Teaching Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace"

In Mammonart Upton Sinclair memorably interprets Guy de Maupassant as an Emile Zola "without social vision and revolutionary hope." As a result what one ends up with is a technically brilliant "master of the short story, better able than anyone else" to "pack . . . meaning into a brief episode, to give you the whole life and import of a character in a couple of thousand words" . . . but absolutely nothing else, teaching the student of writing nothing but "the tricks of the trade." This had much to do with Maupassant being "one of the fighting art-for-art's-sakers, to whom the idea of morality in an art-work is an insult."

A very plausible interpretation indeed, I think, which has made me reflect on my experience using the story in the classroom. This was in the more advanced composition class at the college I taught at, which had a greater accent than the starter course on textual analysis, and used to that end a literary component as preparation for a general education course on literature the students had to take later.

The students almost invariably insisted that the story was a little homily about "Being grateful for what you have"--in that had Mathilde Loisel not borrowed what she thought was a diamond necklace to wear at the ball in the hopes of "not appearing poor in front of rich women," she would not have lost what little comfort she had in her life as she (and her husband) sacrificed all to replace what they mistakenly thought an exceedingly expensive piece of jewelry.

I do not deny that it is possible to read the story that way--especially if one is still callow enough to expect stories to all be centered on presenting a single, tidy, utterly conservative and conventional moral; if they think that "There is no such thing as society"; if they know nothing about French realism or naturalism, or Guy de Maupassant, and how cold-eyed this literary current can be as it presents characters in the grip of larger forces; as indeed they did not.

But what about when someone tries to explain to you all these things? Explain that literature, and life, can be more complicated than that, as this story is? After all, the reason to pick this story over many of the alternatives in the limited selection of the anthology was that, besides being brief and accessible (it was a composition class, after all, and one could give only so much time to the literary element), it seemed to me to offer a lot to talk about, and write about, when it was time to display the compositional skills the class taught by turning in a written essay. We had de Maupassant's sense of what a fragile, tenuous, thing life can be. ("How life is strange and changeful! How little a thing is needed for us to be lost or to be saved!" the narrator remarks at one point.) We had here some hard realities of class, and class mobility; we had the celebration and glamorization of wealth and the illusions and deceptions that go with that; we had the anxieties and aspirations of the marginally middle class--all things that seemed to me to very "relatable" today. We had what it meant to be in debt in this earlier era, and how different that was from the present. And so on and so forth.

However, they brushed all this aside as they insisted on the simple, "moralistic" reading that would have appalled Maupassant.

It does not seem to me incidental that this let them moralize sanctimoniously about Mathilde's conduct--her being ungrateful for what she had, her "not knowing her place" and wanting more than life had given her.

How sanctimonious was evident at grading time. Far from being "grateful for what they have" and "knowing their place" they constantly showed themselves ungrateful as they came to demand of their instructor (usually in the most disrespectful manner) that anything they got that was less than an "A" be changed an "A" in the apparent belief that I was singlehandedly keeping them from their destiny to be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company by giving them anything less than that "A."

Alas, the fictional portraits of the teaching profession rarely present those scenes--and how far from rewarding they are for practitioners of a profession whose members society at large expects to do the job out of convenient social virtue.