By the 1860’s the pandemonium induced by the Industrial Revolution settled as the Second Empire established itself in France. While both took a firm hold on social norms, cultural expectations, and business practices, the machines replaced human artistry. Precisely because of this transition, individual craftsmanship became outdated and obsolete; the big department store, an emblem of capitalism, continued to emerge, dominate, and swallow up smaller competition. As a contemporary issue for its time, Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise comes as no surprise in its concentration on the struggle of smaller shops against the immense success and dominance of the big new department store, Ladies’ Paradise. Although the stark difference between the dying shops of an age past and the avant-garde emporiums of the future equals the quintessential experience of the modernization of the nineteenth century, the symbolic description of the Ladies’ Paradise as a soulless “machine” captures the perspective of what the department store represents. In the novel people resent Ladies’ Paradise and its seemingly unexplainable success. However, not until the “machine” gains a soul does the Ladies’ Paradise become complete and wholesome.
Denise felt that she was watching a machine working at high pressure…. these passions in the street were giving life to the materials: the laces shivered, then dropped again, concealing the depths of the shop with an exciting air of mystery; even the lengths of cloth, thick and square, were breathing, exuding a tempting odor, while the overcoats were throwing back their shoulders still more on the dummies, which were acquiring souls, and the huge velvet coat was billowing out, supple and warm, as if on shoulders of flesh and
Denise felt that she was watching a machine working at high pressure…. these passions in the street were giving life to the materials: the laces shivered, then dropped again, concealing the depths of the shop with an exciting air of mystery; even the lengths of cloth, thick and square, were breathing, exuding a tempting odor, while the overcoats were throwing back their shoulders still more on the dummies, which were acquiring souls, and the huge velvet coat was billowing out, supple and warm, as if on shoulders of flesh and
Denise, the protagonist who just arrives from the country side of France, first witnesses Ladies’ Paradise come alive and could hardly believe what she saw:

