In “The Necklace,” a female character, Mathilde, is living in Paris during the 19th century. She is poor, yet undyingly wishes she was wealthy. One day the woman is invited to a prestigious ball within her city. She immediately she contacts a rich friend and borrows a fabulous necklace. Once the night is all said and done and she returns from the ball, she realizes that the borrowed necklace is lost. She reacts by lying about the necklace and buying her friend a new one. With her financial situation the way it is she goes spiraling into debt and never recovers. Later, once Mathilde admits to her friend that she lost and replaced the necklace, it is revealed that the borrowed necklace was a fake worth very little.…
In the beginning of “The Necklace”, Mathilde is not satisfied with her life, for she is stuck in a middle-class lifestyle when she desperately feels that she is “born for every delicacy and luxury.” (de Maupassant) In the nineteenth century, the wealthiest people commonly threw elegant balls, and invited many of their friends. If de Maupassant decided to have this…
In “The Necklace,” GUY DE MAUPASSANT character loisel Mathilde who is a very greedy and selfish woman, believes that she was born for every delicacy and luxury there is and feels that she was made for all beautiful jewels and clothes, which cause her emotional…
In Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Necklace”, he explores the theme that greed and envy can lead to self-destruction. In this story Matilda Loisel is a very envious wife whom always dreamed for a better existence. She was a beautiful but very discontent woman who thought that she must have been born into the wrong life, since she had no way of being recognized and courted by a rich and powerful man.…
You can read “The Necklace” as a story about greed, but this is also about pride. Mathilde Loisel is a very proud woman. She feels far above the humble circumstances and she is forced to live with her husband by her common birth. Her current situation disgusts her. She is also vain too, completely caught up in her own beauty. It is pride that prevents Mathilde from admitting they've lost an expensive necklace. After the loss of the necklace makes Mathilde poor, and her beauty fades, she may learn a pride of a different sort: pride in her own work and…
After the party, Madame Loisel loses the necklace, resulting in tireless work, loans, and night jobs for her and her husband in order to pay back the equivalent of the price. The couple finally succeeds when all the money is paid ten years later, only for Mathilde to discover that the necklace was ironically a fake, and worth a very small percentage of what the couple paid. The theme of this story is that an overemphasis on material wealth can shrink the spirit and leave one open to the changeability of fortune. The situational irony highlights this moral because the Loisels would never have had to exhaust themselves if Madame Loisel wasn’t so obsessed with riches and wealth. From the very beginning of the story, she wastes her time dreaming of luxuries such as fine silks, beautiful furniture, and gourmet feasts. Even when she is at Madam Forestier’s house to try on necklaces to borrow, she is never satisfied until she has seen the very best. Madame Loisel’s preoccupation with appearance clouds her judgment as well. As soon as she realizes that she has lost the necklace, she should simply come clean to Madam Forestier. Instead, she is too concerned with how her reputation will be affected, so she keeps quiet. She later pays the price for this when she discovers that the necklace is “false [and]…worth five hundred francs at most.” The life that she gets instead as punishment during the ten years in debt is even more difficult and meager than her life to begin with, which stresses how fame and fortune is so fleeting and unimportant in the scheme of…
In these plays, they both found happiness in money. In the Necklace, Mathilde “had no dresses, no jewels, nothing. And she loved nothing but appearance of its possession, led Mathilde to borrow an expensive necklace from a wealthy friend to show it off at the ball she was invited to by the Minister of Public Instruction. She ended up losing the necklace and worked half of her life to get it back. Not knowing that the necklace was fake. She didn’t want anyone to know that she had lost it, and would do anything to earn money.…
