- All's Well That Ends Well
- Antony and Cleopatra
- As You Like It
- The Comedy of Errors
- Coriolanus
- Cymbeline
- Hamlet
- Henry IV, Part 1
- Henry IV, Part 2
- Henry V
- Henry VI, Part 1
- Henry VI, Part 2
- Henry VI, Part 3
- Henry VIII
- Julius Caesar
- King John
- King Lear
- Love's Labor's Lost
- A Lover's Complaint
- Macbeth
- Measure for Measure
- The Merchant of Venice
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Othello
- Pericles
- The Rape of Lucrece
- Richard II
- Richard III
- Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare's Sonnets
- The Taming of the Shrew
- The Tempest
- Timon of Athens
- Titus Andronicus
- Troilus and Cressida
- Twelfth Night
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
- Venus and Adonis
- The Winter's Tale
Mathilde is disappointed in her life because she interprets her beauty as a sign that she was born “for all delicacies and all luxuries.” The fact that Mathilde grieves over the dinginess and shabbiness of the apartment shows that her dissatisfaction is essentially directed at the things around her. For Mathilde, material possessions and happiness are inextricably linked.
The fact that another woman of her class would not have noticed the things that make Mathilde so unhappy has two meanings. On the one hand, it could be that Mathilde’s extraordinary beauty clashes with her ordinary surroundings; a plainer woman might…