The “Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant is a story about an pretty girl, Mathilde, who borrows a precious necklace from her friend to dress herself up and become the focus of the ball. Unfortunately, she loses the necklace, as a result, she endures ten years’ hard life to pay off all the debt. After I read the story, there is a question come into my mind. What makes Mathilde suffer the ten years’ hard life? In my point of view, it is the result of three factors.
The first one is her beauty. As we all know, Mathilde is a pretty girl which is told at the beginning of the story. And we also can know Mathilde’s beauty from people’s reaction when she appears at the ball. “She was the prettiest woman present, elegant, graceful, smiling, and quite above herself with happiness. All the men stared at her, inquired her name, and asked to be introduced to her. All the Under-Secretaries of State were eager to waltz with her. The Minister noticed her. ” She is so attractive that she can become the dancing queen easily. Her beauty endows her with the right to pursue a better life, because “women have no caste or class, their beauty, grace, and charm serving them for birth or family, their natural delicacy, their instinctive elegance, their nimbleness of wit, are their only mark of rank, and put the slum girl on a level with the highest lady in the land.” So Mathilde suffered endlessly, feeling herself born for every delicacy and luxury. Her beauty drives her to pursue the luxury life by all kinds of means.
The second factor, I think, is her vanity. As far as I am concerned, vanity is a terrible thing. It will make people pursue fortune, power and any other things that can help them to get others’ attention. Sometimes, vanity make them ignore the reality and become selfish. In the story, Mathilde is clearly aware of her circumstances. She was born into a family of artisans. “she had no marriage portion, no expectations, no means of getting known, understood, loved, and wedded by a man of wealth and distinction; and she let herself be married off to a little clerk in the Ministry of Education.” But when she gets the opportunity to show herself, she forgets all the things and only wants to show her beauty which I think is the result of vanity. Ingoring the poverty of her family, she uses a huge amount of money which her husband saved for a gun to buy the dress. Without and luxury jewel, she tries to borrow some from her friend. When she becomes the focus of the ball, “She danced madly, ecstatically, drunk with pleasure, with no thought for anything, in the triumph of her beauty, in the pride of her success, in a cloud of happiness made up of this universal homage and admiration, of the desires she had aroused, of the completeness of a victory so dear to her feminine heart. ” She loses the necklace when she gets dizzy with success. Furthermore, after losing the necklace, she is keen on face-saving that she wants to buy a new necklace to return without telling her friend the fact. So she doesn’t know that the neck is a fake and suffers ten years’ hard life for the cheap necklace.
From my point of view, the last factor is her poverty. “She suffered from the poorness of her house, from its mean walls, worn chairs, and ugly curtains. All these things, of which other women of her class would not even have been aware, tormented and insulted her.” The poverty is the ball and chain which prevents her to pursue he dream. Her ordinary family cannot afford her luxury dream. It also cannot afford the necklace. When she lost the necklace, she and her husband have no choice but to work day after night.
In my opinion, the three factors together make Mathilde endure the ten year’s hard life.
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