This paper compares Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace," two nineteenth-century short stories that place dissatisfied married women at their center. The analysis examines how each author portrays marriage as a source of unhappiness while assigning that unhappiness to very different causes: Chopin blames male dominance and Victorian social structures, whereas Maupassant attributes suffering to the characters' own greed and misplaced desires. The paper also explores the biographical influences on each author's worldview, the symbolic elements embedded in each text, and the contrasting narrative structures of the two stories.
Literary texts reflect the common beliefs and thoughts prevalent in a society. They are a mirror that acquaints society with its prejudices, obsessions, passions, strengths, and weaknesses. Literature is used by authors to help reform society and advise people on what they ought to change in order to flourish as a whole.
The two texts compared in this paper are The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin and The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant. Both short stories place women at their center, and both reveal a side of marriage that is the opposite of the fairy-tale image of perfect marital bliss. The two female characters are similar yet distinctly different. In their flaws, strengths, and passions, they reflect the broader female experience — not just of their era, but across time. In this sense, both stories can be read as their authors' commentaries on marriage from the perspective of women.
In The Story of an Hour, Kate Chopin tells the story of a married couple apparently leading a blissful life. One day the wife, Mrs. Louise Mallard, receives news that her husband has died in a train accident. She is shocked and shuts herself in her room. There, she reveals her true feelings — not sadness or despair, but relief and a profound sense of freedom. She acknowledges that her husband Brently was a gentle, loving man, yet marriage for her was still an oppressive affair. She felt trapped and enslaved, and with her husband's death she believed herself freed from those bonds and at liberty to live her life as she pleased. Sometime later, her sister calls her out, warning that she will make herself ill if she remains locked away. When Louise enters the living room, her husband's friend — the messenger who had brought the tragic news — is also present. Suddenly the front door opens, and it is revealed that Brently had never been on the train and is very much alive. Louise faints, and when the doctor is called he pronounces her dead — the victim, he declares, of a heart attack brought on by extreme joy (SparkNotes, 2012).
The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant is the story of another married couple, the Loisels. They are a lower-middle-class pair: the husband is an employee of the Ministry of Education, and Mathilde Loisel is a housewife. The husband is a simple, loving man satisfied with his modest life, while Mathilde constantly laments their poverty and believes she deserves far more than she has. When the husband brings home an invitation to a Ministry event, Mathilde begins to cry, complaining that she has nothing appropriate to wear and asking him to return the invitation. He promises to buy her a dress and, despite his shock at the price, purchases a 400-franc gown for the occasion. She then claims she has no jewels to wear, and he suggests she borrow some from her wealthy friend Madame Forestier. Mathilde visits her friend, who generously offers her entire collection; Mathilde selects a diamond necklace. She enjoys the party immensely and looks positively radiant. But when they arrive home, she realizes the necklace is missing. The couple panics; the husband goes out to retrace their steps but cannot find it. A few days later he inquires about the price of a similar necklace at a jeweler's shop. The couple then spends ten years repaying the cost of the diamond necklace — they sell their home, move into a smaller one, and the husband takes on extra work. Mathilde loses her beauty under the strain of these years of hardship. One day she runs into Madame Forestier by chance, and her old friend fails to recognize her. When Mathilde explains the reason for her transformation, Madame Forestier is astonished and reveals that the original necklace was a fake and worth next to nothing (SparkNotes, 2012).
Women are rarely satisfied with what they have in life and always desire more and better. For both authors, marriage functions as a cage that brings restrictions and enslaves women within circumstances and bonds that fall far short of what they had hoped for. These conditions consistently disappoint the women's expectations and fantasies, leaving them perpetually unhappy and discontented.
Both characters are dissatisfied with their married lives and would gladly have done without them. They are women who harbored great expectations and hopes. Mathilde wanted wealth and prosperity, an abundance of jewels, and all the material pleasures a woman might desire. She wanted to live a life of luxury and to remain beautiful forever. Louise, by contrast, had hoped that even within marriage she would retain control of her own life and be able to lead it as she wished. Both women were disappointed when their dreams were shattered by the realities of marriage, and both remained discontented. Louise, however, was more accepting than her counterpart and more capable of gratitude. Mathilde was deeply ungrateful and failed to appreciate anything her husband did for her (SparkNotes, 2012).
