Critical Essay of The Diamond Necklace by Guy Maupassant
The story “The Diamond Necklace” by Guy Maupassant has been used as an encouraging approach to understand literature through the lense of a Marxist critic because of the constant references to class and struggles that are introduced because of our places in society that we are born into or progress into. ... I decided to approach the text from a feminist and psychological standpoint, in order to show that both of these forms of criticism can be very insightful and interesting when reading “The Diamond Necklace.” I would first like to begin from a psychological standpoint on reading “The Diamond Necklace. ... Loisel is able to go to a grand upper-class function and borrows a necklace from her friend Jeanne. ... Loisel loses the necklace and spends years paying off the loans she had to take to replace the necklace (bringing her husband and herself to financial ruin) only to find that the necklace is worthless at the end of the story. ... Later in the story, she suffers because of the loss of the necklace and the torment of having to give up what luxuries she did have in order to pay back her debt. At the end of the story, when she realizes the necklace is fake, and all her turmoil was in vain, she surely will suffer even more. In viewing “The Diamond Necklace” through a psychological lense, we can learn a lot about the human mind and how it is affected by outside influences such as money, class, and stress. ... In “The Diamond Necklace” Mme. Loisel’s superego is what causes her to do what she and her husband feel is the honorable thing; make up for the lost necklace. ... We see throughout the entire story that her ego has difficulty taming her id, and even when the superego takes over in order to do the right thing to replace Jeanne’s lost necklace, she still is not honest about what really happened (which results in a very ironic twist). ... Loisel’s shadow (Jung’s term used to describe the dark part of ourselves we tend to keep hidden) when she approaches her friend Jeanne years after the loss of the necklace and tells her the truth about what happened and what she had to sacrifice to replace it. ... The second approach I would like to briefly explore is the feminist perspective in “The Diamond Necklace. ... For instance, when the necklace is lost, her husband leaves to search for the lost jewelry as she “not having the strength to go to bed, stretched upon a chair, without ambition or thoughts” (246).