Natalie's Writing Portfolio

Essay Draft Two

            The origin of Mathilde’s Misery Life 

In “The Necklace”, Guy de Maupassant set a stage for a 19 century French tragedy play, in which Mathilde paid the debts of one night glory for ten years of hard living, resulting from her losing the borrowed necklace. At the very beginning, I just feel the woman deserved it because of her excessive vanity. However, after I’ve read the dramatic ending of the story again and again, a question comes to my mind: what causes the tragedy of Mathilde?

Some people think that Mathilde ate her own bitter fruit, attributed to her excessive vanity, basing on the fact that Mathilde regarded herself “had really fallen from her proper station”, and “born for all the delicacies and all the luxuries”(38). This idea does make some sense at the first glimpse, and honestly, I feel the same way at first. After having read the story thoroughly and then dug into the story’s essence, granting that everybody has peacockery, I begin to realize that the vanity is not the deadly reason which leads the tragedy of Mathilde. After all, everybody likes “to please, to be envied, to be charming, to be sought after”, especially under the social’s atmosphere when the sociality advertised the aristocrats’ elegant, ranks people’s luxury life, and exterior fineness. While, “excessive” vanity she might have, I admit, could also naturally derive from her prettiness and charm, rending her having fantasy to be equal with the very greatest ladies. But what’s wrong with her “natural fineness”? After all we can not blame someone only because of one’s beauty. From my point of view, her fault is the misinterpretation of “Natural fineness as the sole hierarchy”(38); she should never underestimate the unbreakable strength of social hierarchy. So, it is the huge disproportion between her pretty looking and low social hierarchy that made her dream some dream she should never dream, buy the dress she should never buy, and more fatally, borrow the necklace she should never borrow.

Since her vanity resulted from the big gap between ideality and reality, it was the social hierarchy rather than her vanity directly resulted in her tragedy. In my opinion, the ideality is what she intended to have matched her “natural fineness”, and the reality is what she couldn’t have according to the rigid social hierarchy. Let us see some details to support my opinion. “By a mistake of destiny,” Mathilde, born to be a pretty and charming girl, was in a family of “neither caste nor rank” (38), so she had no expectation, for she knew there was an invisible line she would never have ability to cross. Then when her time came, she would do whatever she could, buying dress, borrowing jewelry, to shine, only for one night, because she can not believe the beauty like her could not have what she supposed to have. So after what she’d gone through--the losing of the necklace, the hardship of paying the debt, she could only sigh that “how life is strange and changeful!”(44); she could only see how she was manipulated by destiny, I guess. So what is destiny? It is the rigid social hierarchy, due to which she should only do within her rank boundary.

And another significant factor which also made the story more dramatic is that the necklace was paste one. Let us simply suppose the necklace is a real diamond, what Mathilde had been suffered for years was only the simply paying back of a serious mistakes she made ten years ago. However, the cruel truth that the necklace was a paste one made her ten years of hard work amounted to nothing. As far as I see, under that atmosphere, in the different classes, it is luxury for Mathilde to make real friends with Forestier, who didn’t bother to tell the truth beforehand, which, to some degree, caused her “friend’s” ten years of misery life. And she even gave a gesture of dissatisfaction when Mathilde return the replaced one. “You should have returned it sooner, I might have needed it.”(43)

In conclusion, the tragedy of Mathilde was rooted in the rigid social hierarchy. More accurately, she was manipulated by the hierarchy.