In Guy DeMaupassant’s 19th century morality tale, The Necklace, Mathilde Loisel starts out melancholy and wistful, married to a clerk in the Department of Education, daydreaming about wealth and greatness. Beautiful and smart, but born into a middle-class family, married to a middle-class man, and living a middle-class life, she feels cheated. 150 years before social media, “She burned with the desire to please, to be envied, to be attractive and sought after.” Mathilde suffers from the common delusion that receiving the love of others will make us love ourselves when it’s actually the other way around – love yourself and others will love you. When we accept ourselves, when we have the confidence to be who and what we are, love and admiration pour into our lives.
Mathilde is unhappy with her lot in life. “She suffered constantly, feeling herself destined for all delicacies and luxuries.” She lives in Paris, Paris!, but she wants to live in a palace. She has a servant, but Mathilde neglects her own part of the housework while daydreaming of being wealthy. She and her husband sit down to eat dinner at a table “covered with a cloth that had not been washed for three days.” Loisel is excited by the pot au fue – a dish of boiled beef and vegetables that some say is the quintessence of French family fare, but she wants “delicate foods served in delicate dishes.” Mathilde has a rich friend from convent school whom she won’t visit because it makes her miserable. “She would weep for the entire day afterward with sorrow, despair, regret, and misery.” The devil on my shoulder is named Entitlement and I have to be on constant guard against its soft and conniving, but oh so convincing, whispers.
In addition to Mathilde’s unhappiness with her socioeconomic status, she is vain. Loisel finagles invitations to an important party and Mathilde insists on getting a new dress – “There’s nothing more humiliating than to look ragged in the middle of rich women.” Her husband buys her a $400 dress (money Loisel was saving to buy a shotgun so he could go hunting with his buddies), and Mathilde complains that she has no jewelry. “I’m going to look impoverished. I’d almost rather not go to the party.” Loisel, a problem-solver like most men, suggests that she borrow something from her rich friend. She agrees and paws through the gracious Mme. Forestier’s jewelry with no success until she finds a beautiful diamond necklace.
Ay the party, Mathilde is finally in her element, “she danced madly, ecstatically, drunk with pleasure, with no thought for anything.” Finally, at the end of the party, Mathilde’s vanity is shown once more when Loisel gives her a shabby shawl to wear home. “She felt it and hurried away to avoid being noticed by the other women, who luxuriated rich furs.” I thought the they were going to catch the flu and die and that would be the lesson but no, they make it home only to discover that the necklace is gone. They retrace their steps and look everywhere they can think of but can’t find it. Well shit.
There’s no way Mathilde can face her friend and admit what happened so they search the city again, this time for a replacement. They finally find an almost exact duplicate but it is SPENDY. Loisel borrows a shit-ton of money from loan sharks, forfeiting his future, to buy the necklace so Mathilde can pass it off as the original to her friend. It works and her friend is none the wiser.
Now, faced with the reality of loan-shark debt, Mathilde switches gears. To pay back the money Loisel borrowed, she puts aside her dreams of wealth and fame and gets to work. “She learned to do heavy housework, dirty kitchen jobs. She washed the dishes, wearing away her manicured fingernails…” She not only works hard to earn money but puts forth as much effort to save what she’s earned, “…she went to the fruit dealer, the grocer, the butcher,…haggling, insulting, defending her measly cash penny by penny.”
It takes a decade to pay off the debt, and Mathilde is beaten down by the end of it. She sees Mme. Forestier at the park one day and her old friend doesn’t even recognize her. Mathilde tells her the whole sad story and her friend, horrified, drops the bomb that the lost necklace was a fake, worth about a tenth of the replacement and that’s where the story ends.
DeMaupassant develops Mathilde into a very complex character. She displays different qualities in dealing with different situations. Her unhappiness is shown in her daydreams and lack of concern about the household. Her vanity is displayed by her demands for the party and her desire to appear equal to the rich women. Her heroism is proven by her willingness to work hard and make great personal sacrifices to pay off her debts. Although her negative attributes got her into trouble, her heroism in paying her debts make Mathilde truly admirable.