The Necklace is a short story written by Guy de Maupassant about a woman who is obsessed with material things. The woman is fixated on having all the finer things in life and trying to fit in with society. Her husband seems to be a nice man who is just trying to please his wife but trying to do this ends up costing them 10 years of debt and lower living. The woman's pride and perception ended up costing her and her husband 36 thousand francs, which took them 10 years to pay off and forced them into having a poorer quality of life. The woman was also forced to work to help pay her debts. After all of her debts were paid off, the woman finds out that the 36 thousand franc replacement necklace the woman got was only replacing a necklace that was worth 500 francs. So in the end the woman put her husband and  herself through all of that for nothing. The way that de Maupassant presents the woman is interesting. He normally refers to the woman as "she" or "her" instead of by name, which makes the character seem more distant and harder to sympathize with. It seems like de Maupassant tries to make you want to feel bad about the woman but then he makes the woman seem selfish and materialistic so that the reader does not feel bad. 

Maupassant starts the story off with, "She was one of those pretty and charming girls who are sometimes, as if by a mistake of destiny, born in a family of clerks" (de Maupassant 33). By starting off the story with this quote, he makes it seem like the woman was born with the idea that she deserves a better life than what she was given. The author states, "...and she let herself be married to a little clerk at the Ministry of Public instruction" (33). This is how the author introduces the husband to the reader. The husband is introduced as not good enough for the woman. The woman's dissatisfaction of her life is the main theme throughout the story. Two paragraphs later the author is talking about all of the trivial aspects of average life and says, "All of those things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have been conscious, tortured her and made her angry"(33). This quote shows how petty the woman is; she feels tortured by the mundane average things that happen just because they are average and they are not the things she thinks should happen with the quality of life she has envisioned for herself. Repetition for effect is also used to show the woman's dissatisfaction with her life. An example of this is, " She had no dresses, no jewels, nothing. And she loved nothing but that.."(34). The word is nothing or no is repeated for emphasis throughout the story. Another example is, "It annoys me not to have a single jewel, not a single stone, nothing to put on." (35). Emphasis is put on her not having certain things and after examples of items she doesn't have are listed then the idea that overall nothing about her life is good enough. When talking about her jewelry she talks about all the types she doesn't have and then says she has nothing to put on. In the other example it's stated that she has no dresses or jewelry  and then it says she loved nothing but jewelry and dresses. This repetition is one of the many ways de Maupassant shows that the woman is dissatisfied with her life.

The husband is used to contradict the woman's selfishness and to make the woman seem even more unappreciative. For example after the husband gets tickets to the ball and he says, " I had awful trouble to get it( the invitation)" (34), the woman said impatiently,  "And what do you want me to put on my back?"(34). This portrays the husband as a nice guy going out of his way to make his wife happy and makes the wife seem  rude and unappreciative. The man's kindness contradicts the woman's selfishness to make it more emphasized. Another example of this is when he answers to his wife and asks her how much it would cost for her to get an acceptable dress. It says, "She reflected several seconds, making her calculations and wondering also what sum she could ask without drawing on herself an immediate refusal and frightened exclamation from the economical clerk" (34). This shows her way of thinking; it shows that instead of thinking of the actual amount of money she would need for a decent dress, she thinks about the most possible money she could say without her husband declining. The husband is once again used to contradict the woman after this, it says, " He had grown pale, because he was laying aside just that amount to buy a gun and treat himself to a little shooting next summer on the plain of Nanterre, with several friends who went to shoot larks down there of a Sunday"(35). The husband gives up the money he set aside for himself to have fun so that he can buy his wife a dress. This shows the difference in the couple and shows his selflessness compared to her selfishness.

After she gets the dress the woman is confronted with the issue of not having jewelry. Her husband tells her to borrow some from one of her wealthy friends and she ends up borrowing a necklace that she perceived to have been made of real diamonds. She ends up losing the necklace and decides against telling her friend about it. She and her husband decide to go to jewelry stores to find a replacement. It takes them awhile but they finally find a replacement. The author uses foreshadowing here to describe the replacement necklace, he says, " They found, in a shop at the Palais Royal , a string of diamonds which seemed to them exactly like the one they looked for. It was forty thousand francs"(37). The author says the string of diamonds seemed to them exactly what they were looking for, instead of saying they found a replacement. This foreshadowed that the replacement was not exactly what they needed to get. After the couple gets the necklace and goes through 10 years of debt the woman is described as " a woman of an impoverished household- strong and hard and rough"(38). She does all of this for one night of pretending she had the quality of life she thought she deserved. After all of this she tells her friend what she went through and the friend says," Oh my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was paste. It was worth at most five hundred francs!"(39). So the story ends with the woman realizing she sacrificed a life that was not bad for one of poverty for no reason and that if she just wasn't so materialistic then her life would have been much better.

