Zola’s novel Ladies’ Paradise presents you with a familiar landscape: Baudelaire’s Paris which we along with Ladies’ Paradise. As it happens, it was during that time that a great part of Notre-Dame, which was engulfed in flames last year, was reconstructed.
The first three chapters of the novel (this week’s required reading) present you with three consecutive angles:
-Arrival of the heroine in Paris from the provinces.
-Gaining access and getting a job at Bon Marché; suffering the consequences.
-The entrepreneur’s vision of the store and his encounter with (and enticement of) a powerful financier.
The store is often described as a “|monster” (chapter 2, page 49) and a machine, but also as a “temple to Woman…creating the rites of a new cult” (chapter 3, page 77).
What is your response to and understanding of this contradiction?
Denise, for example, felt a desire to run away and, at the same time, a need to stop and admire…she was lost and small inside the monster (Chapter 2, page 49).
Why is that? What makes the heroine such a victim of this store?
Also, in chapter 3, Mouret whispers to the Baron, “get the women and you’ll the world” (p. 49).
What does he mean really?