The Ladies' Paradise is a compelling story of ambition and love set against the backdrop of the spectacular rise of the department store in 1860s Paris. Octave Mouret is a business genius who transforms a modest draper's shop into a hugely successful retail enterprise, masterfully exploiting the desires of his female customers and ruining small competitors along the way. Through the eyes of trainee salesgirl Denise we see the inner workings of the store and the relations and intrigues among the staff, human dramas played out alongside the relentless pursuit of commercial supremacy.
My review
(beware of spoilers! ) I came to read this book after watching the BBC adaptation, The Paradise, which gave the story a British setting. The series scriptwriters worked many changes on the original text, which usually disturb people fond of literary classics, but not me and not in this case. I think they quite improved both plot and characterization, instead.
Zola's text aims to depict the department store, The Ladies' Paradise, as 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" (Brian Nelson)
The department store is a model of the new capitalism, designed to seduce more than to supply. The mechanisms of seduction described in the text are numerous: the policy of free entry, the establishment of fixed prices, the system of returns, the seduction of the eye with an almost "orgiastic" display. To create the need, to awake new desires is the main philosophy at The Ladies' Paradise.