Mathilde wants to go to balls and be in the company of nobles, but she cannot afford it because she is the wife of a government clerk who earns little, and she also does not have beautiful dresses and jewelry. One day her husband comes home with an invitation to the ministerial ball, and to feel proud there, Mathilde buys an expensive gown with her spouse’s money and borrows a necklace from her friend, a more fortunate and wealthy woman. The couple loses the diamond necklace on the way home, and to return the lost one to Madame Forestier, they decide to substitute it by buying the jewelry looking exactly similar, for which they sacrifice their property and become poor.
Hard Working is the Only Way to True Joy
De Maupassant discussed socio-economic inequality in the 19th century and the essence of true happiness in “The Necklace,” his central claim is that only great efforts can bring true happiness, whereas the easy way can only bring temporary, poisonous pleasure. At the short story’s end, Mathilde smiles “with a joy that was at once proud and ingenuous” for the first time in ten years because both her deceit was successful, and she and her husband paid off all their debts. It is the first time the author combines the concepts of joy and sincerity of Mathilde’s feelings together in “The Necklace;” this scene also creates a drastic contrast with the beginning of the short story, when the heroine is sad. By creating a contradiction between the tones of the opening and closing parts of the story, while showing a ten-year storyline of the couple, the writer hints to readers that true happiness is achievable only through great effort and work.
Pleasure is easily Achievable yet Poisonous
The idea put into “The Necklace” is complex, and it involves not only joy but also the fact that an individual can confuse happiness with pleasure, with the only effective way to distinguish these is by knowing the preceding path. De Maupassant writes about Mathilde at the ball “she danced with rapture, with passion, intoxicated by pleasure, forgetting all in the triumph of her beauty … in a sort of cloud of happiness” as if she in a toxic mist. Such a choice of words and them being present in one phrase is not accidental since this author’s smart move is a subtle and nuanced hint for the audience of “The Necklace” happiness and pleasure are fundamentally different emotional states. Before this idea, the author showed that it was easy for Mathilde to get into an event similar to those she dreamed of; this storyline sequence motivates the audience to conclude that the easy way leads only to temporary pleasure.
Work Cited
De Maupassant, Guy. “The Necklace.”American Literature, Web.