Loisel's The Necklace

The short story "The Necklace" recounts the unfortunate downfall of Mme. Loisel. A meager housewife with a royal sense of self-worth, Mme. Loisel is discontent with her lowly social status. When her husband does his best to give her a place in society by getting her an invitation to an important ball, Mme. Loisel allows her excitement to give way to pride. She refuses to attend without a new dress and a loaned necklace, a symbol for Mme. Loisel’s assumptions about status based on appearance. Unfortunately, Mme. Loisel loses the necklace at the ball and with the jewels goes the Loisels’ life savings as reparations for the jewels that Mme. Loisel assumed were priceless when in fact, the necklace was a fake. “The Necklace” serves as a cautionary

Her husband secures her an invitation to an important social event in hopes to please her, but her immediate reaction is contrary to what he hopes it will be; she strikes down the invitation. She is too dissatisfied with plain appearance to take the invitation in stride. Instead, she is rude to her husband, and letting her pride conduct her attitude, she refuses to even consider going unless she can get a new, expensive dress. She is so prideful and selfish that she never stops to consider where her husband gets the money to afford a new dress. Moments before the ball, she goes into another childish fit, and she refuses to go without an appropriately decadent looking set of jewels to wear with her new dress. She goes to a friend and, “... discovered, in a black satin box, a superb necklace of diamonds, and her heart began to beat with an immoderate desire” (Maupassant 70). Thinking it is the most expensive jewel at her disposal, she greedily selects the diamonds. As Gamini Monseka states, “The falsehood of the necklace lays bare the truth about the whole system of social hierarchy. Just like the false diamonds, anything that looks precious is valued in that society” (8). She finds her value in looking like

Loisel, whether or not she realizes it. Just as she longs to appear to live above her means, the necklace itself is deceitful about its true value. Mme. Forestier never notices that the new necklace is made of real jewels because she does not have the same complex regarding pride that Mme. Loisel has. She knows it is an expensive appearing fake, which is ironic because an expensive fake is exactly what Mme. Loisel makes of herself through her use of the necklace. Mme. Loisel is only content when she is able to deceive her colleagues. Her pride and discontent leads her to covet the necklace in the first place because she believes she is misplaced in her social caste and she wants to look wealthy so that other socialites can see she belongs, but what she is missing is that the other ladies of high status in her community do not care for the same displays of wealth that Mme. Loisel thinks defines the wealthy. From Mme. Loisel and the theme of “The Necklace”, readers see the destruction putting on such a façade causes. Mme. Loisel lives as a shell of her former self. After years of manual labor taken on to pay for the necklace, she has nothing left to take pride in, although her need to have pride is the reason she now lives a destitute existence. The necklace is not worth much, but by assuming it is valuable as a means of boosting her own self worth, Mme. Loisel learns a valuable lesson about just how ruinous pride and