The Necklace

Guy de Maupassant

The Necklace Summary

At the beginning of the story, we meet Mathilde Loisel, a middle-class girl who desperately wishes she were wealthy. She's got looks and charm, but had the bad luck to be born into a family of clerks, who marry her to another clerk (M. Loisel) in the Department of Education. Mathilde is so convinced she's meantto be rich that she detests her real life and spends all day dreaming and despairing about the fabulous life she's not having. She envisions footmen, feasts, fancy furniture, and strings of rich young men to seduce. One day M. Loisel comes home with an invitation to a fancy ball thrown by his boss, the Minister of Education. M. Loisel has gone to a lot of trouble to get the invitation, but Mathilde's first reaction is to throw a fit. She doesn't have anything nice to wear, and can't possibly go! How dare her husband be so insensitive? M. Loisel doesn't know what to do, and offers to buy his wife a dress, so long as it's not too expensive. Mathilde asks for 400 francs, and he agrees. It's not too long before Mathilde throws another fit, though, this time because she has no jewels. So M. Loisel suggests she go see her friend Mme. Forestier, a rich woman who can probably lend her something. Mathilde goes to see Mme. Forestier, and she is in luck. Mathilde is able to borrow a gorgeous diamond necklace. With the necklace, she's sure to be a stunner. The night of the ball arrives, and Mathilde has the time of her life. Everyone loves her (i.e., lusts after her) and she is absolutely thrilled. She and her husband (who falls asleep off in a corner) don't leave until 4am. Mathilde suddenly dashes outside to avoid being seen in her shabby coat. She and her husband catch a cab and head home. But once back at home, Mathilde makes a horrifying discovery: the diamond necklace is gone. M. Loisel spends all of the next day, and even the next week, searching the city for the necklace, but finds nothing. It's gone. So he and Mathilde decide they have no choice but to buy Mme. Forestier a new necklace. They visit one jewelry store after another until at last they find a necklace that looks just the same as the one they lost. Unfortunately, it's 36thousand francs, which is exactly twice the amount of all the money M. Loisel has to his name. So M. Loisel goes massively into debt and buys the necklace, and Mathilde returns it to Mme. Forestier, who doesn't notice the substitution. Buying the necklace catapults the Loisels into poverty for the next ten years. That's right, ten years. They lose their house, their maid, their comfortable lifestyle, and on top of it all Mathilde loses her good looks. After ten years, all the debts are finally paid, and Mathilde is out for a jaunt on the Champs Elyses. There she comes across Mme. Forestier, rich and beautiful as ever. Now that all the debts are paid off, Mathilde decides she wants to finally tell Mme. Forestier the sad story of the necklace and her ten years of poverty, and she does. At that point, Mme. Forestier, aghast, reveals to Mathilde that the necklace she lost was just a fake. It was worth only five hundred francs.

The Necklace Setting

Where It All Goes Down

Belle poque Paris

The story's set in Paris, that magical, glamorous city of lights where just about every other work of 19th century French literature is set. So that's the where. When's the when? We'd say the 1880s or so, around the time Maupassant wrote it. Granted, we don't get many specific clues, not a lot of detail on clothing, or important people, places, or happenings of the time. But if the author doesn't do anything to suggest he's otherwise, it's usually a safe bet to assume he's writing in his own time. One thing that's telling, though, is that Mathilde dreams of beingrich, but doesn't seem to think a whole lot about being noble. If the story were set earlier, noble blood would have mattered more, and Mathilde probably would have thought about it just as much as money. At this point in time, however, money (plus a little bit of charm) practically makes nobility. Money's what enables you to pay for the "high life," and surround yourself with fancy, fabulous things. And the fancy, fabulous things that Mathilde fantasizes about the oriental tapestries, "tall lamps of bronze," the "precious bric-a-brac" in "coquettish little rooms" all hint at the fashions of the time, as does the intimate," small-party social life that she idolizes. In fact, the importance Mathilde gives money, posh "comfort," and fancy, fashionable baubles makes her fit right in with the Paris of the late 19th century. That period was often called the "Belle poque" (which you could translate as the "Lovely Age," or "Grand Years" depending on how you understand it). It was a time of peace and technological innovation (electricity, for example). It was also a period of spectacular wealth, modish fashion, and what you might call "high consumerism." Going on expensive shopping sprees at the brand new, super-ritzy, block-sized department stores that had just opened up downtown was all the rage (Sacks Fifth Avenue-type shopping palaces were a new invention back then). So if you're one of those folks who thinks a work of literature should capture the "spirit of the age" in which it was written, "The Necklace" works quite well.

