College Hemp

A Persian Proverb:
“He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool—shun him. He who knows not and knows that he knows not is a child—teach him. He who knows and knows not that he knows is asleep—wake him. He who knows and knows that he knows is wise—follow him.”
He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool. Shun him. He who knows not and knows that he knows not is a child. Teach him. He who knows and knows not that he knows is asleep. Wake him. He who knows and knows that he knows is a wise man. Follow him.

Mathilde Loisel is “pretty and charming” but feels she has been born into a family of unfavorable economic status. She was married off to a lowly clerk in the Ministry of Education, who can afford to provide her only with a modest though not uncomfortable lifestyle. Mathilde feels the burden of her poverty intensely. She regrets her lot in life and spends endless hours imagining a more extravagant existence. While her husband expresses his pleasure at the small, modest supper she has prepared for him, she dreams of an elaborate feast served on fancy china and eaten in the company of wealthy friends. She possesses no fancy jewels or clothing, yet these are the only things she lives for. Without them, she feels she is not desirable. She has one wealthy friend, Madame Forestier, but refuses to visit her because of the heartbreak it brings her.
One night, her husband returns home proudly bearing an invitation to a formal party hosted by the Ministry of Education. He hopes that Mathilde will be thrilled with the chance to attend an event of this sort, but she is instantly angry and begins to cry. Through her tears, she tells him that she has nothing to wear and he ought to give the invitation to one of his friends whose wife can afford better clothing. Her husband is upset by her reaction and asks how much a suitable dress would cost. She thinks about it carefully and tells him that 400 francs would be enough. Her husband quietly balks at the sum but agrees that she may have the money.
As the day of the party approaches, Mathilde starts to behave oddly. She confesses that the reason for her behavior is her lack of jewels. Monsieur Loisel suggests that she wear flowers, but she refuses. He implores her to visit Madame Forestier and borrow something from her. Madame Forestier agrees to lend Mathilde her jewels, and Mathilde selects a diamond necklace. She is overcome with gratitude at Madame Forestier’s generosity.
At the party, Mathilde is the most beautiful woman in attendance, and everyone notices her. She is intoxicated by the attention and has an overwhelming sense of self-satisfaction. At 4 A.M., she finally looks for Monsieur Loisel, who has been dozing for hours in a deserted room. He cloaks her bare shoulders in a wrap and cautions her to wait inside, away from the cold night air, while he fetches a cab. But she is ashamed at the shabbiness of her wrap and follows Monsieur Loisel outside. They walk for a while before hailing a cab.
When they finally return home, Mathilde is saddened that the night has ended. As she removes her wrap, she discovers that her necklace is no longer around her neck. In a panic, Monsieur Loisel goes outside and retraces their steps. Terrified, she sits and waits for him. He returns home much later in an even greater panic—he has not found the necklace. He instructs her to write to Madame Forestier and say that she has broken the clasp of the necklace and is getting it mended.
They continue to look for the necklace. After a week, Monsieur Loisel says they have to see about replacing it. They visit many jewelers, searching for a similar necklace, and finally find one. It costs 40,000 francs, although the jeweler says he will give it to them for 36,000. The Loisels spend a week scraping up money from all kinds of sources, mortgaging the rest of their existence. After three days, Monsieur Loisel purchases the necklace. When Mathilde returns the necklace, in its case, to Madame Forestier, Madame Forestier is annoyed at how long it has taken to get it back but does not open the case to inspect it. Mathilde is relieved.

