Suffering and Illusion in Maupassant's "The Necklace"

Introduction: Mathilde's World of Illusion

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 the 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.

When her husband brings home an invitation to an event at the palace, Mathilde experiences a range of emotions: annoyance, humiliation, depression, joy, excitement, despair, and remorse — for various reasons that 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 toward its ironic twist ending. "The Necklace" is ultimately about a woman whose life is not what she feels she deserves. Mathilde lives in an illusory world where objects, appearances, and associations are believed to have life-changing powers.

Moral Suffering and the Weight of Pride

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 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 and throw herself upon her friend's mercy. Instead, she listens to her husband, who constructs a lie 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 instructs — and she does as he commands (Maupassant).

The irony, of course, is that the necklace her friend loaned her for the palace event is set with false stones — it was not made of real diamonds as Mathilde had supposed. She does not realize this until years later, when Madame Forestier finally tells her. From the time that Mathilde's husband goes deep into debt to buy a string of diamonds resembling the one his wife has lost, to the moment Mathilde meets Madame Forestier many years later, Mathilde transforms from a proud, haughty wife into a woman who knows what true poverty feels like.

She engages in housework in order to help her husband repay the debt that her own vanity and carelessness have brought upon them. In doing so, she loses that which she so cherished in her youth — 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 ten years of labor. Yet even through this work, even as her pride is reduced, she is never fully humbled. She still accuses Madame Forestier of being the cause of all her sorrows, when in truth the cause is herself.

That revelation is not delivered until the very last line of the story, when Madame Forestier discloses that all of Mathilde's work has gone to repay a debt for a necklace that cost only 400 francs — not the 40,000 francs that Mathilde and her husband had supposed. The weight and shock of this revelation are not described by Maupassant, but it can be assumed that it does one of two things: it either humbles Mathilde to her core, or fills her with the deepest resentment and bitterness any person has ever known. Regardless, it can be surmised that Mathilde suffers a great deal, morally speaking.

Emotional Suffering Before and After the Ball

Mathilde also suffers emotionally. The first signs of her distress appear upon receiving the invitation to the minister's ball from her husband. She is so vain and proud that instead of receiving the news with joy, she is immediately scornful, rude, and dismissive: "What do you wish me to do with that?" she coldly asks in response to his good news (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 as her husband's callousness — how could she attend a ball when she has no gown to wear?

It is as though she is punishing him for the fact that they are not as wealthy as she feels they ought to be. Her emotional suffering thus begins well before the necklace is ever lost. Maupassant shows that it emanates from her own vanity and unhappiness from the very start. Her husband attempts to make her happy by working hard to secure an invitation to the ball — and all she does is complain. He then agrees to give her a substantial sum of francs to purchase a proper gown, only to have her complain about lacking jewelry to accompany 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 danced with rapture, with passion, intoxicated by pleasure, forgetting all in the triumph of her beauty…" (Maupassant).

That joy, however, collapses the moment she realizes she has lost the diamond necklace. The following twenty-four hours are a rollercoaster of dread, misery, and despair. She buys time as her husband instructs, but they must still come up with a replacement. Upon learning the cost of the replacement, all joy and hope seem to leave her permanently. Her emotional state becomes like stones pressed into pavement — flat, dead, never to rise to anything glorious or glamorous again. She suffers emotionally simply thinking back on the joy she had that one evening at the ball and how a single accident had ruined everything.

Maupassant writes 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 is further evident in the fact that she and Madame Forestier have not seen one another for ten years. For a decade, in other words, Mathilde has been without friendship — and the toll of this isolation is made plain in the Madame's startled reaction upon seeing her: "You have changed!" (Maupassant).

Conclusion: The Cost of Living in Illusion

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 she experienced in her youth was supported not by real diamonds but by a false necklace made of paste. For so many years she believed she had lost an expensive piece of jewelry, when in reality she had simply been seeking happiness in the wrong things.

She should have been content with her life as it was. Because she was not, she suffered greatly. Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace," therefore, is the story of a woman who feels cheated by destiny — only to have one night of pleasure, for which she spends a decade paying. Mathilde's illusory world is finally revealed to her in all its awfulness when the truth of the necklace is told at last.

Works Cited

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