The Necklace final draft

English 101
September 17, 2014

The Façade Mathilde Loisel lived the life of a painfully distressed woman who always believed herself worthy of living in the upper class. Although Mathilde was born into the average middle class family, she spent her time daydreaming of her destiny for more in life, especially when it referred to her financial tier. Guy de Maupassant’s short story, “The Necklace”, expresses a tale of a vain, narcissistic housewife who had longed for an aristocratic lifestyle of wealth, lavish parties, and other materialistic things. In describing Mathilde’s unappreciative outlook on her life, de Maupassant incorporates the tragic irony that ultimately concludes in ruining her. She yearns for the status of being upper class, and she believes that her beauty and charm are worthy of much more than what she has. This false image only leads to Mathilde Loisel and her husband’s demise. Guy de Maupassant portrays multiple mediums of symbolism. A necklace is flashy, beautiful, and seemingly valuable, but just like the true value of any necklace, it’s all show, in other words with no substance. The necklace for Madam Loisel symbolizes all that she doesn 't have in life, and all that she desires, it symbolizes wealth, social status as well as the consequences of greed and deception.
The necklace is a symbol of wealth and power for Madame Loisel. This represents a world she longs to be in but will never be able to reach. The apartment that she lived in with her husband is a constant reminder of what she feels is a miserable life that she doesn 't deserve and that she was not born to. In the real world a necklace represents beauty, but the necklace in this story represents so much more than just beauty. Madame Loisel looked stunning in the new dress she begged her husband to buy, but she still refused to go to the party without some type of jewelry that would only heighten her sense of belonging. She feels the need to have such a necklace because she does not want to be singled out and humiliated by appearing in a lower tax bracket. In the few hours at the party Madame Loisel finally felt the joy she had been wanting, although she had known deep down that the appearance was more a scheme than it was truth. Her wealth and class were simply a hoax, and she had many people (including herself) fooled. Throughout “The Necklace”, Mathilde continues to concrete her jaded and cheated personality by looking down on the average life she has, and only looking up to the luxurious lifestyle of the wealthy. As the reader learns that the diamond necklace is in fact fake; the reader can also infer that Mathilde is not any more authentic than the imitation jewelry that she cannot even call her own. Like herself, the necklace is beautiful, but in the end worthless.
I chose the passage describing Mathilde at the party, this excerpt shows the end game and greed of Mathilde. “She danced madly, ecstatically, drunk with pleasure, with no thought for anything, in the triumph of her beauty, in the pride of her success, in a cloud of happiness made up of this universal homage and admiration, of the desires she had aroused, of the completeness of a victory so dear to her feminine heart.” This excerpt is near the middle of the story, when Mathilde is more content with her life than she has ever been. She had tried so hard to get to this point, while asking her hard working husband to shell out more money for her dress. The excerpt even expresses to the reader that all of it is a fraud when it reads “in a cloud of happiness made up…”. This greed brought her a short taste of the life she yearned for, but she would never predict the consequences that one necklace would bring to her and her husband. As the years go by and they both work to pay off the debt of the real necklace. This period in her life forced Mathilde to learn the ethics of being a lower-class housewife. Heavy duties in the kitchen, cleaning dirty linens and clothing, and fetching water was the result of dismissing the servant they could no longer afford. Ironically, she did not only lose sight of the luxurious life that she dreamt of, she was forced to adapt to the life of a poor housewife; with beat red hands, awry clothing, and miserable circumstances. Mathilde’s real beauty and spark has been tarnished and dulled. The only thing real in her life was lost and forgotten.
Mathilde’s story of desire and hope for wealth portrayed her self-serving, unappreciative, broken and fake human behaviors to her husband and to society. We find her to only be as genuine as the faux necklace she admired so greatly. Her necklace representing her broken image between appearance and reality shows the true worth of her life and dreams. The human behaviors in de Maupassant’s, “The Necklace”, are all too common in the world today. From this story there is a clear and concise message: The things in life that are truly valuable are things not purchased in a retail store. Materialistic objects such as jewelry and clothes are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes down to it. Returning to the passage chosen it is seen that only temporary feelings are brought on by such objects. Out of all the possible types of symbolism in the short story “The Necklace”, the most influential is the idea of appearances being deceptive. All of the others – including wealth, social class, ambition leading to doom, are all crucial to create the main point. De Maupassant waits till the complete end of the story to reveal that the necklace is indeed a façade, while all the time the reader is presumed to believe that both Mathilde and her husband are honest when attempting to repay their debts to Madame Forestier. Instead it leads them to a dead end, where the reader must feel Mathildes’ guilt and pain. In the end we are reminded that those who do not appreciate their own fortune, no matter how small it is, do not deserve the wealth and glamour they seek.

Works Cited

Bauknight, Lee, and William W. Garland. "The Necklace." The Carolina Reader. Southlake, TX: Fountainhead, 2013. N. pag. Print.

Cited: Bauknight, Lee, and William W. Garland. "The Necklace." The Carolina Reader. Southlake, TX: Fountainhead, 2013. N. pag. Print.