A Summary and Analysis of Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Necklace’ is an 1884 short story by the French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850-93), first published in Le Gaulois as ‘La parure’ in February of that year. If you’re unfamiliar with Maupassant’s work, ‘The Necklace’ is his most famous tale, and worth taking the time to read. If you’re a fan of stories with twist endings , you’ll probably love it.
Plot summary
Mathilde Loisel is a pretty woman who is married to a clerk who works in the Ministry of Education. They do not have much money, and Mathilde spends her days fantasising that her life is more glamorous and upmarket than it actually is.
When her husband is invited to a ball hosted by the minister for whom he works, he is keen for them both to attend, but Mathilde tells him she has nothing to wear to such a high-class social occasion. He tells her he will buy her a nice dress, even though it will mean sacrificing his own pleasure.
Then, Mathilde becomes worried that she has no jewels to wear with the dress. Loisel, her husband, suggests she ask her friend, Madame Forestier, if she has something she will lend to Mathilde for the night. Madame Forestier is happy for her friend to borrow whatever she wants, and Mathilde chooses a diamond necklace.
Mathilde enjoys the ball, and especially likes all of the attention she attracts from the men in attendance. When they are due to leave, at four in the morning, they go outside and try to find a cab to take them home. When they arrive home, however, Mathilde is horrified to discover she has lost the necklace!
Loisel retraces their steps but cannot find the lost necklace anywhere. They realise that they will have to replace the necklace, whatever the cost. To buy them some time, they compose a letter to Madame Forestier, claiming that they are having the necklace repaired. They then try to find out where the necklace was made, and have to buy the clasp and the diamonds from separate jewellers.
Loisel racks up thousands of francs in debt, borrowing from friends and from professional moneylenders to raise the cash. They finally have the necklace, which is returned to Madame Forestier, but now they have to pay back the money to all of their creditors.
This takes them ten long years. They dismiss their servant girl and Mathilde has to perform all of the housework, which ages her rapidly. Loisel, meanwhile, takes on a second job, working for a merchant in the evenings. Finally, though, their debts are cleared.
One day, Mathilde bumps into Madame Forestier, who doesn’t recognise her at first because her friend looks so poor and haggard. Now the debt is paid off, Mathilde feels she can tell her friend the truth, and confesses that she lost her friend’s necklace and she and her husband had to buy a replacement.
In a twist, Madame Forestier tells her friend that the necklace she lent Mathilde was made of imitation diamonds, and was virtually worthless. Mathilde and her husband had spent ten years toiling away for no reason.
In ‘The Necklace’, Guy de Maupassant explores the relationship between appearance and reality. The necklace, of course, is the most explicit example of this: it looks like a genuine diamond necklace but is actually an imitation or fake. And this final twist in the tale leads us to think more carefully about the other details of the story.
But ‘The Necklace’ is more specifically about the dangers of not being happy with what one has, and always wanting more. The nineteenth century saw a rise in the prevalance of consumerism, with many middle-class people seeking to improve their lot and keep up with their friends and neighbours in terms of their possessions, clothes, and social status.
Although Maupassant’s story is hardly searing social satire, the fate of the female protagonist does act as a cautionary tale about the dangers of chasing consumerist gratification in order to impress and be admired by others. The Loisels have a perfectly comfortable lower-middle-class life, and Mathilde has one servant to help around the house.
But this isn’t enough. She dreams of having more. Her food is not enough for her and she wants to dine on finer dishes. One would think she was living a life of poverty from how dissatisfied she is.
This constant desire for more is her undoing, of course – and her husband’s. Her insistence that she have some jewels to wear to the ball is what leads her to find out what real poverty is like, when she and her husband have to downsize from a modest flat to a small garret, and Mathilde has to learn how to work as a servant in her own house. She also loses the natural beauty she had as she has to work so hard at scrubbing the floors.
The critic Rachel Mesch, in her book Having It All in the Belle Epoque , has pointed out that ‘The Necklace’, among other stories, is a kind of Cinderella-story gone awry: whereas Cinderella begins by scrubbing floors and ends up going to the ball in all her finery, Mathilde goes to the ball and, as a result of losing her necklace (not her glass slipper), is reduced to a life of scrubbing floors.
Because she longed for more than she had, she ended up with less than she had to begin with. But the delicious ironic twist at the end of the story shows that her reduction to a life of poverty was all for nothing: just like the admiration she was foolishly and vainly chasing, the necklace she was working to replace was, after all, a sham.
Modern consumerism, then, is a con, with anyone able to afford a cheap imitation necklace able to pass themselves off as a member of the upper classes. Maupassant seems to be suggesting that the ‘finer things’ in life which tempt us are often, at their core, hollow and worthless.
At the same time, however, even when she is reduced to a life of grinding poverty, Mathilde still remembers that one night at the ball when she was admired. It is almost as if she thinks it was worth it, despite what happened next. She wonders what would have happened if she’d never lost the necklace.
Of course, at this stage of the narrative she hasn’t learned that the diamonds she was wearing that night were fakes; perhaps that revelation would make her revise her opinion. And yet, knowing they were imitation diamonds raises further ‘what if’ questions.
If they cost five hundred francs at the most, as Madame Forestier reveals at the end, Loisel’s husband could have easily bought her a cheap necklace and nobody – except for the Loisels themselves – would have been any the wiser. After all, Mathilde was admired at the ball even though she was, it turns out, wearing fake diamonds.
‘The Necklace’ is narrated in the third person by an omniscient narrator. The style is broadly realist, with Maupassant’s narrative voice relating the main details of the story in crisp, concise prose. We don’t get – as we would in the work of later modernist writers – detailed insight into the characters’ thoughts and feelings, although we are given occasional details about Mathilde’s feelings towards her situation.
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“The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant, Essay Example
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Oppression plays a large role in the brilliant short story by Guy de Maupassant entitled “The Necklace”. In it, a middle-class woman, Matilda Loisel, who dreams of a luxurious life, is able to have one, glorious night at a ball, wearing a borrowed necklace of diamonds from her childhood friend. Sometime during the night of the ball, the necklace is lost. She and her husband go into great debt to buy a replacement, living a life of great poverty for a decade to pay off the debt they incurred to do this. Years later, the woman meets her old friend by chance in the park and brags of how much she and her husband went through to replace the necklace, only to be told that the necklace was made only costume jewelry and “were not worth five hundred francs”.
The oppression that de Maupassant writes about in this story is two-fold. The first kind of oppression, in the first section of the short story, comes from within Matilda herself because of her unrealistic dreams and expectations for her life. The second kind of oppression, more concrete, comes in the second part of the story, where Matilda and her husband both have to give up what comforts they had to begin with in order to pay off the debt that they owe for the necklace. Both kinds of oppression take their toll are Matilda (though in different ways) and both will be analyzed at length in this paper.
Inner Oppression: The Burden of Fantasy
Guy de Maupassant begins to discuss the theme of Matilda’s inner oppression (or self-oppression) in the first paragraph of the story, introducing her as “one of those pretty, charming young ladies, born….into a family of clerks” (de Maupassant 31), showing the reader from the start that there is a huge divide between Matilda’s life as it is and Matilda’s life the way she wants it to be. It is obvious that Matilda’s middle class life, married to a clerk from the Board of Education (a worthy but not perhaps very romantic job) is very distressing for her, and she is forever fantasizing unrealistically about what her life might have been like if she had married someone “either rich or distinguished” (31). While she sits in her apartment of “the shabby walls, the worn chairs, the faded stuffs” (31), she dreams only of “large drawing-rooms, hung in old silks, of graceful pieces of furniture carrying bric-a-brac of inestimable value” (32).
These beginning paragraphs are important to the story because they show from the very first that Matilda is a woman whose oppression comes from within herself: she oppresses herself by longing for a life that she cannot have; she oppresses herself by being unhappy and discontented with the life that she does have. The frustration that she feels with her life is palpable in the beginning of the story and it is important because it sets the stage for, and gives impetus to, what is going to happen: i.e. the fateful night of the ball, a night which is to forever change the course of Matilda’s life.
When Matilda’s husband comes home with an invitation for the ball at the home of the Minister of Public Instruction, it seems that Matilda’s fantasies might become reality for her, but instead of jumping at the chance to live the kind of life (if only for one evening) that she always dreamed of, she shrinks away at first, asking her husband irritably, “What do you suppose I have to wear to such a thing as that?” (33) and promptly bursts into tears; she is not so distraught, though, that she cannot make a quick and shrewd estimate of how much money she can get out of her husband for a new outfit: “She reflected for some seconds, making estimates and thinking of a sum that she could ask for without bringing with it an immediate refusal…from the economical clerk” (33). And to make her fantasy life complete, she borrows what she thinks is a fabulous necklace from her childhood friend Mrs. Forestier.
