The Jewelry Maupassant Analysis

Elvis Karenzi

Laura Ighade

English 102-006

October 9th 2015

Secrets

Guy de Maupassant’s “The Jewelry” teaches that people often choose to ignore the perceptions we have in the fear that the reality will hurt us. M. Lantin chooses to see his wife’s good deeds only because she is the main source of his happiness. It is until he is revealed to her shady character that he is subjected to face reality and made to feel pain. Madame Lantin presents herself very well in front of the public but keeps secrets even from her own husband, and this was very common for women in the 19th century when this story is set. The veneer of cosmopolitan behavior expected from females in French society leads to and justifies the blatant dishonesty, the acceptance

Lantin was not only ubiquitous behavior among women of her time period, but it was also crucial to the stability of her home. “There were on two points upon which he ever found fault with her—her love of the theatre, and her passion for false jewelry”(P.90). It is interesting to see how the author wants the reader to focus on the details. M. Lantin put his wife on a very high pedestal and yet he was able to find fault in her. The author’s use of the words ‘love’ and ‘passion’ are a subtle way of implying that these gifts and performances meant more to her than she let on. They symbolized the existence of her extra-marital affairs. ‘’Secrecy was thus both deemed necessary to bourgeois notions of privacy and viewed as potentially dangerous to public order’’.(P. 47)

Although accepting gifts from other men made it look like Madame Lantin was cheating on her husband, it helped her maintain the social nature of the upper-middle class woman of the late nineteenth century while supplementing the paycheck of M. Lantin. Women of middle class and of higher stature in 19th century France were often surrounded by men; at the theatre, at dinner parties, salon and so on. The relationship between men and women was not conservative. ”But it also appears that the discreet infidelities of upper middle class women were increasingly tolerated in Paris at the end of the nineteenth