Darin
Bauer
CS-500-5
SP09
Sfai
Carolyn
Duffy
Considerations regarding Les
Bonheur Des Dames.
I
am to wonder if Les Bonheur Des Dames was
a BBC special series on PBS television. A rags to riches saga, after her
parents death our heroine Denise, takes her brothers to their uncle’s residence
in Paris. The older brother Jean receives an ivory carver job in Paris; her
younger brother Pepe is too young for labor. The time of the world when
Victorianism and Industrialism clashed and merged is the same time in which
capitalist-consumerist advances were made in large scale department stores. Department
stores which housed much of everything and waged economic warfare on
independent specialty-item stores which for the most part only offered one kind
of good to the market at large. Department stores also, through streamlined
return policies, delivery practices, and catalog mail-order gouged locality,
and helped to create international markets in said trade. The author Émile Zola
uses the story of Denise, who initially works for her uncle’s fabrics and
hand-carved cane handle store to describe this specific kind of gentrification
that took place during industrialism, and specifically to this tale Hausmannism.
He also makes a telling argument for labor and human rights advocates, as well
as today providing us with some of the roots of sexism, and labor exploitation.
As
mentioned Denise works for a time with her uncle, and rents a room, then she
must take up with Les Bonheur, and her younger brother was already taken in accordance
to his employment, while her youngest brother must be paid for to attend a
nursery. The ladies of Les Bonheur take up in small rooms in the Bonheur attic, which of course is freezing in
the winter. Working conditions are somewhat better than slavery for women at
that time in history. Food and board is included with wage. The Bonheur department store is a vast place with a
basement kitchen, which serves lunch and dinner. The Bonheur also includes a warehouse, and a
special section for horse and van delivery. Zola uses mechanism as a theme to
relate to Denise’s incongruity with her new surroundings.
“She was so lost and small inside the
monster, inside the machine, and although it was still idle, she was terrified
that she would be caught in its motion which was already beginning to make the
walls quake.”[1]
Also
regarding her new employer;
“All the stories told her by her uncle
came back in her memory, enlarging Mouret, surrounding him with a legend,
establishing him as the monster of the terrible machine which since the morning
had been holding her in the iron teeth of its gear wheels.”[2]
Le
Homme de Bonheur, Mouret is an individual with a Baccalaureate, women of
influence throw themselves towards him. Mouret wishes to expand his Bonheur Les
Dames, he and the credit immobilier are buying out all of the nearby
properties. Mouret’s fit of fancy to Le Baron Hartman seems eccentric and
perhaps based on Émile Zola’s interaction with the populace in regards to his
own creativity, “Oh how you do let yourself go, my dear sir,”[3]
I can imagine Zola in the same way being admonished for speaking to strangers
about his book during his own personal research on Les Bonheur. Mouret as a professional
garniture is obsessed with fabric; woman’s clothing and making a killing in
sales. Emile for his part creates Mouret’s schemes for penetrating the purses
of the entirety of the female population of Paris. He buys wholesale, seduces
the women of Paris (with advertising,) and sells massive quantities of goods. Although
fictional, Les Bonheur is a representation
of the Hausmann Renovation of Paris and written to seem much like the Paris
department store where Zola had done much of his research, Le Bon Marché.
Like
in history Mouret finds competition, catalog and newspaper advertising wars that
would seem to have begun in Paris, although there are many examples during
industrialization, Levi-Straus, Floursheim, etc. There were stores like this in
major cities around the world at this time; so as dull as the Sears catalog is
today, retail ventures have more or less always been the vultures of urban
living. Although there have been some measure of guarantees over the years, in
special delivery, catalogs and a refund policy, now we have Craftsman tools, Fed-Ex
and the Victoria Secrets catalog. Most of these advances in capitalism we can
thank the advent of department stores for. Zola makes Les Bonheur out to also
seem as if it is the first department store in the world, just like how Le Bon
Marché regards itself.
What
Denise sees of it however is much more realistic. Like real life Taylorism, at
the Bonheur we have exhausted salespeople, crowded salesrooms, eloquently
ravishing displays (like museums of that time period,) a fancy tea room with
chairs, newspapers, and children’s books; Mouret seems like the most sinister
yet successful purveyor of goods. Denise is portrayed accurately for someone in
her position at that time, and is constantly challenged by Les Bonheur. She is
the subject of hazing and discrimination. Women had little or no rights unless
they were wealthy in the late 1900s. Denise’s younger brother works elsewhere
in a shop or factory, and is always borrowing money from her that she can ill
afford, as it is expected that he should be put out to stud and must impress
women. Zola notes somewhat continuously
that many in Denise’s position rely on extra money from prostitution, the women
in Les Bonheur gossip like crazy,
money is tight, competition is fierce, and people in general are cruel. Zola
writes as if he himself had worked in retail; the plaids of the woolen, the
silks of the oriental, and so on, quite extravagant. With each new sale the
women are driven in like cattle.
