What to read if... you're suffering from sales fever

Ahh! The sales. Those intoxicating fin du saison bazaars of allure, enticement and - too often - regret.¹ We all know how it goes - it's marked down, we can't resist, we snap it up: and on and on it goes, as we’re filled with a kind of berserking bargain fever; until, finally, in the cold, clear light of home, we assess what is, frankly, a pretty mixed haul. Rather an expensive haul, in fact. One which could have subsidised one or two really nice/beautiful/useful things which we actually wanted. We repent. We have learned our lesson. Until the next time.

No-one understands this fever better than Emile Zola; and in The Ladies' Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) he forensically anatomises for us the seductive pleasures of shopping; draws back the curtain on shopping as theatre. Ostensibly a novel which contrasts the rise of Octave Mouret, and his creation, the magnificent department store Au Bonheur des Dames (based on the then revolutionary new Paris shopping experience, the Bon , Marché) with the fall of M. Baudu and his small, traditional draper’s shop (literally opposite Au Bonheur); this is a novel whose true protagonist is a shop: and never have the pleasures and compulsions of shopping been so powerfully described.

Shopping is both religion and seduction, thrillingly conveyed in Mouret’s verbal seduction of the financier, Baron Hartman, as he outlines the principles of successful retailing:

Overwhelm your clientele - women - with fantasy and the irresistible desires that come with shopping. Pile up the goods. Display them to overpower the senses. Raise to women a temple, create out of the pleasure of shopping the rite of a new religion.

Shopping for pleasure, as opposed to functional purchasing, is defined as a solely - imperatively - feminine domain; the religious analogy reflecting the confines of a leisured female existence; the need of any successful cult to attract a continuous supply of acolytes; and the way in which this particular religion both defines and creates the nurturing flame of need: fantasy and the irresistible desires that come with shopping. The desire to shop, is almost an entity in itself, like the shop that feeds it, a ravening, voracious forest fire of impulse and desire that leaves a shop-floor in the aftermath of a sale “a battlefield, still warm from the massacre of fabrics.”

Discrimination is a key element in all successful shopping: and never more important than at sale time. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen ) is a novel based around discrimination: how snap decisions can lead to biased assumptions; how choices influence outcomes. The famous central pair, Darcy and Elizabeth, each has to learn that their judgement is considerably less clear-sighted than they imagined; Charlotte Lucas chooses to buy now on the marriage market rather than be left on the shelf, despite the rather unprepossessing husband material on offer; Lydia (the perfect customer for Au Bonheur des Dames if only it had been around) waltzes unthinkingly along the edge of a precipice, never appearing to recognise that she has been rescued from disaster; and never (even offstage at the end of the novel, when Austen offers us a glimpse of the future), seeming to suffer even a twinge of buyer's remorse. Her attitude to life is perfectly summed up in this greeting to her sisters: “Look here, I have bought this bonnet. I do not think it very pretty, but I thought I might as well buy it as not.” This is how a lot of us shop at the sales.

Shopping, of course, as well as assailing some as akin to a dangerous fever, is also a form of economic energy, a necessary function of survival, as soon as society removes itself from a purely hunter-gatherer axis of existence. It becomes a force that can fuel national prosperity (possibly leading to the spreading of the ripples of social reform); or drive economic recovery from recession (as you know, John Maynard Keynes had quite a few things to say about this - so, hey, you could always kick back with A Treatise on Money (that's the short, really radical one): just to, you know, clarify your position). If you're going to wantonly “Add to basket”, it’s always nice to be able to tell yourself it's for the greater good.

How we spend our money, reflects both our circumstances; and, more generally, the society we live in. Round about a Pound a Week (Maud Pember Reeves and Charlotte Wilson) was published in 1913 as an expansion of a Fabian Society pamphlet examining living conditions among working-class people in the Elephant and Castle, London. The focus is deliberately not on the poorest of the poor - a pound a week was a respectable income for a working man at that time: and it still wasn't enough. Pember Reeves details the difficulties, shifts and resourcefulness of the women managing these incomes for their families, in the days before national healthcare and other such provisions of the welfare state. It's sobering reading.

“The religion of beauty, of coquetry and fashion,” Zola wrote in his research notebooks for Au Bonheur des Dames. One of the things (chimeras?) that fevered shopping pursues is an ideal self, a beauteous being with a lifestyle reflecting all one’s current desires. To experience a version of this, presented with all the charm of a sugared almond, try The Rape of the Lock (Alexander Pope), a delicious verse confection masquerading (18thc style) as a classical epic, with beaux and belles, a ravishing heroine (definitely Belinda with the Good Hair), a wicked baron and an impromptu haircut; guardian sylphs; and an opening scene built entirely around the heroine’s dressing -table. The crisp pastel shell of this poem, conceals the densely witty, kernel. (By the way, it's all true - OK, maybe not the sylphs exactly.) Pure pleasure and the most elegant wit imaginable.

Who are you? or Who would you like to be? are two of the fundamental questions continually addressed to all shoppers. Yet literature (like Zola) seems interested in recreational shopping- even in shopping - as a purely feminine arena. But men shop too. Interestingly, men shopping seems to offer material for comedy rather than passion (or even tragedy); perhaps the subtext being that stepping so far away from their traditionally perceived hunting role is automatically amusing, poor things. As if shopping and masculinity are somehow antithetical. (As if.) Sartorially, self-knowledge is important for all shoppers; and for men this can be conveniently polarised as: in an ideal world, are you Cary Grant or Steve McQueen? As with all self-knowledge, the answer isn't always what one thinks - or wants. This is why so many people trot around in unflattering clothes, bought on a whim or because the garment(s) fulfilled an inner fantasy (vide Zola, it all comes back to Zola here).

Bertie Wooster is an excellent example of this, an impulse shopper who succumbs again and again to the seduction of some natty and unsuitable item of clothing (purple socks, Old Etonian spats), as he skitters from dangerous engagement (romantic rather than martial - poor Bertie is catnip to the more ruthless sex, they want to save/reform him) to social imbroglio; only to be wrenched back from the brink of social disaster by the brilliant and imperturbable Jeeves, his gentleman's gentleman. This is comedy at its most sublime, in the hands of a master. Try Aunt Agatha Speaks her Mind and Pearls Mean Tears, two linked stories in The Inimitable Jeeves (P.G.Wodehouse), in which the hapless Bertie makes a bold bid for a red cummerbund, in the teeth of Jeeves’s disapproval. The cummerbund makes Bertie feel like a jolly old hidalgo (a subsequent white mess jacket is clearly Bertie as Noel Coward): fantasy and the irresistible desires that come with shopping, made manifest by a stitched length of cloth.

But what of the pleasure of fulfilled desire? It lurks offstage or in the background in all these works. It's neither uncomplicated nor always lastingly satisfying, often degenerating into Lydia's retrospective assessment, “I thought I might as well buy it as not.” Shopping - especially shopping in the sales - is not for the unwary.

1. WTRI has just received the first sale invitation of the summer, so it seemed a good moment to reintroduce this. Must rush: the invite was early access and I don't want to miss anything…