The Loisels began to live a life of crippling poverty. They dismiss their servant and move into an even smaller apartment. Monsieur Loisel works three jobs, and Mathilde spends all her time doing the heavy housework. This misery lasts ten years, but at the end they have repaid their financial debts. Mathilde’s extraordinary beauty is now gone: she looks just likes the other women of poor households. They are both tired and irrevocably damaged from these years of hardship.
One Sunday, while she is out for a walk, Mathilde spots Madame Forestier. Feeling emotional, she approaches her and offers greetings. Madame Forestier does not recognize her, and when Mathilde identifies herself, Madame Forestier cannot help but exclaim that she looks different. Mathilde says that the change was on her account and explains to her the long saga of losing the necklace, replacing it, and working for ten years to repay the debts. At the end of her story, Madame Forestier clasps her hands and tells Mathilde the original necklace was just costume jewelry and not worth anything
A young woman named Mathilde Loisel is married to a little clerk of the Ministry of Public Instruction. They live a poor life, which Mathilde hates. One day, they are invited to a grand ball where the rich people will be. Mathilde buys a new gown from her husband’s savings intended to buy him a gun for shooting larks, for his hobby. To go with that very elegant gown, she borrows a diamond necklace from her friend Madame Forestier. At the ball, Mathilde is prettier than any woman there. When they arrive home after that ball, she discovers that the borrowed necklace is gone. She and her husband try to find it, but are not able to, so they buy another one exactly the same, for thirty-four thousand francs, from its original price of forty francs; such a very big amount of money for the couple. They use up Mathilde’s husband's inheritance, borrowed from usurers, and they work odd jobs for ten years just to make up for that amount. After a decade, Mathilde sees Madame Forestier by chance, and after those years, finally confesses that the necklace she returned was a replacement. Madame Forestier is shocked, and tells her that the necklace she lent her was fake, worth at most five hundred francs.

