Essay Draft Two

Jason Wu
May 20, 2007
Draft Two

Title

In late nineteenth-century Paris, there is strict hierarchy in the social classes of the French society. In The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant, Mathilde Louisel losses, at the night of the ball, the diamond necklace she borrowed from her friend. She, together with her husband spends the following ten years of misery paying off the debt, only to find out the necklace was a paste. A curse it may seem at first, the diamond necklace, is nevertheless a blessing for Mathilde’s life.

At the beginning of the story, Mathilde is presented as a wife of a little clerk. Her life is materially comfortable, thought not yet luxurious: she stays all day long at home, with no need to work for a living; she doesn’t have to worry about paying for food, clothing, housing; she even has a Breton peasant do all the humble housework for her (39). Then does Mathilde live a happy life? The answer is obviously negative. People shall agree that in most cases, what determines true happiness is not material affluence but psychological satisfactory.

Evidently, Mathilde’s unsatisfactory of her current status leads to her unhappy life.

Mathilde is not an average housewife of a lower-middle class family. She is pretty, charming, elegant, gracious, which in her mind counts for the sold hierarchy with a woman (38). Normally, beauty will be the biggest bless god can give to a woman, in this special case of Louisel Mathilde, however, it turns out to be a curse. In Mathilde’s world, a pretty and charming girl as she is should naturally be wedded by a rich and distinguished man, but unfortunately she isn’t. “She suffered ceaselessly, feeling herselft born for all the delicacies and all the luxuries” (38). We see that her expectation of life has been lifted high up, and her beauty will thus be one of the underlying causes of her unhappy life, as long as the expectation cannot be fulfilled. One of the immediate consequences of this is vanity, extreme vanity – another reason why Mathilde suffers. Every day when Mr.Louisel is out for work, Mathilde sits around and has nothing to do but dream about the ideal life of luxury she should have lived. The more she thinks about it, the sharper the discrepancy between her expectation and reality, and the more she suffers. Another woman of her rank will never even have been conscious of the things that tortures Mathilde: the poverty of her dwelling, the wretched look of the walls, the worn-out chairs, and the ugliness of the curtains (38). Mathilde’s body and soul are living in two different worlds, and her head is overloaded with imaginary luxury: living in a palace decorated in gold, diamonds, and ancient ornaments, chatting with men famous from top of society, and eating dainty dinners using shining silverware. This makes her neglect any good things that can happen in her real life, those she should feel satisfied about, and how can she live a happy life?

Then comes the night of the ball, the best and the worst night she ever has. At that night, she losses the diamond necklace, and from that point on, her life has been dramatically changed.

“Mme. Loisel now knew the horrible existence of the needy. She took her part, moreover, all of a sudden, with heroism. ” (43) “Suddenly” she changes, she is now determined, and she is ready to shoulder the responsibility to pay the heavy debt. Even though the Louisel have to dismiss their servant, change their lodgings, and rent a garret under the roof, defending their miserable money sou by sou (43), Mathilde’s feeling of emptiness has also ended. She has now found her part in the real life. She has to work for the food, the rent of the housing, and the debt, instead of waiting at home doing nothing every day. She has suddenly found a direction of her own life, a destination to work towards. It is as happy for her as finding a way out of a puzzling maze.

Since that sudden shift in Mathilde’s attitude towards life, many other changes have undergone on Mathilde, both physically and mentally, during the following ten years. Her youth, her beauty, her elegance, and her gracious have all slipped away from her fingers. She looks old now, strong and hard and rough, with frowsy hair skirts askew, and red hands (43-44). Now, she is no longer the woman of a “high rank” as she used to be, and her physical appearance matches her social status. Her beauty, her greatest asset for turning into upper-class overnight is gone, and the “curse” has been dispelled. Together gone is her vanity. Unlike before, Mathilde is now fully occupied with heavy housework washing from the dishes to the dirty linen, the shirts and the dishcloths (43). The needy in reality breaks the bubble of luxury in her daydreaming, and she has to forget about her “proper station” from which she had fallen (38). There is still time when Mathilde gets a chance to take a breath from her busy working days, to think of her triumph night of the ball. However, with her current position, this will now only be a second of memory flashback at most. Before, she thought she had fallen from her “proper station”, and she suffered. Now, at the end of the ten years when they have paid everything, Mathildes feels released, she is promoted from a much lower position, and she can move on to live a normal but happy life.

Last but not least, after experiencing all these ten years of misery, Mathilde’s attitude towards social hierarchy has altered, which shows that she can comfortably live her current life now. Before the night of the ball, Mathilde envied the rich and downgraded the poor including her own class of people. She did not like to visit her rich friend because she suffered from their discrepancy of social classes. She thought “There’s nothing more humiliating than to look poor among other women who are rich” (40). At the ball party, she refused to put on the modest wraps of common life, whose poverty contrasted with the elegance of the ball dress (41). All those evidences prove Mathilde’s shameful feeling of her own social hierarchy and how could she be happy this way? But now, after all these ten years of misery, Mathilde had nothing to lose any more. She dresses like a woman of the people going to public places like the fruiterer, the grocer, the butcher. To look poor no longer humiliates Mathilde, and she manages to accept her role among the social classes. At the end of the story when she runs into her rich friend Mme. Forestier who are still young, still beautiful, still charming, she goes to speak to her, to tell her all about it, with no hesitation. By doing so, Mathilde is conveying a message that she has survived the trick that life plays on her and being at the bottom of social hierarchy cannot hold her from living a happy life.

Conclusion

Work Cited

30.5.07 17:46