators have described how male bourgeois society sought systems of control and regulation. Bourgeois women were largely excluded from nineteenth-century urban space, while bourgeois men were free to explore urban zones of pleasure such as the restaurant, the theatre, the café, and the brothel. The proliferation of public places of pleasure and leisure created a new kind of public person: the flâneur, key figure in the critical literature of modernity and urbanization, and associated with the new urban pastimes of crowd-watching and shopping (including window-shopping). The flâneur spends most of his day—to borrow a phrase from Rachel Bowlby—‘just looking’ at the urban spectacle.10

  One of the significant features of the department store is that it shows women emerging more and more into the public spaces of the city. It functioned in the same way that the Church had previously done, by providing women with a haven outside the home, in which to sit, think, and find solace. Shopping in the late nineteenth century became a woman’s natural way of entering into and occupying the public domain. In that sense the department store represents a transitional social space. Like the arcades, the boulevards, and the cafés, the department store was a space half-public, half-private, which women—that is, the women shoppers—were able to inhabit quite comfortably. At least for the leisured few, shopping provided the pleasures of looking, socializing, and simply strolling; in the department store a woman, too, could become a flâneur. Within the store, women were induced into a dream world in which they enjoyed a sense of freedom from husbands and the restraints of family life. As orthodox religion had once instructed women in the moral codes of daily life, so the department store now delineated a new ethic centred on womanhood and femininity.11

  But the pleasures of shopping, though half-illusory, were not available to all women—largely for reasons of class. Whereas for bourgeois women the department store was the equivalent of the arcades, a protected place half-way between the home and the street, for working-class women the store was hardly different from the street: whether in the street or in the store, Denise and the other working-class salesgirls are constantly a prey, because of their subordinate social and economic status, to the masculine gaze; and they themselves are also buyable objects. In the Paris of the Second Empire, and indeed the Third Republic, a woman who was not a bourgeoise could not enjoy the pleasure and freedom, albeit limited, of la flânerie.

  Moreover, although women enjoyed commodification, they were themselves commodified. Mouret, always a figure of power, is not only a kind of capitalist emperor, the man with the Midas touch, the Goldfinger of modern commerce; he is also, as we have seen, the Great Seducer. The store is not just a money-making machine, but, as operated by Mouret, is an instrument of sexual exploitation and domination, a male pleasure-machine: ‘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’ (p. 77). Mouret proclaims and affirms his virility through his machine, which functions, so to speak, as a condenser and generator of sexual pleasure, enabling him to possess all women simultaneously.

  The shop, objects, things, are eroticized, transforming everything for sale into an object of desire. The store becomes not only a harem but a dream-machine, generating limitless sensual fantasies. The rhythmic structure of the descriptions, with their cascading images and rising pitch, suggests loss of control, quasi-sexual abandonment to consumer dreams, as well as mirroring the perpetual expansion that defines the economic principles of consumerism:

  The crowd had reached the silk department… At the far end of the hall, around one of the small cast-iron columns which supported the glass roof, material was streaming down like a bubbling sheet of water … Women pale with desire were leaning over as if to look at themselves. Faced with this wild cataract, they all remained standing there, filled with the secret fear of being caught in the overflow of all this luxury and with an irresistible desire to throw themselves into it and be lost. (pp. 103–4)

  The women shoppers themselves are shown as fragmented, reduced to distorted parts of the body, merged with the fabrics and objects in the shop, like modern advertising images: ‘the mirrors made the departments recede further into the distance, reflecting the displays together with patches of the public—faces in reverse, bits of shoulders and arms’ (p. 250). Furthermore the vocabulary of sexual dominance and exploitation is accompanied by images marked by a great deal of violence directed against women. Images of decapitation and pierced flesh are common. On the way up the staircase of the Ladies’ Paradise, there is a curious and disturbing image of rows of mannequins, again headless: ‘each one had a little wooden handle, like the handle of a dagger, stuck in the red flannel, which seemed to be bleeding where the neck had been severed’ (p. 253). Woman for Mouret is reduced to a sexually throbbing body, a body that is nothing more, for him, than a source of money, a figure for money. The first window display Denise sees when she arrives in Paris features a row of mannequins, mirrored to infinity, with price tags instead of heads. The women shoppers lose their heads in that they undergo a euphoric loss of self; they are driven crazy, they go mad in ecstasies of buying, succumbing in spectacular fashion to false consciousness. In that sense they become mere bodies, manipulated and mindless.

  The description of the mannequins focuses the commodity fetishism that figures so prominently in the novel. The psychoanalytical reading of erotic fetishism is usually attributed to Freud, but in fact the decisive introduction of the notion of the fetish into the psychological field took place some decades earlier in the work of Alfred Binet (whom Freud acknowledged) in a paper published in the Revue philosophique in 1877. Like Freud, Binet was an observer of Charcot’s clinical practice and acquainted with Charcot’s famous focus on hysteria. Hysteria is not irrelevant to the reaction of the fetishist and is hardly irrelevant to the behaviour of the women shoppers with their erotic fascination with the commodity objects in Mouret’s store.

  In Denise’s first glimpse of the display windows she sees silk stockings ‘displaying the rounded outline of calves’, and the stockings’ flesh colour and satiny texture give them ‘the softness of a blonde woman’s skin’ (p. 5). After the first of the three sales, the lace and lingerie scattered on the floors and counters ‘gave the impression that an army of women had undressed there haphazardly in a wave of desire’ (p. 117). An endless array of lingerie seems strewn everywhere during the climactic sale of the final chapter, ‘as if an army of pretty girls had undressed as they went from department to department, down to their satiny skin’. The mannequins themselves seem to have a ‘disturbing lewdness’ (p. 409).

  As Peter Brooks has pointed out, the clothing—the lingerie and the lace—that speaks of the woman’s erotic body is offered for sale to women themselves: there are very few male shoppers in the Ladies’ Paradise. Brooks comments:

  While this might seem to suggest a primal narcissism of women, or an invitation to them to possess their own bodies, there is rather an alienation of women from their bodies, which have been taken over by the (male-owned and -managed) market economy, defined and fetishized by that economy, and offered back to women in piecemeal form, through the cash nexus … Mouret’s establishment figures a culture in which a woman, through the relay of the economy, commercial and erotic, established by man, is forced to accept herself as other; she is foreclosed from her own desire, never in full possession of her own body.12

  In that sense, the women are not only headless but, paradoxically, bodyless too.

  Denise is the only one of the salesgirls who refuses to be seduced, refuses to be commodified. Having refused Mouret’s advances, she wins his heart; the masterful Mouret is gradually brought to his knees by his love for one of his own shop ass
istants. But the price of Denise’s hand in marriage is the introduction of humanitarian reforms in the running of the store, for the dream-machine depends on a brutal system of labour organization. The role of Denise is thus to humanize the store, to harmonize its economic functions with the moral qualities associated with femininity. The romance plot has been read by feminist critics as an allegory of feminization and female revenge, transcendence of the commodity, and the achievement of autonomy;13 but what is more striking is the bourgeois ideology, the enduring patriarchal structure, that informs the humanization and domestication of Mouret. Although Denise breaks the mould of masculine domination, her influence and independence are only achieved in terms of her critical presence within the existing system. She argues for her reforms in the spirit of sound business practice, and in rewriting Mouret’s male narrative of sexual and economic exploitation, she uses the discourse of bourgeois ideology—the discourse of reason, logic, control, and order: