The general mood in the Necklace is ironic. It is filled with tense and grim storytelling elements. The given spirit is there from the beginning of the story. It illustrates a high level of the unhappiness of Madame Loisel with her life and her status.
Detailed answer:
Madame Mathilde Loisel shifts the mood in the Necklace. She is the main character and an unhappy woman. Her life and position in society disgust her because she does not belong to the wealthy. The grim mood in the story is set from the start, where readers can observe unhappy Loisel. For example, she says that she was born to a family of clerks as the accident of fate. She genuinely believes that she is supposed to be an aristocrat. In other words, an initial mood in the Diamond Necklace is the grimness of the situation.
Another mood observed in the Necklace story is the intensity of actions. The storyline gets tenser and tenser as it progresses. One of the key catalysts of such an aspect is deciding to replace the lost necklace with a new one. To do so, they sacrifice all their savings. This tense mood of the Necklace reaches its maximum when they buy a similar necklace at the Palais-Royal. They decide to purchase it for 36000 francs. The couple sacrifices all of their savings and inheritance to buy the jewelry, putting them in poverty.
It is important to note that irony can be considered as the central mood of the Diamond Necklace story. But it is not as evident as other mentioned moods. It only becomes prominent at the end section, where Jeanne reveals that the original Necklace was fake. In other words, the couple became poor and lived their past ten years in misery for nothing.
The irony is one way of expressing the author’s position, the skeptical attitude to the depicted. The hidden meaning that the author is trying to convey contradicts the explicit one. The irony is a type of mockery, which creates the illusion that the depicted object is not what it seems.
The primary mechanism for the existence of irony is playing with meanings. In this game, the true meaning is not the direct meaning of the statement. But it is the opposite to it, implied by the author indirectly and expressed in various linguistic ways. The greater the conflict between the defined and the signified, the stronger we feel the irony.
As a rhetorical figure, irony reinforces a statement by re-emphasizing its meaning. It creates a comic effect. But we should note that only some forms of irony can be attributed to the means of ridicule. The uncertainty of the text with an ironic orientation has a particular interest. The author creates it willfully to cause a specific stylistic effect.
Looking for an inspiring idea for a paper on The Necklace? Take a look at our The Necklace Essay Topic Ideas & Examples to find the perfect one!
