The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (4 page)

The bourgeois family is thus the social family, indeed the corporate family/society, and the dream-machine assumes ideological significance if we identify its ‘dream state’ with the insidious blurring of social difference, the suppression of oppositional relations within the system, the suppression of the political. As Pierre Bourdieu points out in
Language and Symbolic Power
,
¹⁵
the suppression of signs of social conflict is a tactic of dominant forces in liberal societies. The department store played a leading role in the marketing of life-styles that simultaneously demarcated and blurred class distinctions, encouraging everyone to aspire to a middle-class way of life. Whereas, for the working class, the displays of luxury were signs of their own misery, of the fact that the new social wealth which their own labour was producing had become the source of their impoverishment, there was a danger that the glamour of the scene would blind them to the reality of their self-alienation, that this new worship of commodities and the spectacle of their display would function, like the old religion, as an opiate of the masses. As we have seen, commodities possess a fetish character, they cast a spell; they are dream-symbols of a world of material abundance. Thus, the false harmony of this society is closely related to the formidable structures of manipulation that define modern consumer
culture. The department store, in Zola’s depiction of it, is an ambiguous symbol of progress. It helped women to establish themselves historically in the public sphere, and it may appear to have increased the customer’s power and autonomy; but, as Zola shows, the new codes of social behaviour and social discourses which it entailed for the shopper simultaneously organized a powerful network of constraints, providing a mere illusion of freedom and fulfilment. The department store, in its embodiment of consumer culture, was—and is—a giant, precision-made dream-machine.

T
HE
text on which the translation is based is that included in vol. iii of Henri Mitterand’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of
Les Rougon-Macquart
(Paris: Gallimard, 1964), although a number of other editions were consulted.

The main challenge facing any translator of Zola is how to capture the rhythm, balance, and colour of the many descriptive passages, with their proliferating detail. I hope I have succeeded in capturing the spirit of these passages without sacrificing precision. I hope also that I have written dialogue that is unstilted. My task was greatly facilitated by the help of Jocelyne Mohamudally and Marie-Rose Auguste, to whom I am most grateful. My thanks too, for different reasons, to Ilona Chessid, Joanne Finkelstein, Françoise Gaillard, Pamela Genova, and Rosemary Lloyd.

The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames)
was first published in book form by the Librairie Charpentier in Paris in 1883 (having been serialized in
Le Gil Blas
between 17 December 1882 and 1 March 1883). It is included in volume iii of Henri Mitterand’s superb scholarly edition of
Les Rougon-Macquart
in the ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’ (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Paperback editions exist in the following popular collections: GF-Flammarion (ed. Colette Becker, Paris, 1971); Folio (ed. Henri Mitterand, Paris, 1980); Livre de Poche (ed. Bernadette and Auguste Dezalay, Paris, 1984); Presses Pocket (ed. Robert Sctrick and Claude Aziza, Paris, 1990). The University of California Press reissued in 1992 the old nineteenth-century (1886) translation of the novel, with an introduction by Kristin Ross.

General studies of Zola and Naturalism in English include:

Baguley, David (ed.),
Critical Essays on Émile Zola
(Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1986).

Baguley, David,
Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Hemmings, F. W. J.,
Émile Zola
(2nd edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).

Lethbridge, R. and T. Keefe (eds.),
Zola and the Craft of Fiction
(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990).

Schor, Naomi,
Zola’s Crowds
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

Walker, Philip,
Zola
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).

Wilson, Angus,
Émile Zola: An Introductory Study of his Novels
(London: Seeker & Warburg, 1952; rev. 1964).

Articles and chapters of books in English on
The Ladies’ Paradise
include:

Bell, David, ‘The Play of Fashion:
Au Bonheur des Dames’,
in
Models of Power: Politics and Economics in Zola’s ‘Rougon-Macquart’
(Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 96–124.

Bowlby, Rachel, ‘“Traffic in her Desires”: Zola’s
Au Bonheur des Dames’, in Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola
(New York: Methuen, 1985), 66–82.

Brooks, Peter,
Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 149–54.

Felski, Rita, ‘Imagined Pleasures: The Erotics and Aesthetics of Consumption’, in
The Gender of Modernity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming 1995).

Gay, Peter,
The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud,
ii:
The Tender Passion
(Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1986), 312–19.

Kamm, Lewis,
The Object in Zola’s ‘Rougon-Macquart’
(Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1978), 8–25.

Niess, Robert J., ‘Zola’s
Au Bonheur des Dames:
The Making of a Symbol’, in Marcel Tétel (ed.),
Symbolism and Modern Literature: Studies in Honor of Wallace Fowlie
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978), 130–50.

Saisselin, Remy G., ‘Enter Woman: The Department Store as Cultural Space’, in
The Bourgeois and the Bibelot
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 31–49.

Viti, Robert M., ‘A Woman’s Time, a Lady’s Place:
Nana
and
Au Bonheur des Dames’, Symposium,
44/4 (Winter 1990–1), 291–300.

On the background of the department store and consumer culture generally, the following are very useful:

Abelson, Elaine S.,
When Ladies Go A-thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Adburgham, Alison,
Shops and Shopkeeping, 1800–1914: Where and in What Manner the Weil-Dressed Englishwoman Bought her Clothes
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981).

Bowlby, Rachel,
Shopping with Freud
(London: Routledge, 1993).

Campbell, Colin,
The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

Chaney, David, ‘The Department Store as a Cultural Form’,
Theory, Culture and Society,
1/3 (1983), 22–31.

Featherstone, Mike,
Consumer Culture & Postmodernism
(London: Sage, 1991).

Finkelstein, Joanna,
The Fashioned Self
(Oxford: Polity Press, 1992).

Friedberg, Anne,
Window Shopping: Cinema and Postmodernism
(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993).

Lancaster, W.,
The Department Store: A Social History
(London: Pinter Publishers, 1992).

McCracken, Grant,
Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities
(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990).

Miller, Michael,
The ‘Bon Marché’: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).

Morris, Meaghan, ‘Things to Do with Shopping Centres’, in Susan Sheridan (ed.),
Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism
(London: Verso, 1988), 193–225.

Mukerji, Chandra,
From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

Reekie, Gail,
Temptations: Sex, Selling and the Department Store
(Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993).

Sennett, Richard,
The Fall of Public Man
(New York: Vintage, 1974), 141–6.

Shields, Rob (ed.),
Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption
(London: Routledge, 1992).

Williams, Rosalind,
Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France
(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1982).

Wilson, Elizabeth,
Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).