Greed In Guy De Maupassant's The Necklace

“Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the people in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction”- Erich Fromm. In the short story , “The Necklace”, Guy de Maupassant uses one article to symbolize the thoughts or actions of one character and explains how she interprets her life at the beginning and end of the story. Throughout the story, a woman named Madame Loisel is sad about her life as a lower classmen and she thinks better of herself because of her beauty as well as believing that she deserves to live in the luxurious upper class. However, her plans fail once she borrows her friends necklace and loses it making both her and her husband miserable. The necklace symbolizes Madame Loisel as dreaming in the beginning and the realization of reality at the end. The necklace represents Madame Loisel as dreaming because she believes the necklace changed her life in the matter of a day. At the beginning of the story, she is invited to a ball filled with many upper class people. Her friend lends her a beautiful necklace to wear to the occasion that she felt changed her and made her more desirable …show more content…
Near the end of the story the necklace seems to symbolize the reality of her life. Once losing the necklace they search until it is truly nowhere to be found, in which they have to buy a new one for Madame (her friend). Both her and her husband have to work and stress from debts and the struggle of their worse life now. She stressed so much it aged her making her unrecognizable and like every other poor women. She tried to blame her friend for the pain she’s been through by saying, “Yes, I’ve had some hard times since I saw you last; and many sorrows...and all on your account”(5). However I think it taught her how she had a pretty good life before and that she should’ve been happy with what she

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