"Wasn't she once more going to assist the machine which was crushing the poor? But it was as if she was being swept along by some invisible force; she felt that she was not doing wrong." --from The Ladies' Paradise, by Emile Zola (p. 231)
I've read plenty of books because of Downton Abbey (including Elizabeth and Her German Garden, which I don't know WHAT Anna and Molesley would have made of). So I may as well admit that I picked The Ladies' Paradise (1883) as my Zola novel because of Mr. Selfridge, since it features a similarly lavish Parisian department store. Oddly, this is a sequel to Pot-Bouille, which I read years ago, in an edition with a cover showcasing its saucy themes, and under the title Piping Hot, but I don't remember enough of the plot to make the coincidence useful to me.
Innocent, orphaned Denise and her young brothers come from a provincial small town to Paris, where she finds a job in the ever-expanding dynasty of the Paradise. She struggles with poverty, corporate policies and workplace politics (including her competitive, mean-girl coworkers) while, Pamela-like, she catches the eye of the owner, Mouret, with whom she ends up on a romantic collision course.
Denise is enamored of modern attitudes and technology, even though she's a victim of them. She dedicates herself to improving the "machine" and making it more efficient, despite that fact that it has no soul or heart, and is perfectly willing to throw her out in the street to starve. It is the impractical, inefficient, now poverty-stricken old-school businesspeople who help her and her brothers, because they aren't motivated solely by the profit motive. That's why they can't compete with Mouret and are, it appears inevitably, destroyed by the endless appetite of the larger store's expansion.. But in the end, Denise still prefers Mouret and his ways. It's realistic, especially since the character was always one for whom "beneath her attacks of sensitivity her common sense was always at work" (121). It was still kind of depressing, and it doesn't 't seem like that much of an achievement when she convinces Mouret that he should treat his employees with human decency because that's better for business.
Warning: this is a novel that may test your tolerance for lengthy descriptions of fabric and retail displays. Zola could really go on and on about silk. However, in its mass of detail, it creates a 360-degree picture of a business and a workplace. The everyday hard work that resonates with the modern world, which still uses some of the same tactics and techniques in business competition, and manipulating customers into "yielding to the need for all that is useless and pretty" (75).
Zola, Émile, and Brian Nelson. The Ladies' Paradise. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
I've read plenty of books because of Downton Abbey (including Elizabeth and Her German Garden, which I don't know WHAT Anna and Molesley would have made of). So I may as well admit that I picked The Ladies' Paradise (1883) as my Zola novel because of Mr. Selfridge, since it features a similarly lavish Parisian department store. Oddly, this is a sequel to Pot-Bouille, which I read years ago, in an edition with a cover showcasing its saucy themes, and under the title Piping Hot, but I don't remember enough of the plot to make the coincidence useful to me.
Innocent, orphaned Denise and her young brothers come from a provincial small town to Paris, where she finds a job in the ever-expanding dynasty of the Paradise. She struggles with poverty, corporate policies and workplace politics (including her competitive, mean-girl coworkers) while, Pamela-like, she catches the eye of the owner, Mouret, with whom she ends up on a romantic collision course.
Denise is enamored of modern attitudes and technology, even though she's a victim of them. She dedicates herself to improving the "machine" and making it more efficient, despite that fact that it has no soul or heart, and is perfectly willing to throw her out in the street to starve. It is the impractical, inefficient, now poverty-stricken old-school businesspeople who help her and her brothers, because they aren't motivated solely by the profit motive. That's why they can't compete with Mouret and are, it appears inevitably, destroyed by the endless appetite of the larger store's expansion.. But in the end, Denise still prefers Mouret and his ways. It's realistic, especially since the character was always one for whom "beneath her attacks of sensitivity her common sense was always at work" (121). It was still kind of depressing, and it doesn't 't seem like that much of an achievement when she convinces Mouret that he should treat his employees with human decency because that's better for business.
Warning: this is a novel that may test your tolerance for lengthy descriptions of fabric and retail displays. Zola could really go on and on about silk. However, in its mass of detail, it creates a 360-degree picture of a business and a workplace. The everyday hard work that resonates with the modern world, which still uses some of the same tactics and techniques in business competition, and manipulating customers into "yielding to the need for all that is useless and pretty" (75).
Zola, Émile, and Brian Nelson. The Ladies' Paradise. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
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