Living in a dream The short story The Necklace was written by a French writer named Guy de Maupassant. This story takes place in the late 1880s in France. In this time, there wasn’t any such thing as middle class, only the rich and the poor. The women married young and mated with whomever that appeared to be in their social class and stayed at home while the men worked and provide. The necklace was a symbolism of something that was considered priceless and caused this family to sacrifice their own dreams and goals to portray a false hope to others and themselves. I chose this particular passage because it reminds me a lot of myself. As a married woman, I know how we can easily manipulate men to get what we want. Many people today, …show more content…
She hurried away because she was embarrassed that she didn’t have an expensive fur like the other women as if everything else he did for her wasn’t enough. This passage represents two different themes to me. One theme was greed and how it could make a person become so selfish and want to manipulate the ones that love them just so they can get ahead in life. Mathilde Loisel manipulated her husband just so she could enjoy this one night and didn’t care how much of a bind it would put him in. Her husband gets an invite to this party to cheer her up and she just had to have the best dress and the best jewels just to fake and portray her wealth because she felt like they weren’t good enough. The second theme to me was perception. Like the saying says, “perception is the key”, She was obsessed with looking the part and not being considered un wealthy to the patrons at the party. All she wants to do is escape from her normality and knows what it felt to be wealthy just for the night. She hated her life and dreamed for it to be more glamorous. Both of these themes were significant to the story as a whole because greed was the reason she becomes very poor and was the cause of her downfall. Her wanting to give off a certain perception of wealth to people she was never going to cross paths with
In “The Necklace”, Mathilde Loisel is a woman who cannot tolerate her lower-class status, believing “herself born for every delicacy and luxury”(82). Mathilde’s vain materialistic goals, make her bitter and unhappy. The main point of irony in the story is the fact that Mathilde borrows the necklace and looses it. The necklace was very expensive, or so she thought, so she ended up in poverty
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.
Around the world, values are expressed differently. Some people think that life is about the little things that make them happy. Others feel the opposite way and that expenses are the way to live. In Guy de Maupassant’s short story, “The Necklace”, he develops a character, Madame Loisel, who illustrates her different style of assessments. Madame Loisel, a beautiful woman, lives in a wonderful home with all the necessary supplies needed to live. However, she is very unhappy with her life. She feels she deserves a much more expensive and materialistic life than what she has. After pitying herself for not being the richest of her friends, she goes out and borrows a beautiful necklace from an ally. But as she
The Necklace, a short story written by Guy de Maupassant, is about a greedy woman in poverty, who learns that being selfish can hurt her and others around her. Her greedy behavior indicates that she has been struggling during her years in poverty. When she scrambled to find out her purpose in life, she portrayed anger and malevolence towards others.
Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” is a short story about a middle-class girl Mathilde, who loses her friend’s costly necklace and spends a decade paying for its replacement. “The Necklace” represents the story of a standard young lady who loves her husband, despite her desires to be an affluent person. However, readers fail to notice that Madame Loisel’s love for Monsieur Loisel vanishes upon their marriage and her materialistic personalities continue to increase. “The Necklace” is influencing other stories because of its elegance and love, but people will never understand the melancholy and negative reality of this narrative. Therefore, in the short story “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant, the protagonist Mathilde is portrayed as a dissatisfied, begrudging, and calumniating character through her perspective of her average life, her actions toward her friend Madame Forestier, and her husband Monsieur Loisel.
Mathilde’s is downright inconsiderate to her husband as she declines her husband's attempts to appease her. This shows her lack of compassion towards anything but her status and possessions because she is only thinking about herself. Monsieur Loisel is blind and will do anything to make his wife happy even at his own expense yet she cannot see this and asks money of him that he gives over. Mathilde doesn’t seem to see how loyal her husband is to her and would do anything for her. As for her friend Madame Forestier, Mathilde despite saying she is good friends with madame Forestier cannot visit her house without weeping. Mathilde is envious of what Madame Forestier’s wealth and possessions. During the dance, Mathilde lavished in all the attention she received from her male admirers. The only time in the story where Mathilde is truly happy is when she is surrounded in admiration and envy of the
In the short story, “The Necklace,” a greedy and selfish woman brings financial ruin upon herself and her husband. They go from a comfortable lifestyle in a slightly shabby apartment to an impoverished existence in an attic apartment. Mathilde Loisel was born to a lower middle class French family, but she wished that she could have of noble birth. Her longing for a better life caused her great grief. When she could have been happy with her situation in life, instead she would dream of a grand home and wealthy, dignified friends. When she borrowed a diamond necklace from a friend and lost it at an elegant party, she brought downfall to her husband and herself. Not only does Guy de Maupassant use the
