Maupassant's "The Necklace"

After the French Revolution of 1789, the Aristocracy fell but maintained the position as the authoritative model of emulation; the rising Bourgeoisie, too, inherited the tastes and trends of the Aristocrat and equated their abstract goal of enlightened “progress” with that of concrete social wealth. Although, class divisions continue to widen at an uneasy rate, the lower classes still maintained the hope of social mobility, even if it meant indulging in the illusion of wealth; it was as if appearance, ipso facto, was able to elicit truth-content. The 18th-19th Century was very much consumed by what is called the “Civilizing Process” which was largely contingent with class. Guy de Maupassant illustrates this especially well in his short story “The Necklace”, by portraying how objects initially thought to be under man’s manipulation were , in turn, being used against him; it’s not the objects, themselves, that have the power to subjugate, but it’s the powers that are invested in them which transpires in the realm of fantasy.

It’s by the process of reification that these products come to be disassociated from their producers and “assume an apparently autonomous existence” (Terry Eagleton) ; objects, ideologies, values, in lieu, are attributed to an alien force by which it is de-historicized and universalized insofar as it comes to be seen as “natural” and ultimately, outside the domain of human control.It was around this time, commodities started to become mass produced in factories; objects were no longer customly made by individuals but were created by detached and malnourished workers on an assembly line. People and their desires were, too, produced in the same fashion; in order to fulfill a certain set of bureaucratic needs and quotas, the masses had to be educated on what must be desired and consumed in order to tacitly further the interests of the ruling class.

It appears to me that Mathilde’s conception of freedom is indirectly correlated with her wealth, or lack thereof.The diamond necklace contained a certain sign value that is representative of luxury , status, and strictly exclusive to those who can afford it; the roses represents, from my perspective, a critique of the process of modernization, where nature is only appreciated insofar as it is instrumentally utilized for human gain which the rose cannot provide, because it is beauty in-itself and is free to everyone regardless of their class and wealth.

We find out in the end of the story that the necklace is not worth anything at all and was in “reality”, a cheap copy of a diamond necklace. How could this necklace be fake; did it not in her reality, give Mathilde the happiness she so desired that day, to the point, where she continues to reminisce upon that day as one of her greatest memories; even as she is working in order to pay off the ten year debt after losing the necklace, she reflects, “she sat down by the window and thought of that evening long ago, of the ball at which she had been so beautiful and so much admired” (Maupassant).

We actually don’t know whether this is true or not, but we do know that she projected her own feelings about the necklace unto herself; this necklace became coextensive with her own self-worth. This shows how ordinary objects become extremely powerful by the desires and emotions we attribute to it; it matters less the actual physical quality of the object but what they represent to the human imagination. The fantasies of these objects are shaped by one’s society which includes its means of production, its cultural input, and other environmental factors by which it seems that ordinary individuals don’t seem to have much control and tend to relinquish whatever freedom they may have for this sense of safety and comfort, which these commodities and objects are commercially advertised to provide.

Notes: From my interpretation of this short story: It is by material circumstance, that a person’s desires and goals are shaped accordingly; objects are no longer bought solely for functionality or use-value; this is what Marx calls “commodity fetishism” by which objects are socially endowed with mystical or transformative qualities dependent on its surplus or sign value. This brings us to the question of what properties of an object determine its sign value or market exchange rate or is it not really a matter of its physical makeup and concerns more with what is socially ascribed to the said object.