blood, with a heaving breast and quivering hips. But the furnace-like heat with which the shop was ablaze came above all from the selling, from the bustle at the counters, which could be felt behind the walls. There was a continuous roar of the machine at work, of customers crowding into the departments, dazzled by the merchandise, then propelled towards the cash-desk. And it was all regulated and organized with the remorselessness of a machine: the vast horde of women were as if caught in the wheels of an inevitable force. 2 blood, with a heaving breast and quivering hips. But the furnace-like heat with which the shop was ablaze came above all from the selling, from the bustle at the counters, which could be felt behind the walls. There was a continuous roar of the machine at work, of customers crowding into the departments, dazzled by the merchandise, then propelled towards the cash-desk. And it was all regulated and organized with the remorselessness of a machine: the vast horde of women were as if caught in the wheels of an inevitable force. 2
The Paradise not only exists in order to establish a relationship with customers, but also to efficiently capture women by seducing them with anything and everything it can sell, like a well-oiled engine. Within the Paradise, Zola elaborately concentrates on every inanimate object and deliberately leaves out the employees. The Industrial Revolution, famous for depicting humans as gears to the more powerful entity of the industrial engines, exhibited a time when people possessed mechanical tasks. Even the Paradise seems to maintain a soul because the employees persist on gaining extrinsic rewards and customers succumb to spending. However, when the department store begins to govern the operators and not the other way around, people start to resent the state-of-the-art productivity of the period.
The small shop owners surrounding the Paradise, in particular, considered the big department store as full of “dandies” who “treated the goods and the customers like parcels, dropping their employers or being dropped by him at a moment’s notice.” According to Denise’s uncle, the Paradise possesses “no affection, no manners, no art!” The employees, altogether replaceable, cannot preserve an essential role within the belly of the beast. The Paradise is not conscious of the consequences firing an employee right and left, just as the factories during the Industrial Revolution held little concern for their laborers. Also, Octave Mouret, the commander and chief of the store, only wished to devour, capitalize, and conquer the woman. He wanted to put her on a pedestal only “to hold her at his mercy” She become the oil and power of the department store; she made the department store “smooth running,” as if “like a well-made machine.” Everything about the Ladies’ Paradise screamed inhuman, as if a “monster” that did not care about anything but itself. Even Denise, who ultimately provides the beast its soul and humanity, felt the ominous power exuding from within the store.
Although fascinated and enraptured by the Paradise, Denise felt uneasy. She “felt a desire to run away…. 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 up in its motion, which was already beginning to make the walls shake.”5 As if by instinct, Denise felt the cold indifference that reigns over the store with its relentless teeth “extracting money from [the customers’] very flesh.” The juxtaposition of this domineering atmosphere to the exterior world magnifies as Denise contrasts her experiences within and without the belly of the beast.
Once out of reach of the Paradise’s grasp, Denise “felt her chest was emerging from six-months’ suffocation…. [originating from] the heavy stones of the Ladies’ Paradise." She conducts herself unlike the other employees, whose only ambition presides in attaining and spending money; she does not succumb like the customers, who were successfully seduced into yielding their money; she contradicts Mouret, who simply did what he did in order to dominate and hold supremacy. Denise never surrenders and truly changes into a part of the operation, no matter how desperately Mouret tried to incorporate her into the workings of his creation.
Denise confuses Mouret, a womanizer of sorts who carefully calculated his female companion, with her constant and firm refusal to join the others he had conquered in the past. He, the puppeteer who controlled, manipulated, or seduced everyone, did not have perfect control over one woman, Denise. Mouret, who usually did not get himself involved in the business of employee turnover, went out his way to offer Denise her job back, almost as if he felt something missing with her absence. He tried to make her a part of his world by enticing her with benefits, promotions, and finally an invitation to become his. With her return Mouret strove to capture the one girl who seemed to evade complete submission to his Paradise. Denise ultimately reputes his invitation, which also initiates her refusal to become a tool of the machine.
Mouret realizes that his precious Paradise, which brought him his desired fortune, fame, and authority, is as incomplete and cold as his success in dominating in business. With Denise out of his reach on account of her relentless refusal to comply with, Mouret eventually transforms his lust into love and obsession. As he looks upon Denise with “despair”, his empire that illuminates the street of old, crumbling, dingy, and dark shops with its blazing modernization, has “nothing left… the shop was plunged into darkness.” Mouret feels empty despite the immense wealth and prosperity he gained from operating such a well-oiled industrial Frankenstein.
When Mouret ultimately chooses Denise, a miscalculated passion, over his past deliberate relationship with Madame Desforges, unsought rivalry emerges as a result. Due to her immediate and humiliating failure to embarrass Denise and recapture Mouret, Madame Desforges exacted “revenge by helping” Bouthemont “set up a rival shop…. Quatre Saisons, for which the newspapers were already full of advertisements.” Mouret’s conductor façade began to break. His old ways of only seeing people as money, as a way to attain power, as tools and oil for his engine, turned out to be inapplicable on Denise. He knew that without her he and his prized emporium would not be able to go one without first becoming insane. Thus began “the reign of Denise.”
Ladies’ Paradise desperately needed Denise, the embodiment of a soul. She made it more human. She persuaded Mouret, who at this point would do anything for her in order to maintain a relationship, to implement her humanitarian initiatives. These initiatives improved the lives of the employees significantly by finally permitting and applying desperately needed compassion to the Paradise, making it a behemoth and more of a haven for both workers and customers alike. No longer was the machine a monster. Denise was able to take the industrial, seemingly ruthless, and inevitable capitalistic nature of the Paradise and make it more human, more acceptable, even desirable in comparison to what it used to be. Denise completed the Ladies’ Paradise by making it wholesome, almost poetic, and absolutely alive.
From the beginning of the novel when Denise first arrived and becomes captivated by the big department store, the Ladies’ Paradise, a result of the Industrial Revolution and the pinnacle representation of rising capitalism, was a dominant force that operated like a mighty automaton. However, the Paradise was a monster as well as a machine, using people in any way it saw fit in order to grow in affluence and supremacy. Thus, in this way, the high functioning department store was missing a soul, for everyone inside the belly of paradise was there for shallow, shelf-interested reasons. Only when Denise entered did the tight reign on the business operation soften and make way for the interest of others. Denise not only embeds a conscience into the gears, but she also becomes the very nature necessary to complete its Industrial Revolution. The Ladies’ Paradise finally became part apparatus and part human.

Work Cited
Zola, Émile, and Brian Nelson. The Ladies' Paradise. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

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[ 1 ]. Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, trans. Brian Nelson (Oxford University Press, 2008), xv.
[ 2 ]. Zola, 23
[ 3 ]. Zola, 234
[ 4 ]. Zola, 331
[ 5 ]. Zola, 49
[ 6 ]. Zola, 108
[ 7 ]. Zola, 140
[ 8 ]. Zola, 205
[ 9 ]. Zola, 302
[ 10 ]. Zola, 305
[ 11 ]. Zola, 330
[ 12 ]. Zola, 355-356