During this time, it was considered the responsibility of the husband to make his wife happy. Because of this expectation placed on him by society, Monsieur Loisel worked as hard as he could towards his wife’s happiness. Due to his wife’s blunders, Monsieur Loisel “gave promissory notes, made ruinous agreements...He compromised the end of his life.” It is thanks to his wife’s recklessness that Monsieur Loisel risks losing all he has made for himself. Loisel takes his wife’s burden without a complaint after she has potentially ruined their lives. Madame Loisel also seems to take advantage of her husband, using him for her own personal gain as she asks for money to purchase an expensive dress, to which her husband “went a little pale, for that was exactly the amount he was reserving to buy a gun and treat himself to a little shooting” (688). Monsieur Loisel was willing to give up something he wanted in order to satisfy his wife. Of course, this is a nigh impossible goal for him to have, as Madame Loisel has proven herself unable to enjoy what she has as long as someone else has more. Near the end of the story, Maupassant explains to the reader “Madame Loisel seemed aged now. She had become the robust woman, hard and rough, of a poor household” (687). Madame Loisel had been fighting against this change for most of her life, as society tried to force her to fit their
Caroline and her sister Molly were walking down the beach like they have done everyday for as long as they could remember, with the sand squishing in between their toes, the sun beating down on their backs. Although Caroline and Molly are twins, they don’t fight like regular siblings, they are each other's best friend, they pick out each others outfits and braid each others hair every morning. Caroline and Molly look nothing alike, people are normally surprised to hear that they are twins. Caroline has thin blonde hair and is five feet tall, but Molly has thick brown hair and is five feet and two inches tall. Every morning when the sun is about to rise, the girls run outside, from their house like every morning and onto the beach, they look
She did not accept her existence. She sought an aesthetically pleasing lifestyle, and felt that she would give anything, even her life to have it. She did not realize the fact that she had a loving husband and a secure lifestyle. She was not happy with her surroundings and possessions. She felt cursed to have such beauty and grace with no class to go with it. She dreamt of things that were simply not meant for her and she overlooked the things she did have. It is ironic that she should not recognize her wealth in love and security but, in turn, want a lifestyle that is usually cold, unloving, and shallow. Mathilde daydreamed about things that are unimportant to those that have them. It actually upset her to be invited to a party because she doesn't have anything to wear. At this point in the story it is easy to see that she misjudged her wealth. She wanted a new dress for the Chancellor's party, and even though her husband was saving the money to buy a shotgun, he gave her the money almost without hesitation. This was not enough. She also had to have beautiful jewelry because "…there's nothing more humiliating that looking poor in the company of rich women." (De Maupassant 7). The reality of her situation was that although she was not as rich as the women she admired from afar, she was certainly in a position to be comfortable financially, and she was not poor.
How one reacts to the truth tells a lot about the person. Do they fight the truth? Do they hide from it? Or do they accept the truth and do the best they can with their situation? The quote “We don't get to choose what is true. We only get to choose what we do about it.” from Kami Garcia states that when presented with a challenge or an inconvenient truth, one cannot change the circumstances given, but they do have a choice in how they react to the truth. In addition, no one way of handling truth is right or wrong and everyone will react differently to a situation. Nevertheless, there are better and worse ways of handling it.
Have you ever read an intense short story? Well both “The Necklace” and “The Bet” are the most intense short stories ever. Both authors from both passages explain the dialogue by discovering new aspects of the passages. In “The Necklace” written by Guy de Maupassant (1884), is about how a character called Mathilde that loses one of her friends necklace, that was a fake, and spends the next 10 years paying it off. On the other hand “The Bet” written by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1889) is about a lawyer and a banker who make a bet to see which option is worse for a criminal, either life in jail or instantly getting killed. They came to the conclusion on sending the lawyer to jail for 15 years to see if it was true. “The Necklace” and “The
when she hears of her husband’s death. Although she is not stuck as many women would have
Mr. Loisel was obviously excited the day that The Chancellor of Education had invited them to an exquisite dinner. Surely he thought that this was finally a way that he could provide an outlet for Mathilde's deepest desires. Unfortunately, instead of being thrilled as he had predicted, Mathilde acted like a spoiled child, throwing the invitation on the table. "She had no decent dresses, no jewels, nothing. And she loved nothing but these; she believed herself born only for these" (5). She couldn't have been more manipulative than when she began to cry about not having anything to wear. Of course Mr. Loisel suddenly fell into her trap and suddenly decided to give her all of the money in his savings account to buy her a new dress. Most would assume that she'd be satisfied at this point; her husband has just made a huge financial sacrifice for her. However, as time drew near to the night of the party, she became insecure and restless because she thought she would look poor if she didn't have any fancy jewels to wear; she thought she'd look like a beggar. `I'd almost rather not go to the party (30)", she said.
Setting is known as the time and place in which a story takes place. It can also be used to establish a mood or describe things like the weather. It basically helps establish where, when, and under what circumstances a story takes place. In the short story “The Necklace”, the setting is not directly stated. You can infer that the story takes place in France due to the fact that they talk about using francs, the husband talks about wanting to go shooting with some friends in Nanterre, and how they call a cab which they describe as never being around Paris until dark. The main characters also live on the Rue des Martyrs which is a popular street in Paris France. As far as when the story happened we don't know for sure. We can assume it happened somewhere in the 1900’s because the story was written in 1884 and Euros became france's currency in 1999.