Affects Of Coveting In Maupassant's The Necklace

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Effects of Coveting In “The Necklace”
Coveting is the wanting of not only what you don’t have, but what you can’t have as well. Let’s face it, ultimately, almost everyone covets at some point in their life, but at the end of the day, our happiness comes from within, not from our material possessions. If you spend all of your time coveting for better things, then you are just digging yourself into a deeper and deeper hole of loneliness and disappointment. Inside the story “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant, coveting negatively affects Mme. Loisel by not only altering the reality of her situation, but her perception of the situation as well.
One of the many ways that coveting negatively affected Mme. Loisel was the it caused her to potentially …show more content…

An example of this can be found in the quote, “She would dream of delicious dishes served on wonderful china, of gallant compliments whispered and listened to with a sphinxlike smile as one eats the rosy flesh of a trout or nibble at the wings of a grouse” (352). This quote occurs when Mme. Loisel is eating a dinner of stew with her husband. Her husband on one hand, is perfectly content with the stew and he quite enjoys it, Mme. Loisel on the other hand is not satisfied with the stew and dreams for bigger and better things. If it wasn’t already obvious enough, the stew symbolized the overall situation that Mme. Loisel and her husband were in. Her husband was very happy about the situation was, and he didn’t have any complaints about it. On the contrary, Mme. Loisel wasn’t content with their situation, she wanted more out of life than what she already had. However, the examples do not stop there. Believe it or not, the necklace itself is a symbol of Mme. Loisel’s slight loss of reality. The necklace that Mme. Loisel fell so madly in love with, may have been beautiful, but it was completely and utterly worthless, all a sham. The necklace represented the power of perception, along with the slight difference between fantasy and reality. Even though it was a fake, when she wore the necklace, she felt more wealthy, which in turn, made the people around her believe that she was wealthier too. The fact that the necklace is the result of the complete undoing of Mme. Loisel’s life as she knew it, leads me to infer that the story’s overall message is that nothing good ever comes from the denial of the reality of the

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