Hi, I'm Rebecca Balcarcel. Let's talk about "The Necklace," a short story by Guy de Maupassant.
You can tell by his name that he's French, and that means that you're probably reading
an English translation, and that means that some of the
actual wording could be disputed, but we're going to make inferences that take into account
the whole story, and not worry about exact wording too
much. Okay, so what is this story about? It's fairly straightforward, and Guy de Maupassant
is famous for having a surprise ending, or twist ending, and that's what we get here.
We have a woman who cares very much about pretty things and
beautiful balls, manages to go to one, borrow a necklace, lose it, and then spend ten years
of hard, hard life paying back the cost of the lost
necklace, replacing it first, and then paying back the purchase price. Now she is to be
pitied in several ways, because first of all, she puts a lot of value in things that don't
matter that much. She has a decent life at the beginning
of the story. We see that she has food on the stove, she has a little apartment, her
husband has a steady job, even though it's a modest job. He's a
clerk of some kind. But she's not appreciative of that. So one of her flaws is she doesn't
appreciate what she has, and instead she just wishes she could be rich, and she wishes she
could have beautiful things. She wishes her furniture
were nice, and the curtains were pretty, and maybe we don't blame her entirely for wanting
beauty or wanting sensually stimulating possessions, however
we do blame her for not appreciating what she has, because by the end of the story,
she has even less than what she started with, and all because she went after this grand
elegance that she really could not afford. Now let's take a
look, in contrast, at her husband. This poor man works hard, wants to make his wife happy.
He sacrifices a great deal for her to have had this
catastrophe of losing the necklace. He's the one who's got to work evenings in addition
to his regular job, take out the loans. Not only does he sacrifice during those years
of working, but when she needs a dress for this event they're going
to, this dance or ball gathering, he says, "Oh, you can have this money for your dress."
And he doesn't even tell her that he was planning to use
that money for something for himself. You could even say he's a martyr. So he comes
off looking like the good guy that he is here. I feel really sorry for him when he has to
go back out looking for the necklace. At first they think maybe
they'll find it, and he is very tired, and it's late, but he puts back on his clothes
and goes out into the night to try to find it, and he does not
find it, and of course they end up having to buy another one, and pay for it. Now the
twist ending is, the necklace they bought to replace the lost one was diamond, real
diamonds, but it turns out that the necklace that she borrowed from
her friend was not real diamonds, costume-jewelry, fake diamonds, kind of like cubic zirconia
or something nowadays. So this brings me to talk about
that woman, her friend. This woman is richer than our main character, but she is more realistic.
She knows she can't afford a real diamond necklace. Everyone in this story is more practical
and sensible than our main character. She screws
up her whole life, makes her life worse than before, all because she values these elegances,
and looking higher-class than she actually is. Okay, so
not only does she not appreciate what she has, but she hankers for this superficial
wealth. So instead of developing, let's say, her spiritual life, or her intellectual life,
her emotional wealth, she focuses on surfaces, and this
is her downfall. Okay, now some folks would say that Guy de Maupassant is being rather
unkind to women as he talks about this woman who is so worried
about her elegance and looking good and being pretty and being admired, being vain, that
maybe he is insulting women in general.
I don't think this is the case. And thank goodness we have the example of her friend,
who is not this way. That is an example of a more sensible woman, who doesn't even care
that much about which jewelry gets lent to the friend. You
know, she says, "Oh, you can borrow any of these. I'm happy to loan you any of these
pieces. Whatever you want." She's not overly attached to the
pretty things, the way the main character is. So we can't accuse the author of being
mean to women. It's just this one particular woman this author is looking at. And he sees
her shallowness, and brings that out, and contrives to create
a situation where she will come face to face with her own shallowness. Now one last thing:
Does she grow and change during the story? She doesn't.
Even though she comes to know the hard work and the strength required physically to live
a poor life, doing all the rough work of the house herself, etc., she still thinks, oh,
what if I hadn't lost the jewels? That's the real problem.
She hasn't realized that a deeper problem is wanting to put on those fake airs, wanting
to appear so much higher than she was, richer than she was. It
wasn't enough to have flowers as a decoration. She had to have the jewels. And she wasn't
even honest with her friend, saying she lost them. Her false sense of inflatedness gets
in the way. So that's the real problem. Losing the necklace
is not the real problem. Life brought her that situation so that it correct her, and
change her, but she didn't learn her lesson, she still is focused
on the glory of that night, how beautiful she was. Oh, if only the necklace hadn't been
lost. She worries about the wrong things, and she doesn't change herself. She just wishes
circumstances would change. And that, I think, is a deeper
message for all of us, that instead of waiting for outer circumstances to change, we need to
change internally. Guy de Maupassant shows us a woman
who could have learned from life's lessons, but instead she's worse off, and she hasn't
gained any maturity from her experiences, so she is truly poor. Alright, I hope you
enjoyed talking about the necklace with me. Feel free to leave your
ideas and comments below, and hope you'll join me for another video sometime.