Necklace

The Necklace and Vanity Name UniversityThe Necklace by Guy de Maupassant is simple and straightforward, except that it teaches a valuable lesson. That lesson is: do not lie, be honest with everyone. If a person is honest, they will never have to spend 18000 francs to replace a necklace worth 500. Moreover, there is also a lesson about vanity. The purpose of the story is to demonstrate vanity and the value of honesty: no one in their right mind would ever spend so much on something that has so little practical use. Furthermore, one can save themselves a great deal of pain through honesty. One might imagine that someone could spend all their earnings on a fancy car, but at least the fancy car gets you places. A necklace does absolutely nothing but look nice, so there is a lesson here. We know that the husband accepts the demand of buying a new dress instead of buying a new gun for himself. Again, at least a gun may have practical uses. A dress makes you look nice. A necklace makes you look nice. Then again, this is all for the purpose of going to a ball, which is a social event. The main characters are Mathilde and her husband Loisel, they go through all this trouble to impress others at the ball. Moreover, there was no noticeable difference between real and fake diamonds. De Maupassant writes “‘You say that you bought a necklace of diamonds to replace mine?’ ‘Yes.

You never noticed it, then! They were very like.’ And she smiled with a joy which was proud and naive at once.” She thought there would be no difference between different diamond necklaces as opposed to real and fake diamonds. This what we mean by vanity; to vastly overvalue appearance.From the story, we learn the value of honesty and how to avoid Vanity. The great mystery is what really happened at the end. Loisel and Mathilde had to lie, buying a new diamond necklace instead of just admitting they lost the original. If they were honest about the real problem, they would have owed a tiny fraction of the price. Do they get their money back? Hopefully they do.