Mathilde Loisel is attractive and pretty, but unhappy, very unhappy. She believes that life has played her false. She feels relegated to a lower station than she deserves. She wanted to be appreciated and loved by some rich gentleman from a good family, but instead, having no dowry, she had to settle for a junior clerk in the Ministry of Public Instruction. Her existence is one of constant frustration. She hates her plain apartment, its absence of pictures on the walls, its shoddy furniture. Even the sight of her maid, doing housework, fills her with hopeless regrets and provokes flights of fancy about more opulent surroundings. Though other women of her class may come to terms with their station in life, Mathilde never can.
She is so humiliated by her lower-middle-class existence that she even refuses to see one of her old friends whom she has known from her days at the convent school. Madame Forestier is wealthy, and Mathilde finds visits to her too painful to bear; so, she spends her days hanging around her drab flat, sometimes crying the entire time, overcome with worry, regret, desperation, and distress.
Her husband, on the other hand, seems better adjusted. He does not notice that the tablecloth has been in use for three days. When he is served a simple casserole, he can exclaim with pleasure: “Well, a good hot-pot. I don’t know anything better than that.” One day, he comes home from his office with an invitation to a party that is being given by his superior, the minister of public instruction. Instead of greeting the news with delight, Mathilde throws the invitation down on the table, saying that it is no good to her, because she has nothing suitable to wear for such an occasion. Her husband tries to convince her that it was very difficult for a junior clerk to get asked to such an event. “You will see the whole world of officialdom there,” he says, suggesting that she wear that good-looking dress she once wore to the theater. She refuses and tells him to give the invitation to a colleague whose wife is better turned out than she.
Monsieur Loisel tries another tack. He asks her how much it would cost to get a proper dress. She thinks it over, trying to estimate what an old pinchpenny like him would be willing to spend. She decides on the sum of four hundred francs that, as it happens, is exactly the amount that he has put away to buy himself a gun so he could join some friends who go Sunday lark-shooting on the Nanterre flatlands. He is not happy to forgo his pleasure but agrees.
An appropriate dress is ordered and is ready before the date of the dance. Mathilde, however, is still depressed. Now she complains that she does not have any jewelry to wear with it. Her husband suggests flowers. She is unimpressed. He then suggests that she go to her rich friend Madame Forestier and borrow some jewelry. His wife thinks it a good idea and the next day goes and explains the situation to her. Madame Forestier is more than willing to comply and goes to a wardrobe to get a large jewelry casket. She tells Mathilde to take what she likes.
Such an embarrassment of riches makes it difficult for Mathilde to make up her mind. She asks to see something else. Suddenly, she discovers a black satin case that contains a magnificent necklace, “a river of diamonds.” With tremulous voice she asks if she may borrow this item. “But yes, certainly,” says her friend. Mathilde throws her arms around her friend’s neck, and then joyously hurries home with her treasure.
At the minister’s party, Mathilde scores a success. She appears to be the prettiest woman in the room; all men’s eyes are on her. Even the minister notices her. She dances throughout the night, leaving her exhausted husband dozing in a small drawing room with three other husbands whose wives are also enjoying themselves. When the party breaks up at four o’clock, Mathilde wants to get away as fast as possible because she does not want the other women, who all wear furs, to notice her plain cloth coat. She runs out to the street hoping to find a cab, but the search takes her down to the Seine where, at last, she and her husband find an old dilapidated brougham stationed along the embankment. The ride back to their dismal apartment is sad for Mathilde with her fresh memories of her triumph.
Once home, as she is taking off her wraps, she discovers that the necklace is no longer around her neck. They search her clothes: nothing. Her husband goes out and retraces their path home. He returns several hours later having found nothing. The next day, he goes to the police and files a report. He then advertises in the lost-and-found in the papers, but still, nothing. To give them time to continue the search, they tell Madame Forestier that the clasp on the necklace is being repaired. After five days, however, when nothing shows up, they decide that the necklace is truly gone and they must have it replaced.
They take the necklace case from jeweler to jeweler to find a strand of diamonds that matches the one lost. They finally see one in a shop at the Palais-Royal. The price, with a four-thousand-franc discount, is thirty-six thousand francs. The Loisels pay for it with an eighteen-thousand-franc inheritance that the husband has received from his father, and by borrowing the rest in small amounts, thereby mortgaging their lives for the next decade. The replacement necklace is returned to Madame Forestier, who remarks rather coldly that it should have been returned sooner because she might have needed it. She does not bother to open the case.
The Loisels are left with their debts. They get rid of their maid. They move to a poorer apartment. The wife now has to do all the menial work herself: wash the sheets, carry garbage down to the street, carry up the water, do her own shopping, bargaining with everybody to save a few sous. The husband moonlights, working in the evenings for a bookkeeper and often at nights, doing copying at twenty-five centimes a page. This goes on year after year until the debt is paid. The time of penury has transformed Mathilde into a poor, prematurely old hag, with a loud voice, red hands, and neglected hair, but in her misery she often remembers the minister’s ball, where she had her great success. What, she asks herself, would have been her fortune had she not lost the necklace?
One Sunday, as she strolls along the Champs-Elysees, she sees Madame Forestier taking a child for a walk. Jeanne Forestier is still young-looking and attractive. Now that the debt for the necklace has been satisfied, Mathilde Loisel decides to tell her old friend everything that happened. She stops to speak to her but is not recognized until she introduces herself. She explains that life has been pretty grim. She tells her about the lost necklace, how she had it replaced and for the past ten years has been slaving to pay for it. She is relieved that the long ordeal is over, and naïvely proud that her friend never knew that a different necklace had been returned to her.
Madame Forestier is deeply touched. Taking both of her friend’s hands she says, “Oh! My poor Mathilde! But mine was a fake. It was worth no more than five hundred francs!”

