The Ladies' Paradise: A Realistic Novel

by Émile Zola

Overview

Zola's prophetic celebration of unbridled commerce and consumerism, The Ladies' Paradise (Au bonheur des dames, 1883) recounts the frenzied transformations that made late nineteenth-century Paris the fashion capital of the world. The novel's capitalist hero, Octave Mouret, creates a giant department store that devours the dusty, outmoded boutiques surrounding it. Paralleling the story of commercial triumph is the love story between Mouret and the innocent Denise Baudu, who comes to work in The Ladies' Paradise. She provides the crucial link between Mouret and the three essential social groups in the novel: the female clientele, the shopgirls, and the petit bourgeois shopkeepers of the neighborhood. But the store itself plays the leading role. Zola celebrates capitalism, commerce, and consumerism with a kind of prophetic optimism, calling this novel "a poem of modern activity." The work's interest for readers in feminist, cultural, and social history and theory is made abundantly clear in the introduction by Kristin Ross, and the fiction is reproduced in its colorful, 1886 English translation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9791220250825
Publisher:	Passerino
Publication date:	01/14/2021
Sold by:	StreetLib SRL
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Émile François Zola (1840-1902) was a journalist, a novelist, a playwright, and a political activist. He was one of the most influential French novelists of the 19th century and the founder of the literary and theatrical school of naturalism. Zola was a major figure in the political liberalization of France.

Émile Zola's works include novels, dramas, poetry, and criticism, among which is his famous Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893), a cycle of twenty novels which depict various aspects of life and society, such as "L'Assommoir" (1877), the seventh novel of the series, about the suffering of the Parisian working-class; "Nana" (1880), the ninth installment, which deals with prostitution; "Pot-Bouille" (1882), the tenth novel, and Zola's most sarcastic satire, which describes daily life in a newly constructed block of flats in late nineteenth-century Paris; and "Germinal" (1885), the thirteenth novel in the series, which depicts the mining industry and is considered by some as one of his masterpieces. "The Ladies Paradise," originally "Au Bonheur des Dames," one of his most relevant works, was the eleventh novel of the cycle.

Zola's open letter to French president Félix Faure, under the headline J'Accuse...!, published on the front page of the newspaper L'Aurore on January 13, 1898, charging various French officials with a "terrible miscarriage of justice," reopened the case of the Jewish army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who had been sentenced to Devil's Island. For that, Zola was himself sentenced to a year in prison but fled to England, returning one year later after Dreyfus' name had been cleared. Dreyfus was eventually reinstated as an officer and publicly decorated with the Legion of Honor.