Suffering of Mathilde in The Necklace

In Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” (1884), a beautiful young woman named Mathilde is depicted almost as having been deprived of a higher station in life simply because of her impressive physical characteristics and that fact that she lives in humble dwellings. She is sharply aware both of her beauty and of her modest status. Having been born into a family of clerks and married a clerk, she feels constrained. She cannot afford nice clothes to accentuate and affirm her natural beauty. Yet she is drawn to those who have nicer things—such as her friend Madame Forestier. However, when her husband brings home an invitation to an event at the palace, Mathilde experiences a range of emotions. She shows signs of annoyance, humiliation, depression, joy, excitement, despair and remorse—for various reasons, which the rest of the story reveals. The physical, moral and emotional conflicts that Mathilde suffers as a result of her decisions concerning the necklace (which she borrows from Madame Forestier and subsequently loses) compel the action of the story to its ironic twist-ending: Guy De Maupassant’s “The Necklace” is a about a woman whose life is not what she feels she deserves. Mathilde lives in an illusory world where objects, appearances, and associations have life-changing powers.

Mathilde suffers morally because she feels responsible for losing Madame Forestier’s necklace. However, this suffering is also grounded in her pride: she is afraid to tell Madame Forestier the truth about the necklace and would rather commit herself and her husband to ten years of penury and hard labor (in order to pay for a replacement) than to come clean with Madame Forestier and throw herself upon her friend’s mercy. Instead, she listens to her husband who constructs a lie in order to buy them time: “You must write to your friend that you have broken the clasp of her necklace and that you are having it mended,” Mathilde’s husband states—and she does as he commands (Maupassant). The irony, of course, is that necklace her friend loaned her for the event at the palace is full of false stones—it was not made of real diamonds as Mathilde had supposed. However, Mathilde does not realize this until years later, when Madame Forestier tells her. From the time that Mathilde’s husband goes deep into debt in order to buy a string of diamonds that resembles the one his wife has lost till the moment Mathilde meets Madame Forestier many years later, Mathilde transforms from the proud, haughty wife of a clerk into a woman who knows what true poverty feels like. She engages in housework in order to help her husband pay the debt that she has brought upon them through her vanity and carelessness. In doing so, in slaving away at housework for pay, she loses that which she so cherished in her youth and which compelled her to seek to be glamorized in the first place: her good looks. She becomes “the woman of impoverished households—strong and hard and rough” (Maupassant). Her vanity is gradually and consistently ground out of her through the ten years of labor to which she has been consigned. Yet even in this work, even throughout these years that her vanity is reduced—she is never fully and really humbled. She even still accuses Madame Forestier of being the cause of her sorrows and troubles all these years. The actual and real cause of her troubles is herself through her own doing—and that revelation is not delivered until the very last line of the story when Madame Forestier reveals that all Mathilde’s work has gone to repay a debt for a necklace that really only cost 400 francs—not the 40,000 francs that Mathilde and her husband supposed. The weight and shock of this revelation to Mathilde’s moral being is not described by Maupassant—but it can be assumed that it does one of either two things: 1) it either humbles her to her core, or 2) fills her with the deepest resentment, bitterness and spite that any woman of any life has ever known. Regardless of the outcome, it can be surmised that Mathilde suffers a great deal, morally speaking.