Mathilde Loisel is miserable as the wife of a middle-class Parisian clerk. She suffers constantly from what she views as a life of poverty. Although her husband’s income from his position as a clerk at the Ministry of Public Instructions sufficiently meets the couple’s needs, Mathilde dreams of attending the local salons, which host intimate gatherings of the upper class. She assumes airs at the dinner table, fantasizing that she is eating a higher quality of food and imagining herself dining with the wealthy. Mathilde focuses on her lack of jewels and fine clothing rather than on enjoying her life. She is jealous of one acquaintance in particular with whom she attended convent school, Madame Forestier, who has made a good marriage to a wealthy man.
Thinking Mathilde will be pleased, Monsieur Loisel brings her an invitation to a ball at the Palace of the Ministry. Mathilde surprises him by throwing down the invitation. Because Mathilde lacks a beautiful gown and jewels, she does not feel she can attend the ball. Monsieur Loisel reluctantly agrees to finance the purchase of a four-hundred-franc gown, understanding that he must sacrifice a planned hunting vacation with friends to do so. Mathilde buys the dress but complains that she has no jewels. Monsieur Loisel suggests that she visit her friend Madame Forestier and ask to borrow some jewelry. For once, Mathilde is pleased by a suggestion made by her husband.
Madame Forestier offers Mathilde the choice of her jewels. Mathilde selects a superb diamond necklace from a black satin box. She feels euphoric when she tries it on. When Madame Forestier immediately agrees to let her borrow the necklace, Mathilde kisses her in gratitude.
At the ball, Mathilde’s beauty attracts much attention. She is ecstatic when many men ask her name. She dances with all of the attachés from the cabinet and is even noticed by the minister. Intoxicated with pleasure and passion, Mathilde exists for a time in a fantasy haze. She believes she has at last succeeded in her quest to excel in high society.
Monsieur Loisel finds a room in which to sleep while Mathilde enjoys dancing and socializing. At 4:00 a.m., she is ready to leave. As Monsieur Loisel places her everyday wrap over his wife’s shoulders, it contrasts so much with her beautiful gown that she hurries to depart before the other women notice. Although Monsieur Loisel asks her to wait inside and avoid the cold as he calls a cab, she races down the stairs. They fail to hail a cab and walk miserably in the cold until they find an enclosed carriage, the transportation mode of the middle class, in which to ride.
The Loisels arrive home at the Rue des Martyrs, and Mathilde pauses to enjoy her reflection in the mirror. She screams when she sees that the necklace is missing. She and Monsieur Loisel search frantically, but they cannot find the necklace. Monsieur Loisel volunteers to walk back to the ball’s location, searching as he goes. He returns home exhausted and without the necklace. At his instruction, Mathilde writes a letter to Madame Forestier, explaining she will delay in returning the necklace. She lies, claiming that its clasp broke so she is having it repaired. This ruse allows them time to continue the search.
When the Loisels are unable to find the necklace, they use its jewel box to search for a jeweler from whom it might have been purchased. They discover the value of the necklace to be forty thousand francs; a jeweler offers to sell them a duplicate for thirty-six thousand francs. They buy the necklace using Monsieur Loisel’s inheritance of eighteen thousand francs and borrowing the balance, imperiling their future security. Still hopeful of finding the necklace, they secure a promise from the jeweler to buy back the duplicate for thirty-four thousand francs if they return it within three months. However, they do not find the necklace, and they assume crippling debt that forever changes their lives. Monsieur Loisel anticipates a “black misery” that will befall them as a result not only of future physical sacrifice but also of “moral tortures.”
When Mathilde takes the newly purchased necklace to Madame Forestier, she fears her acquaintance will discover that the necklace is a replacement. Her greatest concern is that her friend would consider her a thief. Although Madame Forestier scolds Mathilde for delaying the necklace’s return, she never opens the case to inspect it.
The next years are torturous for Mathilde, who works like a servant, her own servant having been dismissed. The Loisels move to poor housing. Mathilde dresses in work clothing suiting her position and assumes all the family’s “odious” housekeeping duties. Monsieur Loisel works a second job at night. They work for ten years to repay their debts. The strain of deprivation exacts a toll, and Mathilde ages rapidly. Occasionally, she fantasizes, remembering the wonders of the ball. Finally, their debt is paid in full.
One day on the street, Mathilde meets Madame Forestier, still youthful and lovely. At first not recognizing Mathilde, Madam Forestier is shocked by her friend’s haggard appearance. She cries out with sympathy over Mathilde’s transformation. Mathilde explains that her life has been hard because of Madame Forestier. Mathilde shares the truth regarding her loss and replacement of the necklace that she had borrowed. She explains it was purchased with ten years of hard labor. She proudly describes how she met her obligation both to Madame Forestier and to society.
Madame Forestier takes Mathilde’s hands in her own and tells her the truth. The necklace that she had loaned Mathilde was mere costume jewelry worth only five hundred francs.
What makes Maupassant’s famous story “The Necklace” so popular is not merely the ironic shock that the reader feels at the end when Madame Loisel discovers that she has worked long and hard to pay for a worthless bit of paste, but rather the more pervasive irony that underlies the entire story and makes it a classic exploration on the difference between surface flash and hidden value.
The story begins with a pretty young girl who thinks she is really a lady and feels that she needs only the external trappings of her true status. Although she is married to a simple clerk, she acts as though she has fallen from her proper station; she feels that she was born for luxuries but must endure poverty. Determined to make the best of an opportunity when she and her husband are invited to an elegant party, she borrows a necklace from an acquaintance to impress those not easily impressed and, like Cinderella at the ball, has all of her desires fulfilled as she is transported into the fairy-tale world about which she has dreamed. All of this comes crashing down to reality, however, when she reaches home and discovers that the necklace is missing. Her husband exhausts his meager inheritance and then borrows the rest, mortgaging their life away to buy a replacement for the necklace.
Now that Madame Loisel knows true poverty, she shows herself to be made of something more valuable than her petty desires for surface flash have suggested. With heroism and pride, she shoulders her responsibility with her husband and for ten years does brutal manual labor until she has paid for the necklace. When the reader discovers that the necklace was made of paste, it is a momentary shock; on closer reflection, this final knowledge proves to be anticlimactic, for one realizes that the story is about deeper ironies. What was taken to be real is found to be false. What looked rich on the outside is actually very poor. Yet Madame Loisel, who has looked poor on the outside, turns out to be genuine inside. “The Necklace” is a classic example of the tight ironic structure of the short story in which the unified tone dominates every single word.

