The Role Of Cosmic Irony In The Necklace

In Guy de Maupassant’s story the necklace, Madame Loisel’s is a women in the middle class who’s unsatisfied with her lifestyle and envies the upper class lifestyle. Her personality takes her through a irony filled roller coaster throughout the story. The story shows three different types of irony in the story which are verbal, situational, and dramatic.

The necklace was only worth 500 francs. When Mathilde sees Madame Forestier, she walks up to her and starts to tell her about the necklace. Mathilde explains “‘ And for the last ten years we have been paying for it”’(8) The it Mathilde was talking about was the necklace. Then Madame Forestier replies “‘ It was worth at very most five hundred francs”’ This must be devastating because Mathilde worked for something that was 36,000 francs, to only know she had to pay 500 francs. Therefore situational irony is used to serve justice in Guy de Maupassant’s “The

In The Necklace, the setting of Paris in the late 19th century is a world of elegance and wealth. If not born into a wealthy family, one would have two options: marry into a wealthy family, or stay in their social class. That is just the case for Mathilde Loisel, who is endowed with beauty but born into a family of clerks. She was born free and could have had a plentiful life because of her beauty. However, she was held back by the chains of her social status and forced to marry her wealthy husband Monsieur Loisel. Together they have an awkward relationship consisting only of their need for marriage.

Within the necklace there is multiple ironic things that happen. The three main ironic things are when she had bought a real necklace, the other necklace was fake and she had never know that it was fake, also when they search her dress to look for the necklace to look for it, and she knows that she was not the one who had sold the necklace.

The irony In the necklace is when she lost the necklace she did not tell the owner that she lost it. so she worked numerous years to buy her a new to only realize the original

There is plenty of irony in “The Necklace”. The situational irony in this story happens at the end of the story when Mathilde, who really does not like hard labor or anything lower class finds out that she has had to give up the greatest years of her life to save up and replace a necklace that she discovers is a fake.  For a person who prided herself in that kind of taste and appearance on the upper class could not even tell the difference between the fake and valuable. The dramatic

The use of rhetoric emphasizes the tragic yet ironic theme in the story of The Necklace. Madame Loisel lived in the middle class society but longed to be a member of the higher class. She wanted to live above her means and would do whatever it took to get there, however when her dream of having something of value came true, it ended up hurting her overall;

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

Exquisite but worthless, the necklace illustrates the puissance of perception and the breach between appearance and actuality. In the story, Madame Loisel borrows the necklace from her intimate idol Madame Forestier, with intention as to insinuate wealth. Madame Forestier hides the fact that the necklace is a fake she too wants to impress her peer and paint the illusion of being more affluent than she truly is. Due to Mathilde being profoundly jealous of Madame Forestier, she never suspects the necklace’s legitimacy and blindly assumes the necklace is made of diamonds. Madame Loisel willingly plunders into this world of hypocrisy, as she whole heartily believes in her borrowed opulence; she projects an appearance of abundance to others. Because she believes in her wealth, she becomes wealthy in the eyes of others. The fact that the necklace is the focal point of the beguilement that triggers of Mathilde’s social collapse implies nothing but trouble can result from obscuring the truth of one’s situation.

Essay for “The Necklace” Many people dream of being wealthy, but when given the chance are unable to act the part. In today’s society, people are often divided by their status. Individual’s status in society can even affect the way others are treated and looked upon. In “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant, Madame Loisel is faced with this conflict.

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 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.

“The Necklace” develops the theme of irony through Madame Loisel’s constant need for money and jewels. The first example of irony is when she borrows the necklace to appear wealthy, then loses all her wealth. When Madame Loisel begins to worry about how she will appear to the other wealthy people, her husband tells her to go borrow jewelry from her friend, Madame Forestier (Maupassant 4). The very

Now consider the role of Mathilde Loisel in “The Necklace”. She constantly grieves about her simple life and fantasizes about extravagant life style with rich people and food surrounding her. Her husband is a simple man and is satisfied with his life. He appreciates her for the food which is cooked and never complains. Being in the Ministry of Education their lifestyle is modest. Mathilde is not satisfied on the other hand even when her husband proudly announces that they have been invited at a formal party held by the Ministry of Education. The irony in the story is more or less the same with regard to the female characters. Mathilde cries and gets her prize in the form of a dress but she is never satisfied. She wants jewelry as well. The necklace that she borrows from Madame Forestier teaches her a lesson of life. Since she is not familiar with the real jewelry she picks the cheapest one from her collection and wears it to the party why she loses it. Upon not finding the jewelry her husband takes the pain of selling everything out just to purchase an identical necklace worth 40,000 francs which leaves them poverty stricken for the next ten years during which her husband does three jobs and

The internal conflicts established in “The Necklace” were a result of Madame Loisels perception of happiness. Because of her ungrateful and dejected views on life, she didn’t realize nor recognize true merriment. In the text, Guy De Maupassant shows how Madame “..was one of those pretty and charming girls born as though fate had blundered over her, into a family of