“Meanwhile the congestion was becoming so
great in the silk department that Madame Desforges and Madame Marty were not
able to find a true assistant at first. They remained standing , mingling with
the crowd of ladies who were looking at the materials, feeling them, remaining
there for hours without making up their minds.”[4]
The
price of silk at Le Bonheur seems to replace fulfillment during the repression
of the Victorian era. In fact it is all that the well-to-do women in Zola’s
novel seem to discuss other than sexual scandal and gentrification, usually in
relation to the local retail market. The gentrification of the local shops by
the Bonheur is especially a sore point with Denise’s uncle.
Old uncle Bourras’s neighbors get
bought out by the Bonheur so he becomes surrounded on all sides by the Bonheur.
Bourras, who has already sold his summer home at a major loss to keep his
shop’s sails stubbornly, decides to remodel his store in retaliation. The two
stores struggle over umbrella sales. The frilled umbrella is Bourra’s
invention, although the Bonheur is improving on it. There is also less of a
chance of being bought out at a fair price as the eighty thousand franc offer
to Bourras pales in comparison to that of the green grocer who was offered one
hundred thousand fifty francs. The disparity regarding the hostile takeovers
(eminent domain proceedings) in their neighborhood is finally, after all of
this back ground, tied directly to Haussmannism and Victorian / Industrialist
era gentrification.
The
Rue du Dix-Decembre is a new Boulevard to connect the new Opera with the rest
of the city, the old Vaudeville being
demolished as the sounds of pickaxes fill the city. The Rue du Dix would seem
to lead back to the rumors of the expanding Bonheur Des Dames extending on
various Paris streets. Tongue in cheek, point to Zola!
Mouret
is planning gentrification with the local Baron who would wish for an adjoining
Hotel, a competitive rival to another local hotel of some refinement. As
comparable to the migration created from the construction of the Grand
Boulevards, clouds of plaster fills the streets of the Bonheur. As if to relate
the tale of the most stubborn or hardcore, the moribund quality of Bourras’s
old shop increases as Mouret’s brick layers block the streets of his
competitors. Baudu mentions being relieved by the Bonheur, to which he bears no
ill will for being in “those…barracks of shops,” [Department Stores,] the
reason being the need for the advancement of society. He somehow insanely
admires his enemy.
“…the logical development of trade, the
needs of modern times, the magnitude of such new creations and…the increasing
well-being of the public.”[5]
This
is the logic of the masses. Given the grotesque nature of post-modern mall
culture, Victorian department stores effectively emanate some virtues of class
[and classism,] yet seem to also be a predecessor to a larger corruption in
capitalist society. Baudu yet again commits to a tirade against the Bonheur,
this time mentioning the Halles, a Paris market place that might as well
succumb to the Bonheur given the state of competitiveness. The Bourras daughter
Emile relates statistics saying the Bonheur had grown five fold in four years,
their profits reaching eight to forty million francs. [That’s like a trillion
dollars today.] One thousand employees, twenty eight departments, and a new
furniture and “fancy-goods,” department. [I’d like a cordless hand drill that
has an egg beater attachment and all day battery charge for fewer than sixty
dollars s’il vous plait. Modern times indeed. The post-modern era giving us
such “fancy-goods” as ketchup in a bottle, “The Pet Rock,” “The Rubik Cube,”
alcoholic soda, and Velcro. Is light beer also akin to such accomplishments of
refinement?] In continuation with Baudu’s tirade, in law Colomban curses the
Bonheur; “It’s a filthy place! They’re scoundrels, all of them! In fact it’s a
real plague for the neighborhood!” Colomban must not like Starbucks. The true
nature of capitalism can only be celebrated when there is profit to be had. Le
Vieil Elbeuf’s misery is perpetrated by “the creaking of [ladders and
staircases] tribes of workmen unloading metal plates, the noise of machinery,
whistles, and the soiling snowfall consisting of various debris, permeating
everything poisoning everyone. [This seems indicative of Taylorism and open
market capitalism.] With a deathlike looming the architect to the Bonheur
creates a nightshift with floodlights reminding me of the diesel powered crew
lights used by the University of Police during the Oak Grove Berkeley tree sit.
The neighbors of the Bonheur go bankrupt as expansions and new departments are
created within the new department store. Local Paris businesses such as an
underwear shop, an arcade, the glove-maker, the furriers (who choose to
sublet,) and the hosier. The Bonheur “Fancy-goods,” and also furniture
department of the Bonheur interferes with other local and perhaps regional
interests as the district would seem to be soon covered in the Bonheur roof.
