55 pages • 1 hour read
The Ladies' Paradise
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Symbols & Motifs
The Ladies’ Paradise
The Ladies’ Paradise is the department store run by Octave Mouret. The circumstances by which Mouret came to own the store are mired in gossip and rumor, including the suggestion that he killed his wealthy wife and that her blood was poured into the foundations of the store. Her portrait hangs on his office wall and watches over the rapid expansion of his business empire. The Ladies’ Paradise is the vehicle for Mouret’s ambitions, as he seeks to spread his vision of a consumer society. In this way, the store is a symbol of Mouret’s worldview. The store, like Mouret, is mired in scandal and rumor, but nothing is certain. Mouret’s womanizing is tolerated because the store makes so much money. Similarly, the store is built around Mouret’s view of women. He treats his customers as children, who cannot help but be attracted to shiny new objects and hand over their husbands’ money to acquire them. The store symbolizes Mouret’s influence in Parisian high society while also reflecting the way Mouret views women.
Mouret is told by numerous people that he does not need to make his store bigger, but he does not listen. He has ambitions to reshape society, which are reflected by the size of the store. Mouret offers vast sums to Bourras to leave his small umbrella store because he views it as a “shameful wart” on the side of the department store (369). Bourras’s store is his entire life, yet it is nothing but a blemish to Mouret. This blemish is a symbolic limit to his ambitions, so Mouret uses underhand means to have Mouret thrown out. He then knocks down the store, and the expansion of The Ladies’ Paradise continues. The constant expansion and the removal of competing small businesses is a symbol of Mouret’s drive toward total victory. His ambitions are visible in his belief that the store must constantly expand.
The Ladies’ Paradise also represents the rising consciousness of class identity in Parisian society. The wealthy customers and poor employees are thrust into the same physical space. The store highlights class distinctions in that the employees cannot afford to buy the merchandise they sell. Although they seek to copy the appearance of their customers, the difference in their ability to purchase the objects of their desires emphasizes the class difference. The store illustrates class difference (and thus helps to form class consciousness) by bringing together women of different classes who would not normally socialize with one another.
Food
Food symbolizes class distinctions. For the wealthy characters, food is almost incidental. They attend tea parties and dinners where food is served and enjoyed but rarely acknowledged. Mouret spends a great deal on expensive meals with women, but he does so in pursuit of physical pleasure rather than to sustain himself. The wealthy have high-quality meals at their disposal at all times, and they ignore these meals while focusing on more interesting pursuits. In The Ladies’ Paradise, for example, Mouret offers free food and drinks to his customers to entice them to linger and spend more. Those who need free food the least receive it most often, while the families that the store pushed into poverty go hungry.
The Baudu family, for example, is struggling since The Ladies’ Paradise is taking their business. Even so, they share what little they have as a gesture of solidarity, a stark contrast to the tea parties where everyone is so well fed that food is ignored. At dinner, Baudu carefully carves the meat to ensure that every person has the same amount. Baudu is poor, but he extends his welcome to his distant family members and shares his food equally with them even though it means his family will have less. Later, Baudu’s health is so destroyed by his competition with The Ladies’ Paradise that he can barely carve the meat. The family’s descent into poverty (caused by the store where Denise works) is symbolized by their declining standard of food. The food becomes a measure of the destruction wrought on the Baudu family by The Ladies’ Paradise.
While the small business owners slowly starve, the store’s employees are treated to a higher standard of living and nutrition. They receive free meals, and some of the salesgirls live in the rooms provided by the store. These staff meals symbolize Mouret’s humanity and its limits. He treats his employees comparatively well but has little interest in the business owners his store bankrupts. Moreover, the kindness he shows to his employees is potentially self-serving in that they are likely to sell more merchandise if they look healthy and are satisfied with their jobs. Mouret improves the food and working conditions even further at Denise’s request, but it remains unclear if he does so out of humanitarian impulses or because he is trying to win her affection. The improvement in the quality of the food and the facilities symbolizes the effect that Denise has on Mouret, tempering his brash capitalistic tendencies with more human, empathetic ideas.
Construction Work
The Ladies’ Paradise is set in the middle of the 19th century, a time of great upheaval in Paris. The medieval parts of the city were being rebuilt, reflecting the vast social changes of the era. In the novel, these physical and social changes are symbolized by constant construction work at The Ladies’ Paradise. Mouret’s plans are grandiose. He envisions his shopping center dominating a city block, acting as a cathedral for the consumer society forming around him. Construction work is constant at The Ladies’ Paradise to the point where the entrance and the façade are undergoing continual renewal. The construction work symbolizes the rapid changes in French society, which are seemingly inescapable and affect every part of life.
While Mouret can escape the chaos and mess of construction, his neighbors are not so lucky. The construction work is an inescapable reminder of how quickly they are being left in the past. The growth of Mouret’s business comes at the expense of theirs. The construction takes place during all hours, including at night. Baudu, Bourras, and the people who live next to the store cannot shut their windows and ignore The Ladies’ Paradise because the sound of the construction is so deafening. The carriages that bring building supplies to The Ladies’ Paradise block the streets so much that they cannot go to and from their homes with ease. The construction symbolizes the extent to which The Ladies’ Paradise ruins lives in the neighborhood. The construction work, like the social changes represented by the store, cannot be ignored or escaped.
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By Émile Zola
