The “Necklace” story is about greed, passion for more that what one can have. In this short story, French Writer Guy de Maupassant writes about Mathilde Loisel who is consumed with the desire to have everything that she cannot have. Despite the fact that she has a nice home and a great spouse, she is unsatisfied with everything in life. All she is a think about is riches and privileges that other people have. Her craving for riches is a steady torment and turmoil. Whenever she visits her rich friends she cannot help but overcome with desire to possess of these costly garments. Sometimes the desire even put her to tears. I think craving for these things is a way to complement for things she could not afford. She so obsessed of looking better…
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.…
Seeing the things she doesn’t have hurts her intensely. In the French version of the text it is said that “[s]he had a well-to-do friend, a classmate of convent-school days whom she would no longer go to see, simply because she would feel so distressed on returning home. And she would weep for entire days from vexation, regret, despair and anguish” (Maupassant 1). Her thirst for more bring emotional grief onto herself. Furthermore, the climax of her life, the product of all of her wanting, is short lived by the loss of the necklace. Her self pride as a higher class woman stops her from telling the truth and decides to buy a replacement for her friend forcing her to lose all her money and material belongings and begin to live in true poverty. The narrator then describes her complete loss of beauty, “[s]he had become the woman of impoverished households — strong and hard and rough. With frowsy hair, skirts askew, and red hands” (Maupassant 5). In fact, she has changed so much that her friend could not recognized her shown because when she greats her, the narrator states “The other astonished to be familiarly addressed by this plain goodwife, did not recognize her at all, and…
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…
I agree that the writer’s goal was accomplish because through symbolism of a necklace, Maupassant was able to reveal the moral of the story. We see in the story that the main character who was obsessed with her look wasn’t satisfied with her life. She had a good husband who cared for her and did everything to make her happy. She did not see that. This can be applied to reality in the sense that we get caught up with what we look like or what we are wearing, that we go to lengths to make it happen. Through the symbol of a necklace, the author was able to convey to the readers the theme that vanity is worthless and there’s a price to pay for vanity and that we should be grateful for what we have.…
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 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…
It was after the ball when she realized she had lost the necklace, panicked, she comes up to her husband and says, “"I . . . I . . . I've no longer got Madame Forestier's necklace. . . ." (6) The fact that she cannot keep up with other people’s belongings, tells you that she isn’t responsible enough to keep up with her own things. She further verifies that she can’t take responsibility when she continually lies to her friend about it. Mr. Loisel suggests her to “tell her that you've broken the clasp of her necklace and are getting it mended.” (7) So that they can have more time to look for it. Lastly, when she bumps into her friend on the street after ten years of being in debt she says, “Yes, I’ve had some hard times since I saw you last; and many sorrows…and all on your account.” (9) Nonetheless, it was Mathilda’s fault that she lost the necklace and that she couldn’t own up and tell the truth. She does not want to accept the fact that she is responsible for her own…
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…
Mathilde Loisel, the main character in “The Necklace” is an ungrateful, self-centered young woman. Her selfless behavior is first observed on page 609 when her husband brings home an extraordinary invitation to an aristocratic privileged ball. Soon after her husband gave her the invitation, the Guy De Maupassant writes, “She tossed the invitation on the table and muttered, annoyed:” What do you expect me to do with that?”” Mathilde could not appreciate the invitation that her husband worked to get for her, but instead, she wanted more. Consequently, Mathilde’s behavior resurfaces on page 611 when Mathilde asks for jewelry to wear from Madame Forestier. Mathilde asks “Do you have anything else, by chance?” even though the jewels that Forestier had were beautiful. Mathilde Loisel was being oblivious and rude when she said that as Forestier allowed her to borrow her own jewelry. Undoubtedly, Mathilde has been shown throughout the story to be ungrateful even to those who are altruistic and kind.…
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.…
Now take a look at what greed and materialism is as represented and told by the story “The Necklace”. Know that the moral of the actual story of “The Necklace” is not getting obsessed with greed and materialism, because it has consequences that are not worth it. In the story, Mathilde is invited to a party, but is upset because she will not look very “high class” because she and her husband are not rich. She then goes to her rich friend, Madame Forestier, and requests some “bling bling” from her. She gives Mathilde a necklace, and when Mathilde goes to the party, she is the most beautiful woman there. When she then looks in the mirror, she is shocked because the necklace is gone. Afraid because she will need to return the necklace to her friend, she and her husband work long and hard to buy another one. when she finally gets the money to pay Madame Forestier back with the necklace, she is shocked because…
Living a life where you’re not happy with what you have will always bring you down. You’d go out and see people with nice clothing and other accessories and toys that you wish you had or could afford. Most people nowadays aren’t happy because of this. In order for them to be happy, they simply thought that they need more money, more new stuff, or even a perfect life, which is out of the question because nobody’s perfect. In this case, Guy De Maupassant, the author of The Necklace, writes about a girl who just doesn’t have the best luck. She would always dream of having the “perfect life”, but it never came to her. Although Madame Loisel’s emotions stayed the same, she does have a moment where she feels better than everyone else in the world.…
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.…