We discuss Julien Duvivier’s marvellous 1930 film ‘Au Bonheur des Dames’ based on Émile Zola’s eponymous novel. See links below.

Julien Duvivier (director), Gerlaur / Marthe Pinchaud (costume design), Au Bonheur des Dames (1930): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020656/

Au Bonheur des Dames on Accroche Note: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA5EqTkz84I

Émile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Delight) (first published 1883): https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/35360/au-bonheur-des-dames--the-ladies--delight-/9780140447835.html

Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903) in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, eds. The Blackwell City Reader. Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (2002): http://www.esperdy.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Simmel_21.pdf

Patricia O’Brien, ‘The Kleptomania Diagnosis: Bourgeois Women and Theft in Late Nineteenth-Century France’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Autumn 1983): https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3787239.pdf

Elaine S. Abelson, ‘The Invention of Kleptomania’, Signs, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Autumn 1989): https://www.freud.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Abelson-The-Invention-of-Kleptomania.pdf