In Romeo and Juliet, two young lovers fall for each other, despite their familial rivalry. After a rollercoaster of emotions and predicaments, Romeo and Juliet die, unable to live without the other. The primary cause of this tragedy is their parents, who refuse to make amends or move on from the forgotten strife that started the conflict between their families, the Montagues and Capulets. As they realize that their beloved children have deceased at the conclusion of the play, Juliet’s father says, “As rich shall Romeo’s by his lady's lie,/Poor sacrifices of our enmity” (Shakespeare V.iii.314-315). People often lose sight of what is important in life and texts such as Romeo and Juliet act as powerful means of bringing readers back to what is truly fundamental. Holding grudges results in no happiness or virtue, but rather takes away from the families more than they ever expected. The same is true in “The Necklace,” as the readers watch Mathilde attempt to attain a sense of wealth, only to have more taken away from her. The text explains how she often thinks to herself, imagining “what would have happened if she had not lost that necklace...How life is strange and changeful!” (de Maupassant 5). De Maupassant reveals Mathilde’s realization of the true luxuries she had taken for granted and lost. This gives the…
In the early 17th century, numerous Puritans flocked from Britain to the new developing colonies along the east coast of Northern America. Marriage and family values were the epitome of the Puritan way of life. Marriage in Puritan society was greatly influenced by the millennium which led men and women to marry for particular reasons. This can be proven throughout Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible where Puritan couples in Salem, Massachusetts such as the Proctors, Putnams, Coreys, and Nurses chose to wed because it provided specific roles for each spouse, it allowed them to fulfill their religious duty of procreation, and also because it gave more authority to women.…
the necklace was lost. The narrative describes, “She stayed there, in her ball dress, without…
When one takes a vow, they make a promise. There are many different types of vows. An example of some are marriage vows and political vows. In The Canterbury Tales, the type of vow that is focused is on is the religious kind. Three of the four religious people in the book that break their vows are the Prioress, the Monk, and the Friar. Out of the religious people and the rest of the pilgrims, the most contemptible character in The Canterbury Tales is the Friar, who participates in unsuitable promiscuity, selling absolution, and rejecting his vowed life of poverty.…
Marguerite was forced into love from an extremely young age. Her first romantic relationship was with a boy named Willem. Marguerite and Willem spend some time alone. The environment surrounding was normal and calm until Marguerite asks him for a kiss. The author reveals that Willem is astounded by the words coming out of her mouth. “I’ve never kissed anybody, and I think it’s time I did, let’s say, as a scientific experiment.” Marguerite’s second relationship was a forced marriage by her father. This was not uncommon in medieval times. The count invited knights, noblemen, and guild masters to dinner to announce that Marguerite was ready for marriage. “She will marry Edmund of Langley, Duke of Cambridge, Prince of England and youngest son of King Edward the third “. It is presumed that Marguerite felt very uncomfortable about her father’s big announcement. “I’m nowhere as beautiful as my mother”. As marguerite got to know Edmund a bit more, she grew to feel weary about him. This lead her into her final relationship with a man named Philip. Philip was invited to the Castle of Male as Marguerite’s final option of marriage. At first the two had a peculiar relationship, however, they grew to love each other and get married. “My lady, your husband to be will fight with your veil for your greater honour and glory… But I will fight in my shirtsleeves for your love”. Marguerite found the love…
In “The Necklace”, Mathilde is seen as a poor woman who had low self-esteem and was married to a clerk. In this story, she was invited to a ball and borrowed a friend’s necklace. After the ball, Mathilde discovers that the necklace was lost. As a result, she had to search for a similar necklace and had to take out loans to make a purchase. She was forced to work for ten years to pay off the debt until one day when she saw her friend. Little did Mathilde know that the necklace she lost was worth much less than the new necklace she paid for.…
The meaning of Moupassant’s “The Necklace” is that one should not fall into the trap of wishing for better things and not recognizing what one has to be thankful for. Moupassant uses the main character, Mme. Loisel, to illustrate this point as she struggles with her self-image and her desire to always be better in the eyes of others, especially the upper class and the rich.…
You've arrived at the airport with your parents, you plane is ready to depart but you have no idea what is going on. You have now arrived in Pakistan and have been whisked off to your village to take part in your own wedding ceremony with a 45 year old man you have never met before. This is the start of a brand new life as an unwillingly married 15 year old girl.…