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Title: The Necklace: Overview Author(s): [|Donald Adamson] Source: **//[|Reference Guide to World Literature]//**. Ed. Lesley Henderson. 2nd ed. New York: St. James Press, 1995. From //Literature Resource Center//. Document Type: Work overview, Critical essay Bookmark: [|Bookmark this Document] **Full Text:** COPYRIGHT 1995 St. James Press, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning `The Necklace ' is one of the most famous of Maupassant's short stories but also one of the most enigmatic. Its crux is the loss of a diamond necklace borrowed by the wife of a low-ranking official in the Education Ministry, who wears it at a ball given by her husband's employers. Mme Loisel is a poor but an honest woman. She is determined to return an identical—or practically identical—piece of jewellery to Mme Forestier, the wealthy schoolfriend from whom she had borrowed it. The price of a similar necklace is 36,000 francs. M. Loisel already has half that sum; he borrows the remainder. Husband and wife spend the next ten years in grinding poverty until they have finally paid off their debt. One day, not long after the last loan repayment has been made, Mme Loisel happens to meet Mme Forestier again. In the course of conversation she relates the tribulations she has been through since borrowing the necklace. Mme Forestier explains that those glittering gems were mere costume jewellery. The first feature of `The Necklace ' that is also characteristic of so many of Maupassant's other short stories is that it deals with the genteel poor. He excels in the description of low-ranking civil servants, having been one himself for eight years. No writer has known better than he did how such men struggle to keep up appearances while living on the breadline. It is a prospect that seems to have no end until death. In his emphasis upon shabby gentility and dreary routine, no writer has known better how to describe such lives. Into this static situation, a terrible crisis suddenly erupts: the necklace vanishes. The rest of `The Necklace ' is concerned with the inexorable working-out of the crisis. This is the second characteristic feature of Maupassant's approach to the short-story form. Crises, in Maupassant's short stories, are either single or twofold. `The Necklace ' relates a twofold crisis: the loss of the necklace is but the prelude to the discovery, much later on, that the necklace was a sham. A third feature of `The Necklace ', characteristic not only of Maupassant but also perhaps of his `naturalism', is that the narrator does not overtly look into the minds of his characters. The characters in `The Necklace ', and there are only three, are viewed externally, being as it were characters in a drama rather than a prose fiction. A fourth and final characteristic of `The Necklace ' is its extreme brevity: it is nine pages long. But this is not because all so-called extraneous details have been ruthlessly pared away. For the story is not as straightforward as it seems. The story-teller in `The Necklace ' is a ludic narrator, sometimes mischievously misleading his reader, and sometimes building suspense by indulgence in personal digression. The first two pages of the story—introspective, generalizing, even somewhat diffuse—are a meditation yet also a character portrait, in the manner of Flaubert's //Madame Bovary//, but two pages out of nine are devoted to such effects, and there is no mention in them of any necklace. This tantalizingly ludic effect is heightened by the fact that `The Necklace ' is narrated in the third person. Following Balzac, Flaubert, and other users of //style indirect libre//, Maupassant engages in free indirect discourse—though only very sparingly: at the most critical point in the narrative. Writing of `her treasure', `a superb diamond necklace ', he misleads the reader into believing that the necklace really is valuable. In fact, does not Maupassant employ too many artifices of narrative? It is likely that Mme Forestier would not have said that the necklace was costume jewellery when it was borrowed? Is it likely that M. Loisel could so easily have borrowed 18,000 francs? Or that a similar and almost identical necklace could so quickly have been found, especially if Mme Loisel's brief memories of it were somewhat imprecise? Or that Mme Forestier (apparently) never looked at that necklace again during the next ten years? As with aspects of so many other masterpieces of literature (the time-scheme of **//Phèdre//** for instance), the detail of `The Necklace ', when clinically analysed, teems with improbabilities. Yet, as we read it, we are content to undergo a `willing suspension of disbelief' and to accept it as a `realistic'—perhaps indeed `naturalist'—picture of the world. **Source Citation** Adamson, Donald. "The Necklace: Overview." //Reference Guide to World Literature//. Ed. Lesley Henderson. 2nd ed. New York: St. James Press, 1995. //Literature Resources from Gale//. Web. 14 Jan. 2011.
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