Understanding the Motif of Greed in The Necklace (Essay Example)

Guy de Maupassant’s short story, “The Necklace'' takes place in Paris, 1884. The main character, Mathilde, is a middle-class woman obsessed with Money, Jewelry, and Everything Expensive,  (although she lacks). Mathilde cries for days after visiting her rich friend's house, Madame Forestier,  as she lives the life Mathilde always dreamed of. Mathilde's husband, Monsieur Loisel, is a government worker and is not fond of that trait about his wife. One lesson this story suggests is that the obsession with wealth will never lead to good places.

Even from the beginning, there are lots of details that hint towards the lesson the story may be trying to tell. The first page already shows that Mathilde's life isn’t great, as we know she spends days crying after visiting her rich friend, Madame Forestier. “She had a rich friend, an old school friend whom she refused to visit because she suffered so keenly when she returned home. She would weep whole days, with grief, regret, despair, and misery” (Maupassant, pg. #1). From this we can infer that Mathilde would most definitely be better off spending her time reading, working, or doing anything else as we see the mental and physical toll it has on her. The reader can infer that Mathilde is feeding her “hunger” for Jewelry as she is almost never satisfied, evidence to support this claim is when she gets her dress, she still believes that she needs Jewelry, even though her husband offers the cheap alternative of having flowers instead of Diamonds, she denies.

Because Mathilde is so caught up in her own sorrow, she hurts others more than she thinks. Mathilde is the one to blame for her and her husband's debt, as she loses the “diamond” necklace and has to pay Madame Forestier back over the course of 10 years. For example, her husband was saving up money to buy a gun to go hunting with (Although hunting was a luxury back in 1880, this shows how Money has hypnotized Mathilde, we can see she completely disregards her husband not being able to get the gun) and although Mathilde already owned a dress, she was very sure she needed a new one for such an event. This is without even mentioning that she still wanted more to her outfit, claiming that the dress was not enough and that she wouldn’t go if she didn’t have any jewelry.

By the middle of the story the reader begins to see that to Mathilde, money is more than an obsession to her, it’s a lifestyle. First, Mathilde manages to get another dress for the event even though she already owned one. Then, she claims that a dress alone is not enough, and if she doesn’t get anything else to make it special, she wouldn’t go to the event.  Finally, her husband tells her to ask her rich friend to borrow some jewelry, and when she gets a (fake) diamond necklace, she loses it. The Sentence “"I'm utterly miserable at not having any jewels, not a single stone, to wear," she replied. "I shall look like

absolutely no one. I would almost rather not go to the party."

"Wear flowers," he said. "They're very smart at this time of the year. For ten francs you could get two or

three gorgeous roses." 

She was not convinced.

"No... there's nothing so humiliating as looking poor in the middle of a lot of rich women." shows that she is completely blinded by her lust for looking beautiful, that she completely ignores any other way of achieving her goal unless it costs lots of francs (money).

As you can see, one of the themes in Guy De Maupasssant’s “The Necklace” is that the obsession with money, or more so the idea of money will never lead to good places, and instead may hurt you more than it will help you, as it happens to Mathilde. But what we learn from the story is that although the obsession with wealth will lead to the outcome of no benefit, the reader can learn that the author may be trying to hint at another theme, which would be to take more care of your personal belongings.