De Maupassant evokes, in specific and highly visual language, the life that Mathilde dreams of having at the beginning of “The Necklace.” This description reveals the depth of Mathilde’s obsession with wealth: the high specificity of the fantasy speaks to the time and energy Mathilde has exerted in dreaming it up.
She fantasized about hushed antechambers with Oriental hangings, illuminated by high bronze torchères, and with a pair of tall footmen wearing knee breeches and napping in spacious easy chairs because of the air made heavy by the heater. She fantasized about large drawing rooms lined with ancient silk, about fine furniture carrying priceless knickknacks, about small, fragrant, dainty parlors meant for five o’clock chats with the most intimate friends[.]
However, the level of visual detail also speaks to Mathilde’s lack of real world experience with wealth and the lifestyle it engenders. This description relies almost exclusively on visual imagery, not invoking any specific auditory, tactile, or olfactory sensations. She does note that the house of her dreams is “hushed,” but quiet is not exclusive to wealthy households; she dreams of warm, fragrant rooms, but these details do not carry the same degree of specificity as the visual imagery here does. Mathilde’s understanding of wealth remains fixated on the absolute surface level of the experience, on how it looks, a trend which continues throughout the narrative.
In contrast, the second half of “The Necklace” doesn’t contain detailed images of Mathilde’s daydreams, but instead offers striking imagery of domestic labor and its effect on her body. As Mathilde and her husband endure long hours of hard labor to pay back their debts, Mathilde slowly lets go of her self-pitying fantasies and accepts her new and difficult reality:
She washed the dishes, wearing down her rosy nails on greasy pots and the bottoms of pans.
[...]
Her hair ill kempt, her skirts awry, and her hands red, she spoke loudly and she washed the floors with big buckets of water.
The third-person narration mirrors this shift, and begins to depict the loss of Mathilde’s physical beauty. Her “rosy nails” have been ruined with scrubbing, her clothes have fallen into disarray, her hair and skin are ill-cared for. The visual cues of Mathilde’s relative privilege as a middle-class housewife have disappeared, suggesting physical beauty and wealth go hand in hand in this story. Consider how this is echoed in Madame Forestier’s appearance at the end of the story, which the conditions of her life have preserved so well that she looks no different than she does at the beginning, despite the passage of a decade. In this way, the imagery at the end of “The Necklace” doesn’t just reflect a change in Mathilde’s perspective and way of life, it also disproves finally the common wisdom expressed at the story’s beginning, that a woman’s beauty and charm “serve [her] in lieu of birth and family background."