The Necklace
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory Sometimes, theres more to Lit than meets the eye. The necklace could very well be just a necklace, but it could also be something more. It's so flashy and beautiful, and so seemingly valuable. Despite its convincing outside, it turns out to be "false." It's all show, in other words, with no substance. Doesn't that description sound like it could fit any number of other things? For one, you could easily read the necklace as a symbol of "wealth" itself flashy, but false, in the end. Like "wealth," the necklace is the object of Mathilde's mad desire. Perhaps the revelation of the necklace's falseness at the end is meant to mirror the falseness of Mathilde's dream of wealth. Having wealth is not worth the trouble, any more than the false necklace was worth ten years of poverty. Then again, wealth has its advantages: it certainly seems to do wonders for Mme. Forestier's looks, for instance, while poverty ruins Mathilde's. Maybe that connection between wealth and looks is a telling one. Even deeper than wealth, the necklace might representappearance, the world in which it's the outside that matters. Wealth belongs to the world of appearance, because money buys glamour. Mathilde's unhappy because of the way her own shabby house looks, and the way her lack of money prevents her from wowing the people she wants to wow with her natural charm and good looks. The necklace is glamorous, and it also gives her the opportunity to be the woman she wants to be, for one evening. Beneath the fancy exterior, though, the necklace is not worth anything it's a fake. In that respect, it fits Mathilde's own situation at the party: though she fools everyone there, she's not really wealthy. At the end of the day she is still a clerk's wife in a fancy party dress with some borrowed jewels. The fact that the necklace is a fake may or may not have some kind of moral meaning. You could take it to mean that wealth, or appearances more broadly, are false. Against the backdrop of wealth and appearance, we have the contrast of Mathilde's poverty. Being poverty stricken may ruin her appearance, but it forces her to become responsible and hard working, and perhaps makes her appreciate what she had before. You could take away a moral such as, wealth just keeps you wanting more until you ruin yourself, while poverty teaches appreciation. Then again, Maupassant never comes out and gives us this moral explicitly. And it's up to the reader to decide if giving up good looks, comfort, and your own personal maid for a work ethic and a little more appreciation is a good deal. After all, the world of wealth and appearances may be false, but it's still kind of fabulous. Just like the necklace.

The Necklace Theme of Wealth

"The Necklace" gets its title from the gorgeous piece of diamond jewelry that drives the story's plot. The expensive nature of the necklace is not the only way in which wealth is central to this story. The main character of "The Necklace" is obsessed with wealth. She wants nothing else than to escape from her shabby middle-class life with a shabby middle-class husband and live the glamorous life for which she was born. She's so jealous of her one wealthy friend it hurts. When Mathilde's given the chance to get decked out in diamonds and go to a ritzy party to mingle with all the beautiful people, it seems like her dreams have finally become a reality. Then she loses the borrowed diamond necklace, gets cast into poverty, and learns what it means to truly live without money.

The Necklace Theme of Women and Femininity

Mathilde Loisel, the main character of "The Necklace," is a 19th century French version of a desperate housewife. Because she's a woman in a man's world, she has almost no control over her life. She finds herself married to a husband she doesn't care for, and cooped up in a house she despises. What she wants more than anything else is to be desirable to other men. And what's particularly irritating is that she has all the "womanly virtues" she needs in order to be desirable: she's charming, graceful, beautiful. She's just doesn't have the necessary wealth. Does Mathilde Loisel capture the tragic plight of the modern, middle-class woman? Is she a victim of the patriarchal society in which she lives? Or is she just a shallow and materialistic character?

The Necklace Theme of Pride

You can read "The Necklace" as a story about greed, but you can also read it as a story about pride. Mathilde Loisel is a proud woman. She feels far above the humble circumstances (and the husband) she's forced to live with by her common birth. In fact, her current situation disgusts her. She's a vain one too, completely caught up in her own beauty. It could be that it is also pride that prevents Mathilde and her husband from admitting they've lost an expensive necklace. After the loss of the necklace makes Mathilde poor, and her beauty fades, she may learn a pride of a different sort: pride in her own work and endurance.