It would be very difficult for anybody of any age to read this excellent short story and not be struck by the tremendous irony and dark comedy within it. Maupassant is an author who is famed for the twists in his tales and how he uses dark humour in his work, and certainly this story is no exception, and his original audience would undoubtedly have richly enjoyed the dark irony in this story. Note how this is achieved at the very end, when Mathilde sees her friend who leant her the necklace in the first place which was the source of all of their woe. The following words of course transform the story and give a real impact to the ending:
Oh, my poor Mathilde! But mine was imitation. It was worth at the very most five hundred francs!...
The fact that Mathilde is presented as a woman who is so caught up in thinking about her poverty and the things she lacks, even when she is comfortably off, is shown to be her downfall in this short story, and Maupassant suggests with this ending the dangers of always wanting more than you actually have and being unable to appreciate the level of comfort and possessions that you do actually have.

Overall, Mathilde is portrayed as a very positive, admirable character, though she exhibits some tendency to aspire to materialism, and she is soemtimes infatuated by it. She is definitely not negative, for in paragraphs 99–104, Maupassant describes the massive effort that she exerts to help pay the debt. The heroism that the speaker attributes to her suggests that readers, finally, are justified in admiring her. The quality of character that is a first cause of the misfortune, however, is her refusal to accept the reality of her genteel poverty and her desire to use the borrowed necklace to appear prosperous.

In the short story "The Necklace" Mathilda is a woman who is unhappy at the level of her life and stature. She desires nice things and feels that her husband's profession and her own have deprived her of the things which she should have. Her husband is thrilled when the opportunity arises to take her for a special occasion dinner and party. He just knows that she will be excited to attend.
Mathilda is upset because for her it means she does not have a nice dress to wear or fine jewelry. Her husband buys her a dress. She borrows a necklace from a friend who has money and esteem. The evening is wonderful but when it ends Matilda realizes the necklace is missing. She nor her husband can find it.
Rather than tell her friend the truth, Matilda and her husband scrape together the money to replace the necklace. The next ten years of their life they both have to work extra hard to pay for a necklace that she later learns was a fake.
Mathilda is vain ,proud and materialistic which leads her to having a hard life. I'd suggest that Mathilde in "The Necklace" is human-like, a mixture of positive and negative traits. This is a story the interpretation of which reveals as much about the reader as it does the story. Condemning Mathilde is harshly judgemental and shows a simplistic interpretation. Every piece of evidence from before the loss of the necklace that can be used to condemn her can also be used to suggest, say, that she is similar to a frustrated artist.
And though the choosing to not reveal the loss of the necklace is certainly misguided, one can't help but see the honor and nobility in it.
Mathilde changes greatly throughout the course of the story. The story starts with her as being a materialistic, rather high-maintenance woman who desires parties, jewelry, notoriety and a life of comfort and ease. She is bitter and resentful that she doesn't have money, and that she doesn't have servants, a nice house, nice clothes, nice jewelry, or nice parties and friends to be with. She resents the very food she eats, because it isn't good enough for her. She constantly longs for better things, at least in terms of money. She is willing to take money from her husband, that he had been saving for himself, to have one night of happiness at a party filled with shallow, rich people.
When she goes to the party, she enjoys herself thoroughly, and revels in her acceptance and beauty. It isn't until after she realizes she has lost the necklace, and spent years working hard to get the money, that she changes. She gives up her dreams of wealth and fame, and settles into her life with the common people. She learns to work hard. She learns to accept her life. She learns to work hard and take pride in that work. She changes quite a bit from beginning to end.
I hope that those thoughts helped; good luck!

