preview

The Necklace Greed Essay

Decent Essays

Maupassant’s The Necklace: The Cupidity of Mathilde Loisel Greed is a vice that cannot be satisfied; the intense desire of material objects often leads to hardship and regret. Mathilde Loisel, a middle class woman, desperately wishes that she was a higher class, so she can experience the luxuries of life. In Maupassant’s short story The Necklace, avarice corrupts Mathilde’s expectations of life as well as her state of mind. Despite only being born into a bourgeois family, Mathilde laments over the notion that she was “born for all the delicacies and all the luxuries” (Maupassant). Though Mathilde is born into a lower class, she is in no way poverty-stricken.
Her husband is a clerk that works at the Ministry of Public Instruction and makes …show more content…

Instead of being grateful for not only having an invitation to the ball and a new and extravagant dress to wear, she continued to be ungrateful. Mathilde visited her childhood friend, Mme. Forestier, to find a necklace to go with her dress. She picked out “a superb diamond necklace” that caused her to “remain lost in ecstasy at the sight of herself” (Maupassant). The necklace that she borrows from her friend shows just how vain Mathilde really is. Her infatuation with herself, as it was shown in the later parts of the story, had dire …show more content…

Mathilde, instead of telling Mme. Forestier the mistake she made, and her husband decided that the best course of action would be to buy a new real diamond necklace. Loisel was forced to use all eighteen thousand francs that his father left him as well as borrow the rest from various banks and unsavory figures. The Loisels had to work her debt off with her bare hands. She then began to understand how lucky she was to have a modest, humble home that was her own. Working for ten long years made Mathilde age considerably, for “she had become the woman of impoverished households- strong and hard and rough”

Get Access