The Story of An Hour & The Necklace
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Mathilde Loisel in Guy de Maupassant's story "The Necklace" and Louise Mallard in Kate Chopin's story "The Story of An Hour" are women who lead their lives according to what others want or expect of them. Mathilde is controlled by her belief that others judge her by her wealth and her possessions. She certainly judges herself by such material and superficial criteria, and her efforts to appear to be what she is not costs her and her husband dearly and unnecessarily. Mathilde believes that her physical beauty indicates that she was "born for all the delicacies and all the luxuries" (Maupassant) which the rich enjoy in life. Ironically, her longing to have the good things in life drives her deep into poverty and menial labor. Louise is, simply, controlled by her husband. Ironically, what kills her is the return of her husband "from the dead" after an hour of freedom in which she luxuriated after hearing a false report of her husband's death. The fates of both characters are rich with irony. Mathilde borrows jewelry from a rich friend to go to a ball. Her friend lets her pick out whatever she wants; Mathilde picks out a cheap imitation diamond necklace. Perhaps Maupassant suggests here that Mathilde's false self made her incapable of selecting anything but false jewelry. In any case, she loses what she believes to be a diamond necklace, and she and her husband go into great debt to pay for the genuine diamond necklace with which they replace the false. They must work for ten
. . .
ee!" (Chopin 1-2).
Louise does not report the precise reason or reasons she feels such liberation only moments after being informed that her husband has met a sudden and violent death. This lack gives the reader a sense of unreality about the character. Chopin writes that Louise "had loved him--sometimes," although "often she had not." She adds, "What did it matter!" (Chopin 2). The feminist philosophy of the author intrudes here to such a degree that Louise becomes a cardboard character spouting ideology at a most unlikely moment: "There would be no powerful will bending hers n that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature" (Chopin 2). Nevertheless, those lines appear to express the general explanation for Louise's sense of liberation. Any man, any husband, Chopin seems to be using Louise to say, even one who is not particularly abusive, exerts his will to control a woman and wife. Whatever love Louise might have felt for Brently pales beside this newly-found freedom: "What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!" (Chopin 2).
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1670
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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