Guy De Maupassant “The Necklace”

The novel “the Necklace” takes place in 1800s Paris, France. The author tells the story of a family that had to toil for ten years after losing a diamond that they had borrowed for a party and lost on the same day. Madame Mathilde Loisel and her husband Monsieur Loisel are members of the tribe. The husband returns home overjoyed because he has received an invitation to the wedding, but her wife is disappointed because she has no dress and, later, no ornament to wear and insists that her husband sell the chase to another lady. The disappointed Loisel then decides to get a dress and a jewel for her wife who gets the attention she anticipated at the party. When the party ended, however, they realized that there was no necklace and had to borrow money to repay the necklace, a move that placed them in abject pretty for ten years (Imbila 2). The story is centered on the rift between reality and appearance, and Mathilde falls victims as she failed to spot the difference between the two and end up suffering together with her husband due to poor choices.

From the start, the reader is presented with a woman whose perception about herself was not appreciative of her state as she desired to live a lavish lifestyle. The author presents Mathilde as a charming and pretty girl who thought that the situation that she was in was because of an accident of fate. She pondered about the female gender being of a lower social class and believed that the lack of jewels and little niceties meant that she would not be appreciated. It is amid this self-reflection process that her husband comes with the envelop that she presents to her expecting her to be happy about a party invitation. However, because Mathilde could not appreciate their real state and was more concerned about how she would look at the function, and she plainly declares that she is not happy about lacking a dress. The author writes her words “No . . . there’s nothing so humiliating as looking poor in the middle of a lot of rich women” (Maupassant 2). It is upon this disappointment that she forces her husband to use his life saving to buy a hunting rift to consider a dress, a rather luxurious commodity as opposed to the need that the husband had in mind.

Furthermore, the discord between appearance and reality is further manifested when they are at the party. The woman met her expectation because she realized that just as she anticipated, all men were staring at her at the function. She failed to realize that the perception she was giving them was not the true state of her economic status because they had spent all the money they had with her husband to acquire the material wear she was flaunting at the party. The men would easily conclude that because she was the prettiest and most elegant women in the room for the night, she could have originated from a rich background. In fact, the men were so carried away by what they were seeing that they started enquiring about her name and even the minister noticed her from her moves (Maupassant 16). All these, however, was the exact opposite of the state of affairs back at home. It is likely that the necklace was stolen by one of the many men who confronted her that night because they thought that the woman was rich. In the end, however, the reader realizes that the act of impressing rich men in one night and suffering for ten years was a stupid decision.

Lastly, it is worth emphasizing that the contrast between reality and appearance is further manifested when they had to repay the necklace for an amount that it was not worth. It would have been prudent asking how much the necklace cost when they took it from Madame Forestier. In fact, Mathilde could have been more careful and checked to see whether the jewel was made of real or fake diamond. The relevance of this concept was revealed when they were told they would have to spend in the range of 40000 francs to acquire a similar jewel. The impression that the author gets is that there was a clash between what was thought the price pf the lost jewel was and the true price of the lost necklace. According to Forester, the necklace was at the most 500 francs (Maupassant 16). It thus meant that the couple had made a poor choice based on how they interpreted the reality from how the necklace appeared

In summary, the dichotomy of reality and appearance by Mathilde could be argued as the principal cause of the suffering that the couple had throughout the story. The three key incidences that are worth highlighting include the woman’s perception of herself, the attention they received the party and the price they paid for the lost necklace. In all the three instances, it was apparent that what wax thought to be real based on appearance did not constitute the true state of affairs. The moral of the story to the reader is that before making assumptions about something based on what they see, they should first eliminate the possibility of the scenario being an incidence of a discord between reality and appearance.

Works Cited

Imbila. ”The Necklace By Guy de Maupassant.” English Fall Short Stories (2014): n. pag. Web.

Maupassant, Guy de. The Necklace. 629 Fifth Avenue: Benchmark Education Company, 2007. Print.