The short story, The Necklace, is the story of an average woman who is very unsatisfied with her life and goes to extreme lengths to become like the rest of people around her, surrounding herself with amazing jewels. In the end when it turns out that the “beautiful, amazing, expensive” necklace was a fake, the reader is able to see how the theme of beauty is very negative.
This story is the perfect example of the theme "beauty". The woman needs to look hold the standards of society and fit in, so she has to dress with things that she can not afford herself and and in this case doesn’t own. The societal expectations that she felt, forced her to do something that she did not have too. She is seen as greedy, disrespectful, and disconnected. She comes off as if nothing is ever good enough for her. She finally got the invite to go to the party, but she needs an amazing dress. Then the dress is not enough, she needs a beautiful necklace to go along with it. Beauty is usually thought of as “high class” or a “privilege”. In this story, beauty comes off as "evil". It is something that she strives for so hard. Something that she has to work rigorously the rest of her life, and in the end it never really existed. This necklace symbolizes a sense of “false beauty”. "Oh, my poor Mathilde! But mine was imitation. It was worth at the very most five hundred francs! . . . " In this last sentence of the story, Madame Forestier reveals that the necklace was fake and that is was not worth even half of what she thought the cost was. If Madame Loisel had known that the necklace was indeed not real, she would not have taken it to borrow from her. All Madame Loisel wanted in the first place was real jewels to fit in with everyone else, for this false perception of beauty. With Madame Forestier having this fake necklace, this brings up the point that this idea of “beauty” that Madame Loisel has in her mind, is triggered by lies from other people also. No one knows that the necklace is a fake, so other people who have just as spectacular necklaces could be fake also. Everyone looks at the necklace as if it were real, but in reality it is just something else in her life that is not. For one single night of beauty that she wanted, the dress and necklace at the party, she lost her own beauty in the process of it all. She became old and tired as she worked for years to pay back the expensive debt of the necklace, that was a fake. This story is one of the many from the "beauty" unit, that perfect portray how beauty is seen societally and personally.
