Country France Series Les Rougon-Macquart Preceded by Pot-Bouille | Language French Originally published 1883 Genre Novel Followed by La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret | |
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Publisher Charpentier (book form) Publication date 1883 (serial and book form) Media type Print (Serial, Hardback, and Paperback) Characters Octave Mouret, Denise Baudu, Madame Desforges Similar Émile Zola books, Les Rougon-Macquart books, Novels | ||
Au Bonheur des Dames ([obɔnœʁ deˈdam]; The Ladies' Delight or The Ladies' Paradise) is the eleventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart series by Émile Zola. It was first serialized in the periodical Gil Blas and published in novel form by Charpentier in 1883.
Contents
The novel is set in the world of the department store, an innovative development in mid-nineteenth century retail sales. Zola models his store after Le Bon Marché, which consolidated under one roof many of the goods hitherto sold in separate shops. The narrative details many of Le Bon Marché's innovations, including its mail-order business, its system of commissions, its in-house staff commissary, and its methods of receiving and retailing goods.
Au Bonheur des Dames is a sequel to Pot-Bouille. Like its predecessor, Au Bonheur des Dames focuses on Octave Mouret, who at the end of the previous novel married Caroline Hédouin, the owner of a small silk shop. Now a widower, Octave has expanded the business into an international retail powerhouse occupying, at the beginning of the book, the greater part of an entire city block.
Au Bonheur des Dames was first translated into English by F. Belmont in 1883. Several other translations have appeared since. John Calder published April FitzLyon's translation in 1957. The most readily available are those by Brian Nelson (The Ladies' Paradise, 1995) for Oxford World's Classics and by Robin Buss (The Ladies' Delight, 2002) for Penguin Classics.
Plot summary
The events of Au Bonheur des Dames cover approximately 1864-1869.
The novel tells the story of Denise Baudu, a 20-year-old woman from Valognes who comes to Paris with her younger brothers and begins working as a saleswoman at the department store Au Bonheur des Dames. Zola describes the inner workings of the store from the employees' perspective, including the 13-hour workdays, the substandard food and the bare lodgings for the female staff. Many of the conflicts in the novel spring from each employee's struggle for advancement and the malicious infighting and gossip among the staff.
Denise's story is played against the career of Octave Mouret, the owner of Au Bonheur des Dames, whose retail innovations and store expansions threaten the existence of all the neighborhood shops. Under one roof, Octave has gathered textiles (silks, woolens) as well as all manner of ready-made garments (dresses, coats, lingerie, gloves), accessories necessary for making clothes, and ancillary items like carpeting and furniture. His aim is to overwhelm the senses of his female customers, forcing them to spend by bombarding them with an array of buying choices and by juxtaposing goods in enticing and intoxicating ways. Massive advertising, huge sales, home delivery, and a system of refunds and novelties such as a reading room and a snack bar further induce his female clientele to patronize his store in growing numbers. In the process, he drives the traditional retailers who operate smaller speciality shops out of business.
In Pot-Bouille, an earlier novel, Octave is depicted as a ladies' man, sometimes inept, who seduces or attempts to seduce women who can give him some social or financial advantage. In Au Bonheur des Dames, he uses a young widow to influence a political figure–modeled after Baron Haussmann–in order to gain frontage access to a huge thoroughfare, the present day rue de Quatre-Septembre, for the store.
Despite his contempt for women, Octave finds himself slowly falling in love with Denise, whose refusal to be seduced by his charms further inflames him. The book ends with Denise admitting her love for Octave. Her marriage with Octave is seen as a victory for women, by her conquest of a man whose aim is to subjugate and exploit women using their own senses.
Relationship to the other Rougon-Macquart novels
Zola designed the Rougon-Macquart novels to demonstrate how heredity and environment operate on the members of one family over the course of the Second French Empire. In this case, the environment is the department store.
Octave Mouret is introduced briefly in La fortune des Rougon. He plays a larger but background role in La conquête de Plassans, which focuses on his parents, the first cousins Marthe Rougon and François Mouret. As an innovator and risk-taker, Octave combines his mother's imagination with his father's business sense, making the department store the perfect milieu for his natural gifts. He also inherits from his great-grandmother (Adelaïde Fouque or Tante Dide) a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder, manifested in his intense commercial drive and his obsession with dominating female consumers.
Octave's brother is the priest Serge (La faute de l'Abbé Mouret), who served as a guardian to their mentally challenged sister Desirée.
In Le docteur Pascal, the final novel in the series set in 1872-1873, Octave and Denise are married and have two children. Octave also appears briefly or is mentioned in La joie de vivre and L'œuvre.
Adaptations
The novel has been adapted for film several times.
The BBC used the novel as the basis for an eight-part television series set in northern England titled The Paradise and broadcast in 2012. It starred Joanna Vanderham and Emun Elliott. The BBC launched a second series in October 2013.
The novel was adapted for the stage, with the title The Department Store, by Justin Fleming, and was premiered at The Old Fitzroy Theatre Sydney in 2005, directed by Christopher Hurrell.
The novel was adapted into a play for BBC Radio 4 that premiered in September 2010.