The Necklace Necklace Symbolism

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The Necklace The old saying goes, “a diamond is a girl’s best friend.” In this story, “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant, it certainly doesn’t seem so. Mathilde Loisel (the main character of this story) was “one of those pretty and charming girls born,” (Maupassant 1) who was born “into a family of artisans.” The necklace symbolizes different things as the story and the character develops. In the beginning of the story, the diamond necklace symbolizes Mathilde Lolsel’s imaginary world and later in the story it develops into a burden to her. By the end of the story, she discovers that the necklace is nothing. To understand the character Mathilde Loisel, we have to understand her imaginary world. Although poor, she always imagined “herself born for every delicacy and luxury.” She had visions of a world of, “vast saloons hung with antique silks, exquisite pieces of furniture supporting priceless ornaments.” The necklace represents her imaginative world, a world she will never be in, a world of “antechambers, heavy with Oriental Tapestries, lit by torches in lofty bronze sockets.” She daydreams of a world she will never be in, which causes her to be miserable. As the story develops, so does the necklace. It degraded from a symbol of a luxurious world to a burden. Mathilde Lolsel, drowns in all her luxuries at the ball, loses the necklace and was very distressed. She and her husband panics, “We must see about replacing the diamonds” says her husband, from then on, the necklace becomes a burden, perhaps even a blood diamond. To replace the necklace, her husband uses the 18,000 francs left for him by his father and borrowed the rest from “usurers and the whole tribe of money-lenders. He mortgaged the whole remaining years of his existence.” Their poor life becomes even poorer, “they changed their flat; they took a garret under the roof. She came to know the heavy
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