Both texts are set in the nineteenth century, a period characterized by severe restrictions on women's freedom. It was a time when women were expected to submit to the will of a man — either a husband or a father — and marriage was widely regarded as an institution that effectively confined women (Toth, 1999).
One key difference between the two authors is that Chopin draws on real-life figures and uses her stories to advocate for the liberation of her female protagonists (Toth, 1999). Maupassant, by contrast, uses the same nineteenth-century setting to illustrate how people fall victim to their own base desires. Unlike Chopin, he does not view women as oppressed by men; rather, he believes that whoever suffers does so as a consequence of their own misdeeds (Columbia Encyclopedia, 2012). In his story, marriage has certainly brought Mathilde unhappiness, but he attributes that unhappiness not to her circumstances but to her extravagant hopes, dreams, and greed. A more grateful woman, in his view, would have been content with what she had — and then neither she nor her husband would have suffered the way they did.
Both authors agree, however, that marriage is a major cause of unhappiness. Maupassant also felt that all husbands and wives "betray each other." His pessimism toward marriage and his belief that all humans suffer because of their own faults stem partly from his parents' failed marriage and his father's laziness. Although he does not draw on these experiences as overtly as Chopin does, they had a lasting impact on his life, his work, and his relationships (Coward & de Maupassant, 1903).
Although Chopin did not normally focus on the portrayal of sins and their power, she demonstrates in The Story of an Hour that Louise — after an initial spell of obvious grief — experiences an epiphany: she is now free and independent. This realization gives rise to a feeling of joy which she initially suppresses, regarding it as a forbidden pleasure. But as she lets go of her resistance and allows herself to feel it, she becomes consumed by this immense sense of liberation. She feels possessed by it and must abandon herself to it entirely as the word "free" escapes her lips.
It can also be argued that even Louise, in a sense, dies because of her own fault — as Maupassant might phrase it, she succumbs to her desire for liberty and control. She allows that desire to overwhelm her faculties, and this single indulgence brings about her death. One might argue that had she not given herself over to the fantasy and had instead remained in company, she might have survived.
Although both stories characterize marriage as painful and restrictive, they assign responsibility for that unhappiness to different sources. In The Story of an Hour, the responsibility lies with the husband, who — like many Victorian men — is dominant and controlling. Although he loves his wife, he nonetheless imposes his own will and decisions upon her. In The Necklace, the responsibility lies with the wife's selfishness, greed, and foolishness. Mathilde ignores her husband's feelings and his hardships in pursuit of her own desires. He works hard and readily gives her a large sum of money to buy a dress, demonstrating that he is a caring man who wants to fulfill her wishes. Yet she does not consider his discomfort. She is a self-obsessed character who believes she is a victim of fate and that life has always been harsh and unfair to her.
Later, when the couple must work to repay the cost of the necklace, Mathilde scrubs floors and cooks for other households. She continues to feel sorry for herself and never grasps that their suffering is her own doing. Had she not been greedy — had she worn flowers as her husband had suggested — they would still have been living in a comfortable home and she would not have been reduced to such hardship. What she also fails to see is that her husband had been suffering continuously. He had been working extraordinarily hard from the very beginning, while she remained at home. After the debacle of the necklace, he took on three different jobs to collect the money needed. He was the one who truly suffered — and he suffered because of her greed and discontent.
Once again, the authors diverge on a key point: Chopin believes that marital discontent stems from the oppression women face at the hands of men, while Maupassant attributes such discontent to the moral failings of people in general — men or women alike.
"How each author's life shaped their literary worldview"
"Window, necklace, and other symbols analyzed"
SparkNotes (2012). The Story of an Hour: Themes, motifs and symbols. Retrieved August 20, 2012, from SparkNotes website:
SparkNotes (2012). The Necklace: Plot overview. Retrieved August 20, 2012, from SparkNotes website:
SparkNotes (2012). The Necklace: Themes, motifs and symbols. Retrieved August 20, 2012, from SparkNotes website:
Toth, E. (1999). Unveiling Kate Chopin. Retrieved August 20, 2012, from Questia website:
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