Guy de Maupassant's short story "The Necklace" is about a woman who wants the better things in life for herself and pays a big price in getting them, if only for a night.
Mathilde Loisel is an attractive woman who does not have any of the "good things" in life she believes that she should have. She feels cheated by life. She is not happy living a plain life, and believes that she would be happy if only she could live her life as a fancy woman. The story is about the chance that she gets to do so, although she lives that fancy life only for a single day, and it costs her and her husband dearly.
Mathilde is from "a family of clerks" and she "had no dowry, no expectations, no means of being known, understood, loved, wedded by any rich and distinguished man; and she let herself be married to a little clerk at the Ministry of Public Instruction" (1131). In other words, she does not love her husband, but marries him only because she believes she can do no better than him.
Maupassant stresses the fact that Mathilde believes her "proper station" should have been much higher in life. Instead, she is a "woman of the people." She thinks that she belongs among "the very greatest ladies" and if only she had the external, material signs of success and class, she would be happy and would be where she belongs.
Mathilde is not a woman who once in a while wishes that she had more in life. To the contrary, she
suffered ceaselessly, feeling herself born for all the delicacies and all the luxuries. She suffered from the poverty of her dwelling, from the wretched look of the walls, from the worn-out chairs, from the ugliness of the curtains. All those things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have been conscious, tortured her and made her angry (1132).
She dreams without end about the fine things in life and how she would be happy if only she was rich and lived among other rich people. She hates her class and her life an...