English 9- Story Capsule Ms. Cardino

Name______Date______

Title: “The Necklace”

Author: Guy de Maupassant

Setting:

France in the 1800’s

Point of View: 3rd person limited

Plot:At the beginning of the story, we meet MathildeLoisel, 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'smeantto be rich that she detests her real life and spends all daydreaming and despairing about the fabulous life she'snothaving.

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. Everyonelovesher (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 36thousandfrancs, which is exactly twice the amount ofallthe 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 nextten years. That's right,ten years. They lose their house, their maid, their comfortable life-style, 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 Elysées. 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.

Characters:

MathildeLoisel-wants to be aglamour 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'snothaving, 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-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. 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 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.

Conflict: Real Life vs. Fantasy Life

Changes in MathildeLoisel

Real Life-

Unhappy in every aspect of life
Doesn’t feel as if she necessarily deserves what she has, believes she deserves so much more than the average person
Mathilde believes she is destined for wealth and everything it brings to the table

Fantasy Life-

Still unhappy about her clothing and appearance
Still unhappy about her everyday “average life”
Even though she thinks she fits in, deep down she knows she doesn’t

Symbolism:

The necklace can be a symbol representing actual wealth, flashy, yet false in the end. Like wealth “the necklace” is the object of Mathilde’s 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.

Allegory:

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.

Theme: Be happy with who you are and what you have or be yourself, everyone else is taken.

Often being unhappy in life can be restricting because it takes away from letting your appreciate the things you should in life.