ABSTRACT
The title of Zola’s novel about a Paris department store clearly alludes to the one where he carried out the bulk of his preliminary researches, whose plastic carrier bags a century later still bear the evocative legend, “Au Bon Marché.”1 “Au Bonheurs des Dames” and “Au Bon Marché”: the intimate relations between “ladies’ happiness” and the “good deal” or “cheap store,” between what a woman wants or might want and the market forces of consumer capitalism, here stand out with all the subliminal suggestion of an advertising jingle: “Au Bon… Au Bon… Au Bon…”
Eve’s Ransom brought out some of the complexities of late nineteenth-century representations and practices bearing on women. Sister Carrie, on the other hand, was less about the images constraining women than the contributions of money and what it can buy to the construction of a self-image: something both narcissistically gratifying and recognizable in society. Au Bonheur des Dames brings the two sides together in a single, richly symbolic modern space. Women and money; ideologies of femininity and ideologies of consumption; the image decreed and the image bought; the markings of people and prices; the selling of a society of female consumers: all are related with deft precision in Zola’s story. Like Dreiser’s and Gissing’s, it figures the arrival of an inexperienced girl in the big city, which serves as a narrative device for describing how urban consumer attractions impress themselves on a woman initially innocent of their appeal.