The
Bonheur commute regiment marches on twice a day for a full ten minutes,
congesting the pavements. Like some shops the Vieil Elbeuf chooses an agent in whole
selling to represent themselves to their customers. This is the only way to
compete without customer walk-ins. The rigid traditions and seemingly rural or
pedestrian former practices of smaller specialty shops- had been sacked! The Bourras family isn’t alone; smaller
shopkeepers are selling their summer homes as their promissory notes pile
higher. Denise goes back to the Bonheur Des Dames.
The
Bonheur is inaugurating its new building, which is compared to the proud façade
of a church. The Bonheur owner Mouret’s goal is to use this cathedral of
capitalism to dominate the matriarchy of power. Women are to rule his store as
queens as long as they subjugate themselves to capitalist consumerism. Using
mail-order lures Mouret spends three hundred thousand francs a year on catalogs
and two hundred thousand on his summer catalog; they are translated into all
languages. The returns policy entraps prey and further mirrors the now historic
innovation of Le Bon Marché. Mouret has his carpet and furniture on the second
floor. Zola would allow in his fiction that the Bonheur would be the first
department store to employ this method of attraction of goods as customers pass
the second floor to become received into others. He also merges departments in
their respected off seasons to make the store seem alive at all times, (coats,
swimwear, etc.) In a look at the audaciousness of the wage slavery aspects of
Taylorism Zola examines how Mouret, forty-eight hours before a huge store wide
clearance sale wants everything redone in a pattern of geometric absolutes that
force customers to pass through many different sections of the store to search
for any one item, minutes before the store inauguration he then insists that
the parasols must be redone for aesthetic purposes, not a small task actually. In
the description of the inaugural sale, it is described that women shoppers are
sucked into the store against their will.
“Mouret employed auctioneering, the method
of selling goods by word of mouth, by which customers were caught and robbed of
their money, for he made use of any kind of advertisement, he jeered at the
discretion of some of his colleagues, who held the opinion that the goods alone
should speak for themselves. Special salesmen, loafing Parisians with the gift
of the gab, got rid of considerable quantities of small, trashy articles in
this way.”[6]
Like
the clutter of things near check-out stands, customers are the victim, we
always have been the victim. Unlike today’s fluorescent lighted drywall and cinderblock
stores, the framework at the Bonheur is mostly wrought iron, towards the top
floor there was color, sculpture, gold inlay, mosaics, ceramics, and the
staircase with banisters in red velvet. The entire aura of consumer capitalism
was a gaudy aesthetic manifestation, although like a palace or museum. Zola’s
description of the masses of the Bonheur sounds like the interior of a Borg
cube from Star Trek.
“Then when Madame Desforges looked up she
saw all up the staircases, along the suspension bridges, round the balustrades
of each storey, an unbroken, murmuring stream of people ascending, a whole
multitude of people in the air, travelling through the fretwork of the enormous
metal frame, silhouetted in black against the diffused light of the enameled panes.”[7]
Zola
xenophobicly describes “satiny Peking fabrics with the supple skin of a Chinese
virgin.” Exotics from Japan, India, and French light silks of which Zola
describes “ladies in furbelows walking a May morning beneath apricot trees in a
park.” What else could be such a
Impressionist cliché? It makes one wonder how people will view the
construct of late twentieth century and early twenty-first century capitalism. It
might seem like contemptuous behavior in light of increasing economic
disparity.
In
a section regarding department store security we find three types of women/gender
stereotypes; professional thieves, those with the desire for theft, (perhaps a
mania or neurosis,) and pregnant women who specialize in one item in which to
steal. Pages later in another passage Zola describes a commotion, which does
not lead to an arrest, although the Madame du Boves tried to steal a garment.
It is if (re: those with the desire of
theft,) women are expected to be so consumed by greed that they cannot control
their desires inside the store, and Zola describes the situation with Madame du
Boves as such, she is well to do, and not expected to really understand that
she needs to come to her senses, and she is put upon before she could actually
commit to theft itself. As she is of wealth it would also seem that there is
another double standard at play here. Single, low-income and pregnant women are
hounded by the Bonheur’s inspector Joves.
The
Bonheur makes a record ₣587, 210.30 on the day of their expansion inauguration,
with some seventy thousand customers in attendance. I am supposed to believe
that in capitalism the end justifies the mean, although I know it does not.
People are exploited and in all fairness there is no fairness, Taylorism removes
human beings from anything other than rote robotic behavior and greed pushes
all other concerns away. This is essentially Zola’s view of Le Bon Marché, and
his warning to readers: Caveat Emptor!
