‘The Necklace’ is narrated in the third person by an omniscient narrator. After all, Mathilde was admired at the ball even though she was, it turns out, wearing fake diamonds.
If they cost five hundred francs at the most, as Madame Forestier reveals at the end, Loisel’s husband could have easily bought her a cheap necklace and nobody – except for the Loisels themselves – would have been any the wiser. And yet, knowing they were imitation diamonds raises further ‘what if’ questions. Of course, at this stage of the narrative she hasn’t learned that the diamonds she was wearing that night were fakes perhaps that revelation would make her revise her opinion. She wonders what would have happened if she’d never lost the necklace. It is almost as if she thinks it was worth it, despite what happened next. Maupassant seems to be suggesting that the ‘finer things’ in life which tempt us are often, at their core, hollow and worthless.Īt the same time, however, even when she is reduced to a life of grinding poverty, Mathilde still remembers that one night at the ball when she was admired. Modern consumerism, then, is a con, with anyone able to afford a cheap imitation necklace able to pass themselves off as a member of the upper classes. But the delicious ironic twist at the end of the story shows that her reduction to a life of poverty was all for nothing: just like the admiration she was foolishly and vainly chasing, the necklace she was working to replace was, after all, a sham. The critic Rachel Mesch, in her book Having It All in the Belle Epoque, has pointed out that ‘The Necklace’, among other stories, is a kind of Cinderella-story gone awry: whereas Cinderella begins by scrubbing floors and ends up going to the ball in all her finery, Mathilde goes to the ball and, as a result of losing her necklace (not her glass slipper), is reduced to a life of scrubbing floors.īecause she longed for more than she had, she ended up with less than she had to begin with.
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