Essay Draft Two
Date: May, 6, 2007.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Unfortunately, this household-known saying might only be regarded as a mythical cliché if we trace back to the nineteenth-century in France, when class distinctions remained to be the prominent integral of French society. With hierarchy being dominant in the social values, high social status inevitably represents virtue, which ultimately triumphs natural fineness, wit and wisdom and a conscientious mind.
Born into an upper bourgeois family in France, Guy de Maupassant succeeded in challenging the merciless social system by his extraordinary literary works. Realism was a remarkable element of his published stories which are perfectly linked by irony of the realistic world and the frailty of human nature. His masterpiece, “The Necklace”, arouses the readers to think about the devastating effects that class distinction had on common people’s lives. In the story, the protagonist Mathilde was a good-looking middle-class woman, who irrationally longed for the extravagant upper-class life. Pathetically, it took her and her husband ten years of hard work to pay for a lost necklace she had borrowed to attend a ball. Astonishingly, the original necklace turned out to be a paste. The writer’s attitude toward the subject matter was arresting, especially the use of irony is prominent in this short story for the writer established a satirical tone when capturing several realistic details.
At the beginning of the story, Mathilde is depicted as a born blue-blooded woman who was, “by a mistake of destiny”, reduced to the middle-class. “She suffered ceaselessly, feeling herself born for all the delicacies and all the luxuries… All those things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have been conscious, tortured her and made her angry.” Mathilde seems to have fabulous “instinct for what is elegant” and her luxurious taste to a certain extent thrills the readers. The writer delicately yet deliberately describes Mathilde’s frequent and over-romantic daydreaming, which involves numerous enchanting stuffs which are elaborate but superficially clever:
“She thought of the silent antechambers hung with Oriental tapestry, lit by tall bronze candelabra, and of the two great footmen in knee breeches who sleep in the big armchairs, made drowsy by the heavy warmth of the hot-air stove…”(P39)
It is non-negotiable that the author’s lengthy depictions here are not nearly meaningless. These details reveal that only through boundless and unrealistic imagination was Mathilde able to get in touch with the upper class; However, pathetically, the deeper she was indulged in her imagination, the more dissatisfied she was with the reality. Obviously, the conspicuous incongruity of the protagonist’s expectation and reality is reflected here, which can effectively prove the effective function of irony in this story.
The plot starts to thicken when Mr. Loisel notifies Mathilde of the ball. The dialogue between the couple revealed their disparate character and attitude toward plain life. There is no doubt that Mathilde is an over self-conscious woman, for what she only concerns is her appearance and dressing at the ball. “Two great tears descended slowly from the corners of her eyes toward the corners of her mouth.”(P40)This is an important detail that cannot be neglected. It seems that Mathilde was a sentimental and fragile woman, but for what did she cry? Obviously the author here writes in an exaggerated way which may create a taste of sarcasm. It is easy to detect Mathilde’s complicated and elusive feeling: she is not willing to let slip through her fingers the opportunity to show her fabulous and luxurious taste as well as her appealing glamour, nevertheless, she is equally afraid of being triumphed or even despised by the exalted and elevated ladies that may appear at the ball.
Afterward, when Mathilde went to Mme. Forestier’s home to borrow the necklace, we can not neglect the writer’s penetrating description of Mathilde’s acts:
“All of a sudden she discovered, in a black satin box, a superb necklace of diamonds, and her heart began to beat with an immoderate desire. Her hands trembled as she took it. She fastened it around her throat, outside her high necked dress, and remained lost in ecstasy at the sight of herself.”(P41)
How ironic it is! Among all the superb jewels, Mathilde, with her “instinct for what is elegant” (P38), did cautiously pick a fake necklace! Poor Mathilde, for she could not have predicted the hardship she would endure to pay for this alluring yet valueless necklace. Here, the writer might be teasing and ridiculing the individuals who blindly venerate the upper class and pretend to have the extravagant taste, or he might be indicating the fact that the so-called hierarchy is nothing but a paste.
Attention must be paid on the name of the street where Mathilde and her husband live: “Rue des Martyrs” (Street of the Martyrs) (P41). The pathetic yet ignorant couple could never know that one day, they would also become “martyrs”. Naïve Mathilde, being a fervent admirer of the upper class, regarded the pursuing of extravagant lifestyle as a noble deed, but she finally suffered greatly due to her beliefs. Isn’t she a ridiculous “martyr”? Here, the writer uses a brilliant sarcastic way to foreshadow the miserable twist of fate of this couple, which is really thought-provoking.
There is no controversy that the end of the short story indicates the biggest irony. Mathilde, who has pulled through the torturing hardship for a decade, while being severely traumatized, being deprived of her beauty and grace, her plain but peaceful life, her age of innocence, her romantic fancies which a woman deserves, finally reappears like “a woman of the people” with her smile which is “proud and naïve”. However, through her words with Mme. Forestier, it is easy to detect that it is still the same Mathilde, the same egoistic and fragile women whose real nature hasn’t been refined by a decade of wretched life. “[The] necklace was paste.”(P44). What Mathilde has longed for and hysterically pursued turned out to be a fake paste dream which can be easily broken in a second. The art of irony reaches the peak here, which suggests that the origin of such incongruity is the merciless and obsolete social condition at that time, which is breakable and worthless just like a “paste” necklace.
Throughout the whole story, the writer’s sarcastic attitude and ironic tone really provided staggering sensation. Mathilde may represent a slave of the upper class, a victim of excessive vanity, or a sacrifice of the cruel social system, a sufferer of irony of fate. To a certain extent, she is an exaggerated figure created by Guy de Maupassant, standing for the majority of the women at that time in France. The element of irony make this short story a time-honored one, which uncovers the brutal social condition, reveals the incongruity and drawbacks of the class distinction, and lashes out at the inequality of human being.