Essay Draft Three

Date: June 16, 2007

The Function of Maupassant’s Ironic Tone in “The Necklace”

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “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.

Being a son of minor aristocrats, 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”, seeks to arouse 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. It took her and her husband ten miserable 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. In the story, Maupassant uses an ironic tone not only to embody Mathilde’s character but also to express his own attitude toward the subject matter.

At the beginning of the story, Mathilde is depicted as a born blue-blooded woman who, “by a mistake of destiny”, was reduced to the middle-class. She appears as a fervent admirer of the upper-class’s delicacies and luxuries, which however, apparently disagrees with her ordinary social status. The fierce conflict between her vain character and the reality can be seen in the lines:“All those things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have been conscious, tortured her and made her angry.” (38) The writer delicately yet deliberately captures Mathilde’s frequent and over-romantic daydreaming moments in lengthy sentences, involving numerous enchanting things that are elaborate but superficially clever which would stand for Mathilde’s seemingly elegant but in truth frivolous taste:

When she sat down to dinner, before the round table covered with a tablecloth three days old, … she thought of dainty dinners, of shining silverware, of tapestry which peopled the walls with ancient personages and with strange birds flying in the midst of a fairy forest. (39)

To a great extent, these details reveal that only through boundless and unrealistic imagination is Mathilde able to get in touch with the upper class; however, pathetically, the deeper she is indulged in her unrealistic imagination, the more dissatisfied she is with the reality. The stage to release her grievance toward plain life and satisfy her expanding curiosity finally turns out to be the source of her stronger vanity and greedier desire! Here, the conspicuous incongruity and contrast of the protagonist’s expectation and reality is reflected, where the element of irony emerges and makes the personality of the protagonist more vivid.

The plot starts to thicken when Mr. Loisel notifies Mathilde of the ball. Mathilde is an over self-conscious woman, for what she only concerns is her appearance and dressing at the ball. She seems extremely fragile and sentimental when she feels at a loss what to wear at the ball: “Two great tears descended slowly from the corners of her eyes toward the corners of her mouth.” (40) Mathilde’s complicated and elusive feeling can be detected: 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. This very situation exposes Mathilde’s paradoxical and ironic character: on the one hand, her beauty endows her with high self-esteem and makes her into an aggressive woman; on the other hand, her fragility and excessive vanity drive her to feel inferior to the upper-class ladies, thus crazily desires things that she does not possess.

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. (41)

How ironic it is! Among all the superb jewels, Mathilde, with her “instinct for what is elegant” (38), 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, Maupassant 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. Another character, Mme. Forestier, a noble lady of the upper class, seems to be generous enough to allow Mathilde to choose whatever she likes; however, her conscience does drive her to lend Mathilde, a middle-class woman, a fake necklace! Is the writer suggesting the ornaments “of admirable workmanship” (41) in that large jewel box are all fake ones? That could be another ironic situation in this story. Probably, Maupassant depends on the hypocritical behavior of Mme. Forestier to unearth and criticize the nature of the upper-class people at that time: superficially charitable, but internally fake and mean.

     The ball really earns Mathilde the unprecedented ecstatic feeling, with her “awakened desires” (41) satisfied by “the sense of complete victory” (41) which drives her into intoxication. Nevertheless, who can foretell the lost of the necklace? In the latter part of the story, although Mathilde is reduced to a miserable life, memory still leads her to fantasy, when she thinks of “that gay evening of long ago, of that that ball where she had been so beautiful and so feted.” (44) Such is the irony of fate, when a tragic but little moment changes a person’s whole life!

Attention must be paid on the name of the street where Mathilde and her husband live: “Rue des Martyrs [Street of Martyrs]” (41). The pathetic yet ignorant couple could never know that one day, they would also become certain kinds of “martyrs”. Naïve Mathilde, being a fervent follower 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, Maupassant uses his forceful ironic tone to show the absurdity of Mathilde’s deed, while foreshadowing the miserable twist of fate of this couple, which is really thought-provoking.

The short story indicates the biggest irony. Mathilde, who has pulled through a decade’s hardship, 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” (43) with her “proud and naïve” (44) smile. 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.”(44) What Mathilde has longed for and hysterically pursued just turned out to be a fake paste dream which can be easily broken in an instant. The art of irony reaches the peak here, where Maupassant suggests that the origin of such stubborn incongruity between expectation and reality as well as appearance and truth is the merciless and obsolete social system at that time, which is as breakable and worthless as a “paste” necklace.

Throughout the whole story, Maupassant uses his ironic tone and incisive attitude to provide the story with both staggering sensation and food for thought. The protagonist, 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 Maupassant, standing for the majority of the women at that time in France, when the balance of the society was upset by the unjustified social system, while the frivolous and the fake were blindly pursued and human nature was severely oppressed. 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.

Work Cited

Maupassant, Guy de. “The Necklace.” 1884. Rpt. In The International Story: An Anthology with Guidelines for Reading and Writing about Fiction. Ruth Spack.

New York: St. Martins’s, 1994. 6-8.

27.5.07 07:09