Maryna Kagan Professor Dr. Z. Yablokova ENG 201­139 11 Oct 2014

Personality traits of Mathilde Loisel in "The Necklace" "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant is a short story with a protagonist Mathilde Loisel, who has a character that destroys all her life. Mathilde is a good looking and charming middle class woman married to supportive husband that pleases her every wish. But she seems to be severely suffering due to being poor when she is not. She is discontent with her life and refuses to accept the existing reality. Her own attitude is the major source of her problems. I would like to elaborate on the next traits of character of Mathilde: she is hard to be pleased, dependent and snobbish. Firstly, this woman is so hard to be pleased. No matter how intensely the surrounding her people try to make her happy, nothing seems to be satisfying for her. "The Necklace" is filled with the examples of Mathilde's being hard to be pleased. The first example is when her spouse gives her an invitation to an event for which he had to work the hardest, and instead of being grateful and delighted, she just throws it on the table with annoyance, murmuring:
"What do you want me to do with that?" (12).Then, she declares with impatience:"What do you want me to put on my back to go there?" (15). Then, with two big tears descending slowly from her eyes, she complains to Loisel: "Only I have no clothes, and in consequence I cannot go to this party. Give your card to some colleague whose wife has a better outfit than I"
(21).Her next dissatisfaction is: "It annoys me not to have a jewel, not a single stone, to put on. I shall look like distress. I would almost rather not go to this party" (33). And the last example I would like to give, is when Mme. Loisel goes over to her rich friend's house and
Mme. Forester lets her choose a piece of jewelry, Mathilde kept asking: "You haven’t anything else?" And her friend replies: "Yes, yes. Look. I do not know what will happen to please you"
(47).
Another trait of character of Mathilde that we will consider is dependency. She seems to be utterly dependent on her husband. She manipulates by demeaning him with tears and cross words. When he offers to go in a theater dress but "He shut up, astonished and distracted at seeing that his wife was weeping. Two big tears were descending slowly from the corners of the eyes to the corners of the mouth" (18). She manipulates his emotions until he surrenders and gives her whatever she wants. When she wants money for a dress, she asks for the most she can get "without meeting an immediate refusal and frightened

exclamation from the frugal clerk" (24). Throughout the story, she shows the tendency to be expecting her husband to buy things for her, to please her in every single way and, in the long run, to fix the consequences of the mistakes she makes. For example: after they find the diamond necklace to have gone missing, Loisel is the one who goes out there to look for it:
"I’m going," he said, "back the whole distance we came on foot, to see if I cannot find it" (78).
So, now, since they could not find the jewelry, they have to buy another one to replace the lost diamonds. That is why Loisel has to spend his entire inheritance. "Loisel possessed eighteen thousand francs which his father had left him. He had to borrow the remainder" (93). I think in this story, the majority of mishaps of the Loisels family comes from the snobbishness of Mathilde. The story leaves me under the impression that the only person this woman cares for is herself only. In the beginning of the story the author gives us an example of how instead of being thankful for what she has, Mathilde feels so unhappy because she thinks that she is superior and she deserves to be and to live in a