The Necklace Character Analysis Essay

It is through Matilde that Maupassant develops the story's irony. This is reflected through Matilde's daydreaming, which only serves to torment her, the loss of the necklace borrowed for show, which only worsens their economic position, and finally, their unnecessary sacrifice. The irony begins with Matilde's frequent daydreaming. She is a beautiful and charming woman who feels "herself destined for all delicacies and luxuries" (4). Fate, however, placed her among the middle class where life was very simple.

Vivie is a refined woman with class, well dressed and her mother, a nice woman, but lack the class and skills of Vivie world. The characters, stage, and themes make this an enjoyable play. The play is very successful getting the message across about women being exploited as prostitutes. It was unfortunate that the good intentions and hard work of Mrs. Warren ultimately causes her to loose her daughter. It is ironic that her mother’s profession, a madam, which provides the life for Vivie with a fine education and all the perks of being rich, causes them to have different values and perceptions on life issues.

She lets go of her dreams to be in a higher social class and accepts who she really is. In the story, Mathidle is described as “…the woman of impoverished households…with frowsy hair, skirts askew, and red hands…” Maupassant reveals that she has accepted herself in this way because she is not ashamed to be seen in public because she is seen by her friend, whom she borrowed the necklace from, and went up to her and spoke with confidence. The friend hardly recognized her this way. The friend asked how she had become so old in such a short amount of time, and she explained that she and her husband had to work very hard for the past ten years to pay for the replacement necklace. Her friend, shocked, tells Mathidle that the necklace she had borrowed was “paste” (73).

Ten years of suffering is the cost of having pleasure for only one night! In “The Necklace,” by Guy de Maupassant presents Mathilde Loisel, an attractive, charming but vacuous and selfish middle class lady transforms to selfness, poor, satisfied and hard-working lady. Even though, Mathidle owns a comfortable home and married to a faithful and kind husband, Monsieur Loisel, who seeks her happiness and satisfaction; she was ungrateful to the things that she had been given, because her greed and desire of wealth had captured her thoughts and blurred the real meaning of happiness in her perspective. Mathidle spends most of her time surfing in her day dreams of being wealthy and suffering from accepting the reality, because her imagination was more than she could not afford. One day Mathidle’s husband brought his wife an invitation for a fancy party, but as a result of their low income, Mathidle’s was ashamed to wear flowers as decoration, so she decided to borrow an expensive looking necklace from a friend of her, Madame Forestier.

Born in a family of artisans, she wasn’t rich, but beautiful and glamor. But she never feel satisfied of what she had and never stop dreaming to have more, to live a luxury life with expensive homes and glittering dresses, and eventually paid hard for her nonsense dreams. In “The Necklace”, Guy de Maupassant uses third person limited narration to show how Mathilde Loisel changes in how she looks and acts; However, she does not fully change in what she says or how she thinks. Throughout the story, the third person limited narrator focuses on Mathilde’s evolving in her actions. Madame Mathilde Loisel, a charming but selfish lady, never feel satisfied with her wants.

Life is a treasure box full of surprises that makes up the outgoing events of love, envy, joy, sorrow, and irony. In the short story, The Necklace, Madame Losiel is the wife of a poor clerk of the Minister of Education who thought about luxury (The Necklace). Since she caught the readers’ attention with her dowdy characteristics, she was also in the eye of the beholder (The Necklace). The narrator pictured her physical features by using imaginative adjectives such as “pretty” and “charming” (The Necklace). Madame Losiel was considered as a gorgeous young woman, but she did not understand the importance of life (The Necklace).

Mathilda associate her own husband as being the essence of lower life because he does not make the lots of money to feed her inner desires. Since this is the case Mathilda associates the best she can with her friend Madame Forestier. Forestier is the lady Mathilda would like to be, beautiful and rich. By befriending Madame Forestier, Mathilda thinks she can get closer to becoming a lady of stature, grace, and riches. Madame Forestier has box and boxes of jewelry and is where Mathilda barrows the necklace from.

A very important aspect of her character is that she idealizes the upper class and longs to be above her current status. She “[felt] herself born for every delicacy and luxury.” Madame Loisel, despite a decent living as a middle class lady, falsely perceives the upper classes as happier, exciting, and more romantic. She despises and looks down upon her own life as less valuable and worthwhile, to the extent that she doesn't visit her own friend who is wealthier than herself. However, within the story, the upper classes are not necessarily better off or happier. Her wealthy friend Madame Forestier, for instance, keeps a fake necklace even though she is wealthy, demonstrating that even the wealthy don't “have it all.” What's more, Madame Loisel's status quo at the beginning of the tale is a life in which she has all of h... ... middle of paper ... ...urting her.

As to Moll Flanders, she went through what her mother did in almost the same way: from a decent woman to a shameless whore then to a thief, at last experiencing a narrow escape from the gallows. Like Jane she met her family at last quite unexpectedly in an exotic place. Despite all the suffering they had born, the endings of the two novels were happy. They could marry their beloved ones and lead tranquil and rich lives. It seemed that a happy marriage and a rich life were the best endings an author could come up with for a woman at that time.

A life of glitz and glamor may not be for everyone but Mathilde may say otherwise. In Guy Maupassant’s short story the Necklace, Mathilde is a lovely looking woman who believes that she was always meant to live a life of luxury who was granted one night to live her dream but in the end of it she became the opposite of what she always dreamed off. Although it may sound as if it was a tragic downfall, it was anything but so as the story was written off of Mathilde’s selfish attitude. The Necklace is a story that portrays the protagonist, Mathilde as a ungrateful and vain women which causes her to fall to poverty and to self impose her own misery. From the beginning it is shown how Mathilde live a comfortable life as the wife of a clerk and