In this cruel tale about ridiculous social pretensions, the main characters obviously get the fate they deserve. This is the world of the Parisian lower middle class, but it could well serve as an allegory for French society as a whole, or at least those elements of French society where ambition, materialism, greed, and petty meanness are the main dynamic. Mathilde bears a striking resemblance to Madame Bovary. Both feel trapped in a provincially dull existence, made worse by the solid mediocrity of their husbands. Both long for deliverance, but the deliverance that only money can buy. The party attended by the Loisels at the town house of the minister is not unlike the soiree that the Bovarys attend at the chateau of the count. Even the descriptions of the opulence of both settings seems interchangeable.
Both heroines pay a terrible price for their inability to come to terms with their situation in life. In the case of Emma Bovary, the cost is her own life, ended by suicide; with Mathilde Loisel, the torture is more prolonged. She has thrown away her youth and will have to live with her misery for the rest of her life. The grand party whose pleasant memory has sustained her even while she has been drudging to pay off her enormous debt now becomes a hideous nightmare.
This, in one way or another, is the price to be paid for crass materialism and false pride. Had the characters been less superficial and been willing to admit the loss of the necklace, all of their misery would have been avoided. In accepting a code of conduct that befits their ambitions, not their real situation, they courted disaster. In this the husband is as much to blame as his wife. Although Guy de Maupassant seems to be saying that such people are the victims of the society in which they live, dominated by the status-conscious in the early days of the Third Republic, he never prevents his characters from exercising their free will. It is precisely their ability to make such choices that leads to their own damnation. Maupassant shows how the Loisels are imprisoned in their loneliness and their lack of self-worth. Their pathos is their inability to speak to avoid a whole lifetime of misery.

Symbols
The Necklace
The necklace, beautiful but worthless, represents the power of perception and the split between appearances and reality. Mathilde borrows the necklace because she wants to give the appearance of being wealthy; Madame Forestier does not tell her up front that the necklace is fake, perhaps because she, too, wants to give the illusion of being wealthier than she actually is. Because Mathilde is so envious of Madame Forestier and believes her to be wealthy, she never doubts the necklace’s authenticity—she expects diamonds, so diamonds are what she perceives. She enters willingly and unknowingly into this deception, and her complete belief in her borrowed wealth allows her to convey an appearance of wealth to others. Because she believes herself rich for one night, she becomes rich in others’ eyes. The fact that the necklace is at the center of the deception that leads to Mathilde’s downfall suggests that only trouble can come from denying the reality of one’s situation.
The Perceived Power of Objects
Mathilde believes that objects have the power to change her life, but when she finally gets two of the objects she desires most, the dress and necklace, her happiness is fleeting at best. At the beginning of “The Necklace,” we get a laundry list of all the objects she does not have but that she feels she deserves. The beautiful objects in other women’s homes and absence of such objects in her own home make her feel like an outsider, fated to envy other women. The things she does have—a comfortable home, hot soup, a loving husband—she disdains. Mathilde effectively relinquishes control of her happiness to objects that she does not even possess, and her obsession with the trappings of the wealthy leads to her perpetual discontent. When she finally acquires the dress and necklace, those objects seem to have a transformative power. She is finally the woman she believes she was meant to be—happy, admired, and envied. She has gotten what she wanted, and her life has changed accordingly. However, when she loses the necklace, the dream dissolves instantly, and her life becomes even worse than before. In reality, the power does not lie with the objects but within herself.
In contrast to Mathilde, Madame Forestier infuses objects with little power. Her wealth enables her to purchase what she likes, but more important, it also affords her the vantage point to realize that these objects are not the most important things in the world. She seems casual about, and even careless with her possessions: when Mathilde brazenly requests to borrow her striking diamond necklace, she agrees. And later, when Mathilde informs her that the necklace in her possession is actually extremely valuable, she seems more rattled by the idea that Mathilde has sacrificed her life unnecessarily. The fact that Madame Forestier owned fake jewels in the first place suggests that she understands that objects are only as powerful as people perceive them to be. For her, fake jewels can be just as beautiful and striking as real diamonds if one sees them as such.

