Preview

Is Mathilde Loisel in "The Necklace" a Sympathetic Character?

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
281 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Is Mathilde Loisel in "The Necklace" a Sympathetic Character?
Mathilde Loisel is not a sympathetic character in “The Necklace” because of her materialistic and selfish motives. She is not just poor financially but also in character. She is always dissatisfied with her life. Nice clothes, expensive jewelry, a beautiful house, more furniture and rich friends are the only things she loves in her life.
Moreover, she is not a sympathetic character because she disrespects her loving husband. In spite of having a kind, generous, loyal and hard working husband she never stops complaining about him. Mr. Loisel works hard in the evening and sometimes at night as well in order make their life easier. Yet, Mathilde is self-centered and never realizes the problems her husband has to go through to ensure her happiness. Mr. Loisel expects his wife to be thrilled when he gives her invitation to the Ministry’s party. Instead, she throws the invitation in his face for not having a suitable dress and jewelry for the function. He buys her a dress with the money he has saved for a gun. Also after the party, he goes to look for the lost necklace at four in the morning and spends his ten years to pay the debt incurred by a lost necklace. He does everything possible to fulfill her demands and to make her happy. But she didn’t feel his love and devotion for her. Also, in the other way she is too proud because she doesn’t tell Madame Forestier about the lost necklace at first. Because of Mathilde’s greed and pride she and her husband have to spend a miserable life. Therefore, the reader should not feel any pity for

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    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.…

    • 342 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Mathilde Loisel was a mixture of selfish,greedy and has all around pride. She was more worried about the gowns, the jewels, and herself,and living in a daydream but instead she didn't appreciate the things she had, like a beautiful home, a maid, and also a loving husband.She shows her self centered actions, her thoughtless words and her self obsessed personality.…

    • 60 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    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…

    • 1277 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    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…

    • 676 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Mathilde’s perception of herself as a martyr leads her to take unwise, self-serving actions. When Mathilde loses the necklace and sacrifices the next ten years of her life to pay back the debts she incurred from buying a replacement, her feeling of being a martyr intensifies. She undertakes the hard work with grim determination, behaving more like a martyr than ever before. Her beauty is once again being wasted; this work eventually erases it completely. Her lot in life has gotten worse, and Mathilde continues to believe she has gotten less than she deserves, never acknowledging the fact that she is responsible for her own fate. Her belief in her martyrdom is, in a way, the only thing she has left. When Madame Forestier reveals that the necklace was worthless, Mathilde’s sacrifices also become worthless, and her status as a…

    • 849 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    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…

    • 1345 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    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.…

    • 289 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Compare and Contrast

    • 1076 Words
    • 5 Pages

    In the story “The Necklace” the main character, Mathilda Losisel, is unhappily married to a clerk, and is ungrateful of the life she is living. She thinks that she deserves to be living a better lifestyle, and that materialistic objects and fancy things will make her happy rather than love. Mathilda is invited to the ball in the beginning of the story, and immediately she turns selfish and wants her husband to get the things she desires for her ball. Her husband tries everything he can to please his wife in every way that he could do to try to make her happy. Not once in the story did she say thank you for her husband’s efforts because she wasn’t thankful for what he had done for her. She also borrows an expensive necklace from one of her close friends. As she was partying away at the ball, she did not once think about her husband. She was more focused on the fact that other people were giving her attention. Later on in the story Mathilda loses the necklace, and her husband does everything he can to try to get it back. He ended up getting money to buy a brand new necklace, but had to pay off debts he had from raising that money by working it off and Mathilda has to work it off as well. Because of Mathilda’s greed and ignorance it had lead her to the situation of debt she was in. Throughout the story she only worried about herself rather than thinking about how much effort her husband was doing to making her happy. In the end the necklace turned out to…

    • 1076 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In the story The Necklace, Mathilde is a middle-class woman who only cares for luxury, materials things and an unhappy woman…

    • 436 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    The irony that is implied in the story is that in the fact borrowing the necklace was what the main character, Mathilde hoped would help her into the life she coveted, yet it was also what put her into a life of poverty. In the story, it stated that “ She suffered endlessly, feeling herself born for every delicacy and luxury. She suffered from the poorness of her house, from its mean walls, worn chairs, and ugly curtains. All these things, of which other women of her class would not even have been aware, tormented and insulted her.” This shows how Mathilde has a poor family background while compared to the rich classes for the women in that time period.…

    • 1760 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Imagine how she felt when she received the information that it was not even worth half as much as the necklace she replaced. Through all that time laboring to pay off the borrowed necklace, Mathilde has lost her natural beauty. As said on page 168, “She became heavy, rough, harsh, like one of the poor. her hair untended, her skirts askew, her hands red, her voice shrill, she even slopped water on her floors and scrubbed them herself.” Her friend Mme.…

    • 676 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Necklace Greediness

    • 1059 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Guy de Maupassant, born into nobility, wrote “The Necklace,” along with many other literary works, some inspired by his nobility. “The Necklace” is rittled with themes of wealth, and status, all issues Maupassant would have dealt with. The main character, Mathilde deals with these issues as well. When Mathilde deals with these themes her character is revealed, some good, but mostly bad. In “The Necklace” Maupassant represents Mathilde’s character by revealing her greediness, her lies, and her love.…

    • 1059 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Necklaces

    • 359 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Throughout “The Necklace,” Mathilde covets everything that other people have and she does not. Whereas Monsieur Loisel happily looks forward to having hot soup for dinner, Mathilde thinks only of the grandness of other homes and lavish table settings that she does not own. When Monsieur Loisel obtains an invitation for a party, she covets a new dress so that she can look as beautiful as the other wives as well as jewelry so that she does not look poor in comparison to them. She is so covetous of Madame Forestier’s wealth that she cannot bear to visit her, but she overcomes her angst when she needs to borrow jewelry for the party; there, her coveting is briefly sated because she gets to take one of the ornaments home with her. After the party, she covets the fur coats the other women are wearing, which highlight the shabbiness of her own wraps. This endless coveting ultimately leads to Mathilde’s downfall and, along the way, yields only fleeting happiness. It is so persistent, however, that it takes on a life of its own—Mathilde’s coveting is as much a part of her life as breathing.…

    • 359 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Mathilde vs. Dee

    • 622 Words
    • 2 Pages

    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.…

    • 622 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Thesis for "The Necklace"

    • 497 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Mme. Loisel’s struggle with her self image is apparent during this part of the story. At last, she has a nice dress and a fine necklace and has a grand time at the event. This is the end of her first struggle with self-image. Then, when the necklace is lost, she begins a new struggle with her self image to save her self from being seen as a thief. She and her husband go through great lengths to buy a replacement necklace and are forced to sacrifice many of their previous comforts. After ten years of…

    • 497 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays