Internal Conflict Of The Necklace

“The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant displays a critical view of the materialistic ways which society forces upon women. During the late 1800’s, wealth and social status defined a person. Mathilde Loisel, a middle-class woman, is not content with her social status. She has dreams of being wealthy and having a plethora of riches. Through the use of irony and tragedy in the life of Mathilde Loisel, Maupassant displays the harsh realities behind materialism.

The necklace serves as a symbol for greed. When Mathilda Loisel loses the necklace that she believed was worth forty thousand francs, she desperately retraces her steps and gets her husband to help her find it as well. It ends up taking ten years to pay off the debt. The ten years were hard on Mathilda Loisel and her husband, and Maupassant told the reader that she “looked old now… with hair half combed, with skirts award, and reddened hands” (6). However, even after the long ten years of manual labor all because she lost the necklace, she “sat down near the window and though of that evening at the ball so long ago, when she has been so beautiful and so admired” (6). The necklace symbolizes that when greed controls emotions and decisions, it never leads to good results.

The short story The Necklace portrays greed and selfishness through the life of Mathlide Loisel. This story was written in the 1800’s in Paris, which is also believed to be when the story takes place. Life in Paris during this time was all about your rank and where you stood in society. This want for acceptance made many people desire unnecessary things, leading to more greed and envy for others.

Loisel experiences another difficult situation.. While leaving the reception she loses her borrowed jewelry, “Suddenly she gave a cry. The necklace was gone” (de Maupassant 225). So in order to cover her mistake and solve this problem, Monsieur and Madame Loisel buy an identical necklace, without telling Mme. Forestier, “He went about raising the money”... “he went to claim the new necklace with the thirty-six thousand francs, which he placed on the counter of the shopkeeper” (de Maupassant 226). Although this seems like a terrible way to go about resolving the problem, there are a few good aspects of her conclusion. For instance, Mme. Forestier won’t be heartbroken about the loss of the necklace, and the purchase of a new necklace might make up for the loss if the truth is ever discovered, but most aspects of the action are bad. If Mme. Forestier ever finds out about the lost article, she will most likely be upset, Mme. Loisel herself may live with guilt for a long time, and the friendship between the two women could be destroyed and never

The story intially takes place at a ball that Madame Louisel has been invited to by her husband. In the beginning of the story Madame is very indecisive about making an appearance at the ball. She complained she did not have a dress, any jewels, and she was scared she would look like a "pauper"(174). She did not want to look poor around a bunch of rich woman, so she had asked a friend for a piece of jewelry to wear for the night. Excited, she picks out the diamond necklace that seemed to stand out to her. She adored it. The narrator describes it as "lovliest of all, elegant, smiling, and radiating with joy"(175). Having a blast at the party, dancing, drinking, and not thinking about anything else, Madame left the ball around four in the morning. Calling a cab, Madame and her husband were on their way home, delighted with the fun night that they had. Finally arriving at home, they begin to get into comfortable clothes when suddenly Madame notices that the diamond necklace she had borrowed from a friend for the night had gone missing. Searching everyhwere

     People who make decisions based off want can end up with bad consequences in the end. In the story The Necklace a woman chooses want over need. She thinks she needs to be luxurious and rich but she really doesn't. She thinks she needs nice things to be happy but she actually has all she needs. She borrows a luxurious necklace from her friend and when she loses it she's stuck with a huge debt that will take forever to repay. She spent the

It turned out that her friend’s necklace was made of paste and was only worth “five hundred francs at most” (Maupassant 6) Mine. Loisel was so envious of the wealthy that she ended up working for 10 years when she really didn’t need to. If you lost somethings of a friend’s you would tell them. Therefore, Mine. Loisel was so proud of herself that she was unwilling to admit to losing her friend’s

Mathilde finally confronts her friend about the necklace after all these years, to explain what happened. After she tells her the story however, Madame Forestier tell her friend that the necklace she gave to her in the first place was an imitation. This causes the reader to feel a sense of

As the story comes to an end, she had a tremendous personality change. She had borrowed a necklace from her close friend, Madame Loisel. During the ball, Mathilde had not thought of her boyfriend nor her friend’s necklace. She lost it…… Mathilde had realized, she needed to do something about the lost diamond necklace.

1 In “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant the borrowed necklace and Madame Loisel’s dreams of life in high society are the same in a few ways. The necklace was something Madame Loisel could never afford as a lower class person, while a high class person could afford it easily. 2 The main conflict of the story is when Madame Loisel and her husband undertook the task to replace a necklace that Madame Loisel had lost. Conflict is a literary element that involves a struggle between two opposing forces usually a protagonist and an antagonist. Therefore, when Madame Loisel and her husband had to earn 36,000 francs to pay for the replacement necklace the couple struggled.

This story had an ironic twist that ended up teaching an extremely good lesson. In the story of “The Necklace” Mathilde “suffered ceaselessly” because she was always wanting possessions she did not have. Mathilde spent a lot of her time wishing she had more than what she had. Mathilde and her husband were invited to a fancy ball and Mathilde wanted to impress her friends so she borrowed what she thought was an expensive necklace from a friend. When Mathilde lost the necklace she did not want to tell her friend, so both her and her husband ended up losing everything they had and working very hard to replace it because they did not want to just admit what had happened. The irony was when Mathilde did finally tell her friend what happened

The Necklace introduces us to Matilda Loisel, a woman who acts pretentious and is insatiable, Matilda’s terrible fate acts as a result of her actions. Matilda so eagerly believes that she had lived in an error of fate. She had the looks and the charm of any woman who lived aristocracy but instead lived in a family of clerks. I believe otherwise, as it is an act of fate. Her selfish actions paved the way to her tragic situational irony at the end of the story.

The action of the story first started when her husband brought home the invitation for the ball. When Madame Loisel first saw what the invitation was for, she was frustrated with her husband. For example, “She looked at him with an irritated eye and she declared with impatience ‘What do you want me to put on my back to go there?” She needed a necklace to go with the dress she had gotten, so she borrowed one from a friend. She had the necklace throughout the party, but as soon as she was home it was gone. They found a necklace that was similar and bought it. For instance, “In a shop in the Palais Royal, they found a diamond necklace that seemed to them absolutely like the one they were seeking.” The replacement necklace took them 10 years to pay off. The writer surprised us with Madame Loisel finding out that the necklace they had bought as the replacement was real diamond and that the original necklace was

(Resolution) When Mathilde faces Madame Forestier, she explains how she lost the necklace and how she and her husband went to every jeweller to try to find a necklace exactly like it. However, Madame Forestier interrupts Mathilde by saying that the necklace only cost 500 france, when Mathilde paid a total of 36,000 france over the span of ten long years, to replace the one she lost. I think I would have been sick to my stomach about that.

While irony and character foil add a lot to the plot of The Necklace, the use of details throughout the story also significantly impacts the plot. In the case of The Necklace, Guy de Maupassant leaves out details that are imperative to the plot, creating a conflict as well as adding elements of suspense and surprise into the story. After Mathilde loses her friend’s diamond necklace at a party and works for ten years in order to replace it, she confesses what happened to her friend. “‘Do you remember that diamond necklace you loaned me to wear to the dance at the ministry?’” During this conversation it is revealed that the necklace was really only worth around five hundred francs. Maupassant was clever in that he left out that crucial detail that gave the story a surprise ending, leaving many readers shocked and surprised. The reader never sees the ending coming and is left to ponder over the consequence Mathilde faced for her materialism, which is what makes it such a humorous and ironic story.