Au Bonheur des Dames Reading Order

Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) by Émile Zola is the eleventh volume of Les Rougon-Macquart and his most accessible — the story of the department store as a new social institution, following Octave Mouret's transformation of a small Paris shop into one of the first great retail empires, and the experience of Denise Baudu, a young woman from the provinces who rises through the store's hierarchy to become Mouret's partner and wife. The novel is unusual in the cycle for its relative optimism: Zola presents the department store as a genuinely liberating force for the women who work in it and the women who shop in it, even while it systematically destroys the small shops around it. The tension between these two arguments — the store as liberation and the store as monopolistic destruction — is what gives the novel its complexity. Mouret is Zola's only protagonist who is both the agent of destruction (the small merchants, the traditional quarter) and the creator of something new and in its way admirable (the female workforce that is paid, trained, and given advancement opportunities that the domestic sphere never offered). Au Bonheur des Dames is also the founding text of what we might call the retail novel — the commercial institution as a complete social world — and its analysis of consumer desire, marketing, and the experience of shopping remains the most sustained fictional treatment of these subjects in any language.