Rereading Elsa Triolet’s Roses à crédit as a Fairy Tale for Tough Financial Times

Abstract

Elsa Triolet’s Roses à crédit (1959) tracks its heroine’s discovery of the material pleasures of the postwar consumer boom. Yet, all is not “glorious” in the Trente Glorieuses, as Roses à crédit exposes the personal and social costs of societal transformation. Debt increasingly underwrites Martine’s desires—until accounts must be settled, and reality forecloses upon her happiness. To understand how the novel taps into the socioeconomic and metaphysical anxieties of its times and indicts consumer capitalism’s excesses, Roses à crédit can be read as weaving and unraveling the traditional fairy tale. In this modern tale, the “ogress” reality interrupts the enchantment of fiction, in the sense of both a marvelous plot and illusory riches. Triolet’s narrative comes irrecoverably undone, shaking its protagonist’s faith—in other words, her credence or credit—in money’s ability to underwrite happiness. Ultimately, as I contend, Roses à crédit deploys and updates classic fairy tale conventions to craft a gendered critique of consumer capitalism for uncertain economic times—hers, and our own, both bound up in consumer cultures of credit and debt.