Matilda is freed from her self-oppression for one night, the night of the ball, where she gets to live her fantasy in a way that she always wanted to, and de Maupassant notes that she “was a great success. She was the prettiest of all, elegant, gracious, smiling, and full of joy” (34). But at the end of the evening, reality comes back in full force, and Matilda feels oppressed once again when she and her husband wrap up in “modest garments of everyday wear, whose poverty clashed with the elegance of the ball costume” (34) and Matilda wishes to get away quickly, as she feels oppressed again by “the other women wrapping themselves in rich furs” (34). In her haste, she and her husband wind up on a bit of misadventure going home and when they arrive back at their apartment, they find that Matilda has lost the necklace. De Maupassant is well aware of what is in store for Matilda when he writes that “she removed the wraps from her shoulders before the glass, for a final view of herself in her glory” This will, indeed, be the “final view” for Matilda, for a second later, she realizes that the necklace in missing, and with that missing necklace comes the second, outer form of oppression in this story: the oppression of poverty.
Outer Oppression: The Burden of Poverty
In the fall-out from the loss of the necklace, Mr. and Mrs. Loisel replace the piece of jewelry at a tremendous cost to their middle-class household: thirty-six thousand francs, which they beg and borrow and use up their inheritance to purchase. Whether she realized it and appreciated it or not, Matilda’s life was one of middle-class comfort before, but all that is to change with the loss of the necklace. And now the real, outer oppression, the oppression of poverty, takes hold of Matilda’s life. De Maupassant tells the reader that Matilda “now knew the horrible life of necessity” (36), and a lot of their modest middle-class trappings have to go: “they sent away the maid; they changed their lodgings; they rented some rooms under a mansard roof” (36). So now, the poor life that Matilda has always imagined that she led has become a poor life indeed. Without a maid to take care of these things for her, she is forced to shoulder, “the heavy cares of a household, the odious work of a kitchen” (36) but with great sacrifice, she and her husband pay off the debt that they incurred to replace the necklace, a debt which takes them a decade to pay off.
The oppression of poverty has a terrible affect upon Matilda. De Maupassant describes her, after this decade of economic oppression, as “a strong, hard woman, the crude woman of a poor household. Her hair was badly dressed, her skirts awry, her hands red” (37). This is no longer the bored middle class woman with a maid who fantasized about a life of wealth, although, even in the difficulty of her poverty, she “would seat herself before the window and think of that evening party of former times, of that ball when she had been so beautiful and so flattered” (37). The fantasy seems different now: in the first part of the story, the fantasy is the vehicle of for Matilda’s self-oppression, the way in which she tortures herself for not having the kind of life she dreams of; by the end of the story, the fantasy has becomes a means of escape from the real, outer oppression of her poverty. The image of Matilda, resting for a while from her work and thinking for a few minutes about the one night of her life when she was free from the oppressions of her discontent – the night of her life which was also her downfall and led to the oppression of her new life of poverty – is one of the most poignant scenes in the story.
If the story ended there, it would still be tragic, but De Maupassant is not yet done twisting his knife. In the final scene of the story, the old, hard Matilda, walking in the Champs Elysee “to rid herself of the cares of the week” (38), runs into her old friend Madame Forestier, “still young, still pretty, still attractive” (38), in contrast to Matilda herself. Matilda cannot help but brag to Mrs. Forestier of the diamond necklace she replaced at such a tremendous cost, only to have Forestier exclaim that the necklace was cheap costume jewelry and that Matilda has ruined her life for nothing.
To conclude, this is a poignant story about the life of a woman who is at first oppressed by the unattainable fantasies that she has for herself, and then is oppressed by the poverty which results when she tries to make her fantasies into reality. Both the oppression of her fantasies (the oppression that comes from within herself) and the oppression of poverty (the oppression that comes from the circumstance of her life) exact a toll on her. De Maupassant, in this story, seems to be exploring the ways in which someone’s character flaws (in this case, Matilda’s unrealistic expectations for her life) can bring about a tragic end for them. It is Matilda’s ravenous need to act out her fantasies that leads her to borrow the necklace to begin with, then hurry away from the party because she is ashamed of her wrap and lose the necklace in the process, and thus condemn herself to ten years of pointless poverty. She is, truly, both a victim of her own oppression and of the oppression which life lays down upon her, and the second form of oppression is a direct result of the first. One reason why this story is such a classic, why it can be read even so long after it was written by people in a very different society, is because of De Maupassant’s understanding of the ways in which people do indeed oppress themselves and of the ways in which the circumstances of their life can oppress them as well. Both are equally tragic and seem equally difficult to combat.
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