“How would it be if she had not lost that necklace? … How small a thing will ruin or save one!” (Maupassant 61). The short story “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant, tells of Matilda, who feels as if she was born into the wrong class. She attends a fancy party, borrowing her friend’s diamond necklace, which she loses, and puts herself and her family into extreme poverty. She and her husband pay for the necklace over the next 10 years. The necklace ends up saving Matilda because the necklace makes her more joyful, and it teaches her determination. The necklace saves Matilda because it makes her more joyful. Towards the end of the story, Mrs. Loisel tells Madame Forestier about all the hard times they had paying for the diamond necklace and the changes they had to make: “But it is finished and I am decently content... and she smiled with a proud and simple joy” (Maupassant 62). In the quotation, Matilda feels …show more content…
In the story, Matilda returns the duplicate of the lost necklace to her friend and thinks about everything she will have to do to pay for the necklace. “Mrs. Loisel now knew the horrible life of necessity. She did her part, however, completely, heroically. It was necessary to pay this frightful debt. She would pay it” (Maupassant 60). Matilda has now turned into a “strong, hard woman, the crude woman of the poor household” (Maupassant 61). She has to work for everything. The quotation makes it evident that Matilda feels determined because when the story says “She would pay it” that indicates that she would do anything to get out of debt. “Completely, heroically,” also shows that she has resolved to pay for the necklace no matter what. To do something completely means to do something totally, and to be heroic means to be brave or courageous even in the face of hardship. Matilda learns determination indirectly from the necklace, so the necklace saves
Selfishness led Madame Loisel to feel as if her life wasn’t good enough, and feel as if she deserved better. She did not appreciate the life she had, spending her time day dreaming about living a life of luxury. When her husband arrived home with an invitation to an exclusive party, she was more distraught over not having a proper dress or accessory to wear than she was thankful for her husband’s efforts. She gladly took her husband’s savings, money he was intending to use to buy a gun for himself, and spent it on a dress for herself. Pride got in the way of Madame Loisel admitting her mistake of having lost the necklace. She’d rather accept her debt and spend years paying it off than tell Madame Forestier that she lost her jewels. In her mind, it would be unlike the beautiful, rich
In “The Necklace”, Mathilde Loisel is a woman who cannot tolerate her lower-class status, believing “herself born for every delicacy and luxury”(82). Mathilde’s vain materialistic goals, make her bitter and unhappy. The main point of irony in the story is the fact that Mathilde borrows the necklace and looses it. The necklace was very expensive, or so she thought, so she ended up in poverty
The necklace serves as a symbol for greed. When Mathilda Loisel loses the necklace that she believed was worth forty thousand francs, she desperately retraces her steps and gets her husband to help her find it as well. It ends up taking ten years to pay off the debt. The ten years were hard on Mathilda Loisel and her husband, and Maupassant told the reader that she “looked old now… with hair half combed, with skirts award, and reddened hands” (6). However, even after the long ten years of manual labor all because she lost the necklace, she “sat down near the window and though of that evening at the ball so long ago, when she has been so beautiful and so admired” (6). The necklace symbolizes that when greed controls emotions and decisions, it never leads to good results.
Her husband tries and tries until he comes up with a great idea to give her an invitation to a ball. She cheers up a little until she realizes she can’t afford a dress. Her husband asks how much and had given her the money to purchase herself a nice dress. She has the dress but still doesn’t feel pretty nor happy after she put the dress on. She wanted more than just the dress which was jewels but didn’t have any. Someone suggested that she should use flowers, but didn’t find happiness in the flowers. Madame Forestier offer Mathilde to borrow her diamond necklace, which gave her the emptiness that she needed to feel happy. She had a great night and was on her way home when she went to feel for the necklace but found that it was gone. She started to panic and retraced her steps but couldn’t find it anywhere. She and her husband went from jeweler to jeweler to find the exact necklace and to replace it. They worked and worked until they had paid it off and returned it to Madame Forestier. She was a little annoyed since she had got it a few weeks after the ball. Eventually she admitted to what she had done and was surprised with what she was told. She was informed that the necklace was a fake. That it was costume jewelry. In this story the Madame was an outsider towards Mathilde. Mathilde didn’t know who she was and had taken the necklace to wear for the
She thinks that because her friend is rich and beautiful, that her material items would extend with that wealth. Instead, it shows Madame that even the richest of people do not always have to have genuine items. Madame realizes that she does have fun at the party even if she is not wearing all authentic things, the opposite of what she thinks she is wearing. A third ironic happening, is when she has been working to pay off the money for the necklace for a decade. Madame clearly admits to her friend on page 196 how she loses the necklace, and has been paying it back for ten years. As someone is reading the story, they will find it silly how Mme. is working for something when she is usually having people, mostly her husband, do things for her. Instead, she is working to pay off the money that she has spent on a replacement necklace. The turnout of the story changes Madame’s views on how silly, textile items, are not always needed for someone to be happy.