In the story, the author uses the diamond necklace to represent many things, of which two of the most obvious and direct are wealth and high social status. In the real world a necklace usually represents beauty, but the diamond necklace in this case represents more than that. Although Madame Loisel looks great with a new, beautiful dress worth “four hundred francs,” she needs the necklace because she has no jewels and thinks that it is “humiliating” to look “poor” in the middle of rich women. That can be an indication of the necklace representing great wealth as she selects the diamond necklace over some bracelets, a pearl necklace and a beautiful “Venetian cross” in “gold and gems.” The necklace can also be used to represent high social status. Besides to look rich, Madame Loisel also needs the necklace because she says the party will have many important and high class people and she doesn’t want to look out of place. Another piece of supporting evidence is that Madame Forestier probably always goes to parties with important people. To represent her social class, she thinks that she needs a “string of diamonds,” even if they were all imitation. Looking at the story directly, the diamond necklace symbolizes wealth and high social status.

If you dive deeper into the story, however, the diamond necklace can also represent more ideas, such as if you are too greedy, vain or ambitious, it could lead to your doom. Madame Loisel is very vain, believing that she is “born for every delicacy and luxury” and feels that “she was made for” beautiful jewels and clothes. She has a greed for praise, wishing eagerly to charm and be sought after. Because of all those traits, she borrows the necklace from Madame Forestier for the party to satisfy her ambitions and greed. However, when she goes home, she loses the necklace and has to borrow massive amounts of cash to buy a replacement. That dooms her and her husband’s lives as they have to work hard and live in “abject poverty” for ten years to pay back the debt. Therefore, the diamond necklace can also indirectly symbolize the idea of ambition leading to doom because of what happened to Madame Loisel.

Furthermore, the diamond necklace can also indirectly represent the idea of appearances being deceiving. The idea is well illustrated in the story with two examples. The first example is the necklace itself. Throughout the story, almost all of the characters (including the reader) think that the necklace is genuine. However, at the very end, Madame Forestier reveals that the necklace is actually an imitation and worth only five hundred francs. Another illustration is Madame Loisel. At the party, she appears to be rich, high class and is the “prettiest woman present,” but in reality, she is not rich, the jewels belong to Madame Forestier and she is actually only middle class. Overall, the necklace can be used to symbolize the idea of appearances can be deceiving because appearances usually do not represent the reality.

The diamond necklace in the story can represent many different ideas both directly and indirectly. Out of the many ideas discussed in this essay, the best is the idea of appearances being deceiving. All of the other ideas - wealth, high social class, ambition leading to doom, can also apply to the story without the final line where Madame Forestier reveals that the necklace is actually imitation. However, the author deliberately reveals the truth at the end of the story which echoes that the diamond necklace symbolizes the idea of appearances being deceiving. It is probably what the author intended the necklace to symbolize. In conclusion, the necklace can be used to represent a whole range of ideas even though the idea of appearances being deceiving is considered one of the best.