In human life, lies are found in various forms and for many reasons. However, often, if not always, deceiving other people leads to lying to oneself. Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace,” tells about the senselessness of the pursuit of pretentiousness and brilliance of high society, which can turn out to be a fake overnight. Following Ericsson’s classification, one could distinguish at least three types of lies in the story: facades, the white lie, and delusion (Ericsson). In the novel, the wife of a petty official, Matilda, ruined her life in order to pay money for the necklace she had lost, and only many years later, he learns that it was fake. She wanted to look “no worse than others” at the ball, and for this, she sacrificed both herself and her husband. The paper argues that every lie present in “The Necklace” ultimately results in the heroine’s self-deception, which is revealed by the author’s usage of oppositions that contrast reality and the protagonist’s illusions.
The most prominent types of lies present in “The Necklace” are facades. As Ericsson states, “facades can be destructive because they are used to seduce others into an illusion” (p. 179). For the heroine who dreams of luxury and comfort, an exquisite society, suffering from the squalor of her meager life and the poverty of her home, a ball is an unforgettable event. Having got to the ministerial ball, the happy heroine enjoys the attention she has dreamed of all her life. For the momentary pleasure of the woman he loves, her husband, Monsieur Loisel, gives up his inheritance and says goodbye to his ordinary life with the servant. The desire to visit high society and Madame Loisel’s selfishness led her whole family to the fact that they had to make ends meet for ten years, drag out a miserable life to pay for her one moment of happiness.
The lie by means of facades is here revealed through the opposition “ordinary – imaginary.” The heroine’s life from early youth to the day of the ball, which will drastically change her fate, is shown by a series of contrasting text fragments. The heroine can be in two states: she suffered, or she dreamed. The group of “suffering” corresponds to the motive of the “ordinary” and includes particular motives of the interior: the poverty of the home, the insignificance of the walls, sitting chairs, ugly upholstery, and other details of real life. The contrasting motives of the “imaginary” group are also presented in the text in the process of describing the interior. Guy de Maupassant writes: “She thought of silent antechambers hung with Oriental tapestries, illuminated by tall bronze candelabra, and of two great footmen in knee- breeches who sleep in the big armchairs, made drowsy by the oppressive heat of the stove. She thought of long reception halls hung with ancient silk, of the dainty cabinets containing priceless curiosities, and of the little coquettish perfumed reception rooms made for chatting at five o’clock with intimate friends, with men famous and sought after, whom all women envy and whose attention they all desire” (p.31). The very desire of Matilda to be beautiful at the ball does not at all indicate that she wants to please men – on the contrary, the main thing for her is to cause the envy of women. It is for them that Madame Loisel strives to look intelligent and wealthy: “No; there is nothing more humiliating than looking poor in the middle of a lot of rich women. “(p. 33).
Central to the plot and its development lies the white lie, which “assumes that the truth will cause more damage than a simple, harmless untruth… But, in effect, it is the liar deciding what is best for the lied to. It is an act of subtle arrogance for anyone to decide what is best for someone else “(p. 178). Having lost the necklace borrowed from a friend, the couple decides to hide the truth and take time to find a replacement at an unbeatable price for them, which will change their lives. The husband says to the heroine: “You must write to your friend […] that you have broken the clasp of her necklace and that you are having it mended. That will give us time to turn around.”(p. 35) By trying to avoid damage through lies, they find themselves in an even worse situation, from which they cannot get out of an easy way. In reality, things would have turned out much better if they had told the truth to the owner of the necklace.
However, the fundamental type of lies in “The Necklace” is a delusion. Ericsson defines it as a “tendency to see excuses as facts… it filters out information that contradicts what we want to believe… Delusion uses the mind’s ability to see things in myriad ways to support what it wants to be the truth” (p. 181). This work is a story about how life is arranged, in which there are no miracles, but you have to pay a very high price for lies and petty vanity; the story of “little people” who, in principle, cannot become heroes of a genuine drama. Attention is drawn to the fact that the compositional principle of contrast often entails the principle of symmetrical organization of the composition. Indeed, contrast implies a kind of mirroring, more or less hidden repetition of motives in the design of the text as a whole. In The Necklace, we see that the same private motives (interior and food) appear in the third part of the novella (after the ball and the disaster with the loss of the necklace). Matilda plunges into poverty, but is not burdened by it: she is still inspired by the memories of the ballroom triumph. The third part is compositionally symmetrical with respect to the first: the text of the novel gives a significant authorial gap between the first and second, second and third parts, and the events of the first and third parts take ten years, and the events of the central, second, one day. The third compositional part features such images as “the odious labors of the kitchen,” “greasy pots and the bottoms of pans”, the scum that Matilda, who dreamed of elegant salons and fine dinners, takes out down the stairs to the street, shopkeepers with whom she bargains for the cheapest food: “dressed like a woman of the people, she went to the fruiterer, the grocer, the butcher, a basket on her arm, bargaining, meeting with impertinence, defending her miserable money, sou by sou” (p. 36). Matilda describes the decorations for the ball almost as a sensual act: at first, the heroine, burning with passion for these objects, simply cannot bring them back. However, when the heroine sees a necklace that embodies her whole dream of luxury and the meaning of life, she completely loses her mind: “… her heart throbbed with an immoderate desire. Her hands trembled as she took it. She fastened it round her throat, outside her high-necked waist, and was lost in ecstasy at her reflection in the mirror”(p. 31). In general, the text reveals itself to us as a love story – a woman’s love for jewelry. There is also the theme of longing, suffering, and willingness to sacrifice in the name of this love. The development of a group of contrasting motifs, “living – nonliving,” brings us close to the leitmotif of deception, fake, which sounds at the very end of the text.
The leitmotif of the false, receiving an explicit, lexical expression at the end of the text, in the confession of Mrs. Forestier, forces the reader to rethink the entire course of the work’s plot. This motive of fake (“fausse”), substitution, deception, and sounding in the finale, returns the reader to the beginning of the text and the mention of “an error of fate” in it. Thus, we can interpret the text not just as a story of unworthy love, a story of moral failure, or a tragic mistake of the heroine. All these interpretations merge in the idea that it was fate that deceived Matilda, and the clash of a semi-anecdotal situation and the idea of tragic determinism, the doom of the heroine, a “fool” who is blind to her lot, gives rise to a kind of tragic irony in this text. Nevertheless, the essential issue in the novel is an indication of the falsity of the high society in everything, up to cheap jewelry, the replacement of which with genuine ones cost a woman who did not know how to admit her guilt about losing them to a friend, overwork and broken life.
Works Cited
De Maupassant, Guy. The necklace and other short stories. Courier Corporation, 2012.
Ericsson, Stephanie. “The Ways We Lie.” Starke, pp. 177-182.