The
Bonheur’s women’s boarding house includes use of the common room until 11:00
pm, (nice gesture.) Denise has a leg injury and she shows her friend Pauline a
dinner invite that Mouret has sent to her, Pauline reveals to Denise that
Mouret is actively trying to make an impression upon Denise. With tooth and
claw Denise struggled to win respect at the Bonheur despite her past as
assistant buyer. Although with the leg injury, Madame Aurélie advances Denise
to the accounting as a Madame Frédéric had moved on, I believe she had been
married off. Denise confides her anxiety regarding Mouret’s letter dinner
invite to Pauline who spills the beans to her department confidents, which is
whispered to those who just happen to hear, so the news spreads to the entire Bonheur. The gossip rides until lunch, where it
escalates into other forms of human vulgarity. The rest of Zola’s Bonheur is
more or less a pre-feminist fantasy of empowerment and romance, with capitalism
the actual villain. Denise is the hero of the Bonheur’s workers revolution more
or less, and reforms her eventual husband’s store from the bottom up, and the
inside out. It is explained that pensions, and trade unions are created around
this time, and that salespeople are eventually protected and treated with some
fairness after all, despite the obvious competitiveness of the store positions.
“The salemen’s lot was gradually
improving, for the mass dismissals were replaced by a system of leave given
during the off-season and, what is more, a friendly society was going to be
created which would protect them against forced unemployment and would
guarantee them a pension. This was the embryo of the vast workers’
organizations to be created in the twentieth century.”[8]
It
isn’t an easy process for them, at one point Mouret even accuses Denise of
being a socialist, which I found to be very amusing. Ultimately however, Denise
whispers feminine ideas to Mouret which the customers love. Mouret creates a
band amongst the Bonheur workers, and organizes a concert and ball, it becomes
a media event for the good of the store. An amusement room for the assistants
is created with billiard tables, backgammon, chess, classes are given in
languages, grammar, arithmetic, and geography, also riding and fencing. A
library is created with tens of thousands of books at the disposal of the
staff. A resident doctor who gave free consultation, baths, bars and a hair
dressing salon is added to the Bonheur. Conceivably like the Bolovilles as
described in Chris Carlsson’s Processed
World, or models of commune usage architecture such as Arcosanti in
Arizona, the Bonheur is self-reliant. Paris would seem to become alive to this
idea of self reliance.
Logic
would seem to escape the confines of capitalism by all measure. Somehow today’s
massive chains, independent specialty stores and hovels, and large malls
theoretically live in harmony with one another in today’s free market economy. As a young adult I believed that such
employment was interchangeable and mostly permanent if not continuously available.
The employment requirements in places like Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s
(Monsanto and company,) have become quite high, and have forced competitors
into like-minded policy. I can no longer tell if I am over or under qualified,
or if the FBI has put me on some kind of unemployment list due to my
affectations for anarchism. Somehow humanity persevered at Le Bon Marché, and
it would seem that early feminist insistences from the parlor room matriarchal
underground had a lot to do with it.
The
Woman’s Suffrage Movement, and right to vote would still not be universalized
in western society until 1979, and the 1940s respectively. Yet there is discrimination
and inequality currently in law, in capitalist society and employment
situations within the supposed first world predicament. Freedom is still a long
effort to come. In this case Émile Zola already knew the “flavor of the day,”
and this is indicated by the Bonheur’s placement of the reading room with
children’s books and presumably also, tea. It is odd that such a budding corporate
behemoth should have a sense of grassroots community in its later incarnation.
Today
such liberties are considered a fantasy of the 1970s commercial co-ops and not generally
in line with consumerist societal associative standards. We had a ping pong
table in the break room where I worked in 2001, until male dominance made it
extremely unpopular. It was quite a bizarre experience, someone was fired for
discrimination and we were actually glad to get rid of it. A pool table would
have been more appropriate. Due to resistance Taylorism inadvertently opened up
wider public services and possibilities in unionization. When rights are
achieved it is easier to say, “Now see here!”, once those rights are trampled
upon. The International Labor Organization did not ratify the minimum age
convention until 1973, for example. In the 1800s factory acts were used to
limit child labor to 12 hours a day, although the laws were not practical or
effective, and often not enforced. By the time of publishing Les Bonheur Des Dames, most labor was
limited to a ten hour day, although I imagine not in rural conditions. Today
conversely it has been exceedingly difficult to achieve wage standardization
for more than fifteen hours a week.
At
any rate the concept of Scientific Management has again been superseded by
economic efficiency. Taylorism created worker tension and revolt as employers
who did not concede to humanist considerations were subject to riots and
closure. Today in the workplace we [theoretically] consider the idea of
Taylorism synonymous with safety regularity, at least by law in this country to
some greater extent, whereas avarice rules much of everything else in the world
sadly, and many such regulations are not practiced or enforced globally.
Restructuring
the medieval lanes and avenues of Paris created public sewers and more sanitary
public practices. It also created massive displacement to various Parisians.
The effects of human displacement may have been a factor towards the eventuality
of worker regulation at Le Bon Marché if not the Bonheur. Émile Zola does
exemplify the Bonheur within the public regulations that were used to employ
gentrification [page 380,] the system created by Haussmann.
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