The Necklace Theme of Suffering

"The Necklace" is a difficult story to read. If you think about it, it's about nonstop suffering, caused by the cruelty of life and chance. At the opening, we meet Mathilde, the classic dissatisfied housewife, who spends her days weeping about how boring and shabby her life is. Mathilde finds one moment of real joy when she goes to a ball, but chance is cruel. Her happiest night becomes her worst nightmare when she loses the diamond necklace she borrowed. Then she and her husband experience a very different sort of suffering: the suffering of real poverty. And all of this is just the buildup to one devastating ending

CHARACTERS:
Mathilde Loisel
Character Analysis Mathilde Loisel wants to be a glamour girl. She's obsessed with glamour with fancy, beautiful, expensive things, and the life that accompanies them. Unfortunately for her, she wasn't born into a family with the money to make her dream possible. Instead, she gets married to a "little clerk" husband and lives with him in an apartment so shabby it brings tears to her eyes (1). Cooped up all day in the house with nothing to do but cry over the chintzy furniture and the fabulous life she's not having, Mathilde hates her life, and probably her husband too. She weeps "all day long, from chagrin, from regret, from despair, and from distress" (6). She dreams day after day about escaping it all.

M. Loisel
Character Analysis M. Loisel is the "little clerk in the Department of Education" (1) to whom Mathilde's family marries Mathilde off. Mathilde herself, as we're quick to find out, isn't terribly happy about her middle-class husband. She hates the shabby "averageness" of their life, and is miserable being cooped up in their apartment all day, dreaming of the luxurious life she wants to be leading. M. Loisel, on the other hand, seems quite happy with their situation. Unlike Mathilde, he enjoys his life as it is, especially that good old homemade pot-au-feu (stew): When she sat down to dine, before a tablecloth three days old, in front of her husband, who lifted the cover of the tureen, declaring with an air of satisfaction, "Ah, the good pot-au-feu. I don't know anything better than that," she was thinking of delicate repasts, with glittering silver, with tapestries peopling the walls with ancient figures and with strange birds in a fairy-like forest (4) Yes, M. Loisel appreciates the little things. He also seems devoted to his wife. After all, he goes to all that trouble to get her the invitation to a fancy party, which he couldn't care less about himself (he sleeps through it). He sacrifices the hunting rifle he's spent months saving up for so Mathilde can buy a dress for the ball. And when she loses the necklace, he's the one who goes all over the city searching for it. Most importantly, M. Loisel spends his life's savings replacing it. So M. Loisel seems like the simple, happy, good guy in the story, a foil for his perpetually dissatisfied wife. They make the classic unhappy bourgeois couple, in other words.

Mme. Jeanne Forestier

Character Analysis Mme. Jeanne Forestier is wealthy. That's basically all you need to know. She's the rich friend: the person you turn to when you need something absolutely fabulous to wear to that ball next weekend but don't have the money to buy anything appropriate. That's Mme. Forestier's role in this story: she's that friend for Mathilde. It's also Mme. Forestier who reveals at the end that her necklace was false and thereby single-handedly triggers the twist ending. Apparently Mathilde and Mme. Forestier have known each other for a while, since their convent days. Around the time of the ball, though, it doesn't sound as if Mathilde's seen much of her lately, because it makes Mathilde too unhappy to visit her rich friend and see the life of luxury that she's not living. It doesn't sound like they see much of each other after Mathilde returns the substitute diamond necklace, either. The two women most likely don't meet again until they run into each other on the Champs Elyses ten years later. Mathilde's too ashamed to let her friend see the poverty she's living in, and is afraid to explain why she became poor (since that would mean admitting she lost the necklace).

M. Georges Ramponneau
Character Analysis M. Georges Ramponneau is the guy who throws the fabulous ball that just might be the best few hours of Mathilde's life. He's the Minister of Education, which makes him M. Loisel's boss (which is probably why M. Loisel was able to get the invitation). And he apparently "notices" Mathilde at the ball, like every other guy there.

The First Jeweler

Character Analysis The first jeweler is the man whose name is on the box in which Mme. Forestier's necklace comes. Naturally, when Mathilde loses it, he's the one she and her husband go to, to see about replacing it. This jeweler apparently didn't sell the necklace to Mme. Forestier, though, just the box. This is a little weird, isn't it? Why would you just buy a box from someone? Perhaps this is the only hint in the story that there's something a little funny about those jewels