The Necklace, a short story written by Guy de Maupassant, shows the increasingly wide disparity between social classes in 19th century France, specifically the Belle Epoque, when technological advancement and significant improvements in society and politics were happening that brought advantages for the upper classes who could certainly afford the burgeoning luxuries while the people in lower classes remained unable to do so. At first reading, the story sounded like a joke, and it would make a reader wonder if the author depicted life of the proletarians then accurately since Maupassant was born in prosperous bourgeois family and was a member of the Naturalist school with their anthropologically pessimistic ideologies, but after much thinking over, the insights given by the work are profound, serious, timeless, and universal.
Being surrounded by women all his life, including his mother-divorcée who was an influential figure in his life and the prostitutes he boated with on the Seine, it isn’t surprising that most of his stories focus on women. One of his well-known short stories, The Necklace, concentrates on Mathilde Loisel who, although possessing an exceptional physical appearance, was perpetually dissatisfied with her mediocre life, longing “for greater things than her life has brought her,” due to her self-entitled mentality that unfortunately led to her deeper downfall after the necklace which she had borrowed from her economically well-off friend Mme Forestier that had adorned her in a grand ball, giving her the aura of (false) opulence, was lost.
At the beginning, Mathilde’s low social status is stressed especially at the announcement of their attending a ball, which she loathed to attend without wearing fancy dresses and jewelleries, at the palace of the Ministry of Public Instruction, in which Maupassant himself had worked in 1879. Classism is fairly evident in the story as the poor strove to reach the higher rungs of the social ladder because of the pleasure one could derive out of increased attention from other people and material possessions that came with it. This quest is particularly harder for women like Mathilde who, without special talents or skills, can rely only on their beauty to attract a husband, preferably one from the upper classes, who can advance their status. The poor weren’t meant to socialize with the aristocrats and the bourgeois, thus explaining Mathilde’s ardent desire to appear as a wealthy French woman, which she was not.
Great value is attached on material belongings not only because they herald people’s being well-bred, but also because they are one of the yardsticks of society in assessing a person’s value, and how he is to be treated, thereby becoming the medium for the proletarians’ further downfall just like how the diamond necklace dragged the Loisels into sheer misery, but are, in themselves, a “cheap” standard of measurement, as symbolized by the necklace’s being worth only half a thousand francs.
The story revolves around the theme of deception and the commodification of pleasure as, in a money-driven commercial society, we are lead to wrongfully believe that the more material belongings we have, the more satisfactory our life is and the happier we are, which isn’t always true. Mathilde was deceived by the illusion that she was meant for a better destiny that drove her into Mme Forestiers house only to be deceived by a necklace whose actual worth was way lower than how it appeared for Mathilde to deceive other affluent individuals that she was as wealthy as them and, after losing the fake jewel, deceive Mme Forestier that the necklace was just slightly damaged, culminating in an enlightening “reality-check” that slapped the truth to their faces — that poor was what they really were and there’s no use desperately dreaming for something that could never be achieved. The story takes a neutral side and doesn’t favour the proletarians nor the people in the upper class. It tells people in the lower class not to be obsessed with improving their social status because if they did they’d miss out on things that matter more, such as social relationships, or, in Mathilde’s case, her husband’s humble affections and sacrifice that she invariably took for granted, and because the standards of society in evaluating success is illusory that led them into losing their “beauty” just like how Mathilde lost her youthful charm as a result of her self-entitlement.
The Necklace is a twisty illuminating insight on how social stratification, classism, capitalism, and life-dissatisfaction are interconnected into resulting into a society with superficial ideals and criteria for stratifying people and assessing their worth. It provides us a glimpse into the extent to which humans perpetuated these ideals, dating back even before the 19th century, and therefore, has historical and sociocultural value that make this short story worthy to be preserved and presented to future generations as a rightful representative of the body of literary works that show literature’s active role in revolutionizing society by pointing out its flaws in a creative way.
Comments
Post a Comment