Mathilde also suffers emotionally. The first signs of her distress come upon receiving the invitation to the minister’s ball from her husband. She is so vain and proud that instead of receiving the invitation with joy, she is immediately scornful, rude and dismissive: “What do you wish me to do with that?” she coldly asks her husband in response to his sharing the good news of the invite (Maupassant). He counters, “\\"\\\\Why, my dear, I thought you would be glad. You never go out, and this is such a fine opportunity. I had great trouble to get it. Every one wants to go; it is very select, and they are not giving many invitations to clerks. The whole official world will be there” (Maupassant). Instead of feeling glad, however, she is irritated at what she perceives to be her husband’s callousness: how could she attend a ball when she has no gown to wear! It is almost as if she is spitting in his face for the fact that they are not as wealthy as she feels they ought to be (in order for her good looks to be properly ornamented by fine clothes and jewelry). Her emotional suffering, thus begins well before the necklace is ever lost: Maupassant shows that it is with her from the beginning and emanates from her own vanity and unhappiness. Her husband attempts to make her happy by working hard to get an invite to the ball—and all she does is complain. However, her husband agrees to give her a good amount of francs in order to get a proper gown—only to have her then complain about not having jewelry to go with it. He suggests asking Madame Forestier and, finally, Mathilde is made happy. She finds a piece of jewelry that the Madame is kind enough to lend her for the evening—and she has a fantastic time at the ball: she feels like royalty (“She danced with rapture, with passion, intoxicated by pleasure, forgetting all in the triumph of her beauty…” Maupassant states)…until, that is, she realizes she has lost the diamond necklace. The next 24 hours, following the realization that the necklace is missing, is a rollercoaster of dread and misery and despair. She buys time, as her husband commands, but they still must come up with a replacement. Upon learning the cost of the replacement, all joy and hope seem to forever leave her. Her emotional state becomes like stones pressed into the pavement—flat, dead, never to rise to anything glorious or glamorous again. She suffers emotionally just thinking back on the joy she had that one evening at the ball—and how it had all been ruined by the one accident. Maupassant states that “sometimes, when her husband was at the office, she sat down near the window and she thought of that gay evening of long ago, of that ball where she had been so beautiful and so admired. What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? who knows? How strange and changeful is life! How small a thing is needed to make or ruin us!” Clearly Mathilde has suffered emotionally. This fact is evident in the description that Maupassant gives of the relationship between Mathilde and Madame Forestier: they have not seen one another for 10 years. For 10 years, in other words, Mathilde has been without friendship. It is unnecessary to describe the effect that such a state would have on one’s emotions—it is all too clear in the Madame’s description of Mathilde: “You have changed!” (Maupassant).

This change is evidence that Mathilde has also suffered physically. Her years of labor have ruined her beauty: she is unrecognizable by her old friend, who does not know who Mathilde is at first after the latter greets Madame Forestier in the street one day, ten years later. Mathilde’s beauty and passion and triumph experienced at the ball that one evening has sizzled out and been replaced by years of dull, painstaking labor. Her beauty has been lost with the necklace, replaced by something new, which Maupassant describes thus: “With frowsy hair, skirts askew and red hands, she talked loud while washing the floor with great swishes of water.” In other words, she is like any other old washing woman. She has not, however, been broken physically. Whereas prior to the ball, she was beautiful but genteel, proud by dainty; after the ball and the losing of the necklace, she becomes a laborer—and though she loses her beauty, she becomes “strong,” as Maupassant states—strong from so many years of backbreaking scrubbing and washing and housekeeping. Her body loses its physical grace but gains a muscular stature—like a rock that is smoothed over time by the environment in which it is situated. Mathilde’s body is transformed by labor—but the labor is of a painful kind, which never ends and which does not kill but in a way does make her stronger.

In conclusion, Mathilde suffers substantially from the accident that robs her of her joy. Yet Mathilde’s pride and vanity were based on illusions. She imagined that beauty and riches were what made one happy. What she learns after years of toil to repay a debt is that the one perfect evening of passionate joy that she experienced in her youth was supported not by real diamonds but rather by a false necklace made of paste. Here she was for so many years thinking she had lost an expensive piece of jewelry. The reality is that she was simply seeking happiness in the wrong things. She should have been content with her life and herself as it was. Since she was not, she suffered greatly. Guy De Maupassant’s “The Necklace,” therefore, is the story of a woman feels cheated by destiny—only to have one night of pleasure, for which she spends a decade paying. But Mathilde’s illusory world is finally revealed to her in its awfulness, when the truth of the necklace is finally told.

Works Cited
Maupassant, Guy de. “The Necklace,” 1884. American Literature.
https://americanliterature.com/author/guy-de-maupassant/short-story/the-necklace