Figurative Language In The Necklace

“The U.S. jewelry market earned $57.965 billion in annual revenue last year”(McCain 1). To some people this might seem like a crazy amount of wasted money. Not for Mathilde though. In the short story, The Necklace, Mathilde, a poor girl, longs for having a rich life filled with fancy food, clothes, and jewelry. When Mathilde has the chance to go to a fancy dance, she would love to go, but is missing one thing, a fancy necklace. Mathilde borrows a diamond necklace for the dance. After, Mathilde realizes that the necklace is nowhere to be found, but she can’t admit she lost it, so she borrows money, works jobs, and with the help of her husband, she is able to buy a necklace to give back to her friend. One day though, Mathilde ran into the friend,

Mathilde always wanted a better life with more money. Mathilde really dislikes her lifestyle because of her “mean walls, worn chairs, and ugly curtains. All of these things, of which other women of her class would not even have been aware, tormented and insulted her” (Maupassant 1). This personification proves the theme to not act greedy because she doesn’t have a good perspective. She wants more than she has instead of being grateful for everything she has because most people aren’t as lucky as her. After Mathilde paid off the necklace she replaced, her friend explained to her that the necklace “was imitation. It was worth at the very most five hundred francs! …” (Maupassant 6). This irony shows how the necklace, a part of the thing that she thought mattered most in life, really didn’t matter. It cost a small amount of money and was a small thing in life. This proved the part of the theme that little things in life don’t

After Mathilde’s husband surprises her with tickets to a ball, Mathilde asks “What do you want me to do with this?” (Maupassant 2). This expresses that Mathilde had a really bad view on things. Instead of being happy to have the opportunity to go to a fun dance, she only thought about how she didn’t have a fancy dress or jewels to go to the ball. Since Mathilde was complaining about a dress, her husband bought her one with the money he wanted to use to buy a gun, and even after he did this, Mathilde still complained by saying “I’m utterly miserable at not having any jewels, not a single stone to wear” (Maupassant 3). This shows how Mathilde was being very selfish towards her husband because instead of being happy to have a dress, she still griped about the things she didn’t have. Doing this most likely made her husband sad about the things he got her not being good