The Necklace Vs Cinderella Research Paper

The story of a pauper rising from rags to royalty is a story that everybody grows up to and loves to hear. But what about a real-world story about a person starting at middle class and going broke paying something off? This is the difference between the story, "The Necklace", and the popular story "Cinderella". In both stories, there is eventually a dramatic change of social class. However, the change in "The Necklace" is basically the exact opposite of "Cinderella". In "The Necklace", a higher-middle class woman is brought to rags after losing a rich friend's necklace and working off the price of the replacement for the next ten years. In "Cinderella", a poor girl is brought into the royal family after impressing the prince at a dance. However,

She has never appreciated what she had and always dreamed of having more. However, when her husband brings home an invitation to a ball, she "flings the invitation across the table" and complains about not having anything to wear. After her husband gave her 400 francs that "...he had been saving for a gun..." and she got a dress, she complained that she had no jewels, resorting to borrowing an exquisite diamond necklace from her friend Madame Forestier. However, when she comes home from the ball, the diamond necklace is gone, resulting in Madame Loisel buying a new necklace for 36,000 francs, which was far more than she had. Her and her husband worked off the diamond necklace for ten years, giving the jeweler every dime they had, dropping to be poor, work hardened people with no earthly possessions, only to come to find out the original necklace was a fake and "worth at the very most 500 francs!..." This movement from middle-class to being extremely poor changed everything from her appearance, going from the most popular lady at the dance to looking extremely old, with "Her hair badly done, her skirts were all awry, her hands were red." She also still blamed everyone but herself, saying she had suffered all her hard times "all on your (Madame Forestier's) account. However, this is almost the exact opposite of

She is a lower class "kitchen-wench" who has nothing to her name but a tree planted by her mother's grave. Like "The Necklace", there is a fancy ball hosted by a rich man, however in this story it is hosted by the King, hoping to find his son, the prince, a wife. Unlike "The Necklace", Cinderella is not invited to this ball, but is banned from it by her stepmother, who tells her she cannot attend unless she had a dress. Cinderella went to her tree and wished for a dress and the birds brought her a beautiful dress. She went to the ball and impressed the prince so greatly that "He would dance with no other maiden" and she continued to impress him for the next two days of the ball, after which he sought after "she whose foot this golden slipper fits." Cinderella's stepsisters, much like Madame Loisel in the necklace, wanted to be royalty and went as far as to "cut the toe off, force the slipper on" and "swallow the pain" to attempt to get the prince's hand in marriage. However, Cinderella was the one that the slipper fit and the prince took her away to become a princess and his