‘The Necklace’ is a morality tale written by Guy de Maupassant where he portrays the life of a beautiful but dissatisfied girl named Mathilde who desires to live a luxurious life despite being born into a clerk’s family and marrying a clerk too. Mathilde’s discontentment in life instigates her to pretend someone rich that she is not. Moreover, it leads her to severe trouble that caused ten years of hardship to Mathilde and her husband. So, this suffering is a punishment for Mathilde which taught her a lesson and changed her dramatically over the course of the story by making her a person of completely different personality for whom appearances
The story intially takes place at a ball that Madame Louisel has been invited to by her husband. In the beginning of the story Madame is very indecisive about making an appearance at the ball. She complained she did not have a dress, any jewels, and she was scared she would look like a "pauper"(174). She did not want to look poor around a bunch of rich woman, so she had asked a friend for a piece of jewelry to wear for the night. Excited, she picks out the diamond necklace that seemed to stand out to her. She adored it. The narrator describes it as "lovliest of all, elegant, smiling, and radiating with joy"(175). Having a blast at the party, dancing, drinking, and not thinking about anything else, Madame left the ball around four in the morning. Calling a cab, Madame and her husband were on their way home, delighted with the fun night that they had. Finally arriving at home, they begin to get into comfortable clothes when suddenly Madame notices that the diamond necklace she had borrowed from a friend for the night had gone missing. Searching everyhwere
Furthermore, when Mathilde got home she realized that the diamond necklace was gone. M. Loisel helps Mathilde look for it, and spends the next day looking for it around the city, but alas he fails to find it. Upon having no choice, the couple takes loans and spend their whole inheritance to get a new necklace for Madame Foreistier. They get the necklace, and Mathilde returns it to Madame Foreistier, who didn’t notice the replacement. However, for the next 10 years, Mathilde and M. Loisel save up to pay for all
In The Necklace, the main character, Mme. Loisel, has a very materialistic view on happiness. She owns all of these nice things, but is not content in her life. When she sees more elegant items that she wants, she becomes more dissatisfied with her life until she can get it. By the end of the story, she becomes poor from having to repay a large amount of debt. In the end, she learns that money does not equal happiness, and that she should have been grateful for the smaller things in her life that made it
Matilda in The Necklace was a woman who knew exactly what she wanted. She was self-aware in the sense that she knew she was beautiful, and she wanted to feel beautiful at all times via things like fancy necklaces and elegant dresses. Because she lived in the middle-class, though, she couldn’t have the shiny things she desired. This was not the problem. The problem was that the author portrayed her in such a way that made her seem vain, rude, and just overall awful. Just for wanting pretty things. There is absolutely no problem with wanting nice things and wishing you had the money to buy them. That’s called human nature. People always want more than they have, and Matilda is no different. As if that wasn’t enough, the author went and made her compare herself to other women. She
In the end, they made up for the necklace by buying a new diamond necklace and had made up for the money they had spent. They soon come to find out that the necklace was fake and that they had wasted many years of their life trying to make up for the worthless necklace they had misplaced. If there was a theme song for Madame Loisel in the “Necklace,” it would be “No Scrubs” by TLC.
In The Necklace the woman lost her friend’s “expensive” necklace. The loss of this necklace caused her and her husband to live in major debt when they decided to buy her another one just like it to replace it. They worked many jobs for ten years and she lost her beauty and health. When she saw her friend again she was told the necklace
Her pursuit to obtain this apparent life style is what left her empty at the end. After ten years of hard work and misery to pay a replacement diamond necklace, she informs her high class friend, Mme. Forestier, she lost the original necklace the night of the ball. To her surprise she discovers the necklace was fake and not worth the money they spent ten year working to pay. In this story, we observe that Madame Loisel does not notice the sacrificing love her husband has for her and simply sees him as a clerk and nothing more.
Some things are not what they seem. In The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant, Madame Loisel is not content with her social status or husband. She loses a necklace she borrowed to look rich and must work hard to pay for a replacement. She later finds out it was not authentic and she had wasted her life replacing a cheap object. By using characters and events throughout the passage, Maupassant develops the theme that what appears to be is not necessarily true.
Loisel had a brilliant idea, his idea was to replace the necklace with another one, they went to several stores and in one of them they found the exact copy, it costed 36,000 francs. Obviously they couldn’t pay it so Loisel and Mathilde were borrowing money from everybody, Loisel signed notes everywhere, he did business with shark loaners, and he even compromised his life. They worked for 10 years trying to pay for the necklace, Mathilde was now experiencing the life of a needy person. She learned how to do the housework, Mathilde looked like a peasant because she was carrying a basket and because of the way she was dressed “And, clad like a peasant woman, basket in arm…”(p. 231). Mathilde became old, heavy, rough, and harsh like one of the poor people. One day Mme. Loisel was walking and she saw her friend, the one that let Mme. Loisel use the necklace, Mathilde smiled with joy then told her friend how she had lost the necklace and how she replaced it, but Mathilde’s friend told her that the necklace she was wearing at the party was