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  • Gender, War, and the Department Store:Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames
  • Vaheed Ramazani (bio)

In an early sketch for Au Bonheur des Dames, Zola remarks that he wants his new novel to be "the poem of modern-day activity." "Thus," he says, "a complete change of philosophy: no more pessimism; don't show the stupidity and melancholy of life, demonstrate on the contrary its continual labor, the power and the gaiety of its birth-giving. In a word, go with the century, express the century, which is a century of action and conquest, of effort on all fronts."1 Zola's main idea for the novel, we read further on, is that of a department store "absorbing, crushing all the small businesses of a neighborhood." "But," the author hastens to add, "I will not weep for them; on the contrary, for I want to show the triumph of modern activity; they are no longer of their time, too bad for them! they are crushed by the giant" (RM 3: 1681). Ten years later, this self-exhortation to "scientific" impersonality finds a suggestive echo in the narrated reflection of one of the protagonists of La Débâcle, Zola's epic portrayal of the Franco-Prussian war: "Maurice was in favor of war, he believed it to be inevitable, necessary to the very existence of nations. Isn't life a war at every moment? Isn't the very essence of nature that of continuous combat, the victory of the most worthy, force sustained and revitalized by action, life reborn always fresh from within death" (RM 5: 408)? As Zola makes abundantly clear, Maurice, despite the acuity of his "Darwinian"2 insights, represents the degenerate side of France, an empire exhausted by excessive pleasures and resting on the laurels of its glorious past. So when, at the story's end, Maurice expires along with the French army's will to fight Germany, we understand that a stagnant political regime has gone the way of small commerce in the earlier novel: "too bad" for the French; "they are no longer of their time." But we "shall not weep for them," for from their defeat a stronger nation is born. Indeed, in his article commemorating the battle of Sedan, Zola writes: "A nation that has survived such a catastrophe is a nation immortal, invincible throughout the ages" (RM 5: 1415). Sedan represents, then, "regeneration through pain," a "necessary bloodbath," a "virile" kind of "healing" (RM [End Page 126] 5: 1410). Yet, in La Débâcle, Zola's preferred image for this "virile" renewal is that of a ritual self-emasculation: "France amputating herself" (RM 5:1400), cutting off her "decaying member" (RM 5: 906, 907, 912). In the classic gesture of fetishistic inversion, castration has become the sign of potency and health.

But how does a wounded France recover her wholeness, restore her lost identity as eternal phallic mother? Through the masculinization of birth and rebirth—the naturalization of war as male parturition. In the passages quoted above, "birth-giving" is synonymous with "action and conquest"; new life with "combat," "victory," and "death"; "regeneration" with the pain and the blood of men (not of the menses or of women's birthing bodies). What is "necessary to the . . . existence of nations," then, is the male appropriation of female reproduction. "Giving birth to a book is always an abominable torture for me," says Zola as he struggles to finish La Débâcle.3 But, of course, this ostensible denial of sexual difference only works to reinforce sexual hierarchies, to affirm the superiority ("the power and the gaiety") of men's birth-giving, by the pen or by the sword.

We need only look, for example, at Zola's diagnosis of the particular "malady" afflicting the French nation, the underlying cause for "her" miserable defeat. For the "illness," it turns out, is an uncontrolled femininity, characterized, not surprisingly, as a mysterious matrix, "the deep and hidden origin whence History's facts are born" (RM 5: 1411). Maurice, "the bad part of France" (RM 5: 1400), suffers, we are told, from "womanish excitability" (RM 5: 557), "female nervous weakness" (RM 5: 715), while the Communard...

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