i'm going to talk through the necklace by guiding my passant this is in preparation for your edexcel igcse english language exam paper 2. um as i've done for another short story i shan't be reading through the whole thing line by line so please make sure you read through the short story at least twice and you give yourself some time to write down your own interpretations before you listen to mine i'm only going to talk about the most important sections of this short story that i think provide you with some good material to walk into an exam with as always it's only my opinion so of course you can always disagree with it so looking at the title the necklace the focus of the title is about an object and i would say um this focus represents or mirrors matild's obsession with material wealth um moreover thinking about a necklace you might argue that that one's jewelry can be a good indication of one's wealth and what we will learn later on is that's not quite the case for matild um but that's certainly the way she sees the necklace in um this story that it gives her um the ability to um create an image of of herself as someone much wealthier than she actually is so looking at the first two paragraphs i would say there are two things that we take from these the first one i'm going to focus on is the fact that we learn of matild's social class so it's immediately established that she is of a lower social position because we learned that she is the daughter of very minor civil servants um the intensifier of very stresses just how low her social position is the capitalization of fate here really emphasizes the lack of control one had at this time over their social class matild hasn't chosen to be born to these minor civil servants she hasn't been able to choose what social class they belong to so i would argue that's the reason why fate is capitalized um and because of her social position she has no dowry no expectations no means of meeting some rich important man so the triplets here enforce a sense of hopelessness um that one would have of her social ranking and the negative language no no no um just creates this sense that she has no options and she is incredibly restricted by um her social position and so what does she do she ends up marrying a junior clerk and that would be someone who's really of lower middle class and so what i would argue here other than the um techniques i've already mentioned you'll want to mention the fact that this is immediately established because that's showing your understanding of structure and the fact that um more passant has decided to mention this or for it to be one of the first things that's mentioned about mathilde tells us that the society she has been born into finds that important about her so your social position is was incredibly important at this time this being um late 1800s france what else do we learn we learned that beauty is a woman's currency so the other thing um in these first two paragraphs is we learn what she looks like the first adjective to describe her is pretty um and then later we learned that actually women have no class their beauty grace and charm do service for birthright and connections so actually unlike a man who can earn money during this time and climb up the social ladder a woman didn't have um that type of social mobility and so the only way they could improve their position in society was through their beauty and in hope that they would be beautiful enough to attract the attention of a rich man and marry him um but have a look at the the triplets here beauty grace and charm these are really quite um attributes that aren't really very deep and meaningful are they they're surface attributes um they don't really represent what's um within someone so even being graceful and charming you might argue is something that you can just put on um for it for an evening to be nice to people it doesn't necessarily represent the person that you are inside so what do we learn we learn that matild has this great sense of entitlement and i would go as far to say that she has delusions of grandeur she feels too good for the life that she has despite having been born of a low social class so she felt that she was intended for a life of refinement and luxury and really those nouns refinement and luxury focus again on material things she does there's no talk here about um desiring a life a fulfilling life of love for instance which we learn she has because she has a really loving husband and when she looks at her apartment how is it described it is run down it's peeling it's battered it's ugly and for her it is torture and it makes her very angry um so yes okay these adjectives do imply poverty um but the the way it affects her the fact that it's torturous and it makes her angry already suggests to us that she's quite melodramatic and i think what's really important here is that we have a peasant girl so she has a maid um who's a peasant girl and she's a she's an important reminder that mathilde isn't as poor as she seems to think she is there are people in this society that are much much worse off than her but because she is so self-obsessed so self-absorbed she it is impossible for her to look around and gain perspective and realize that she's lucky and look and realize the things around her that she should be grateful for one of them being her husband so i think having the presence of this peasant girl is really important it's a good reminder that um there are people worse off and we're going to find her in a very similar position you might argue um to this peasant girl in the end so it's also quite ironic that she should refer to her as a spectacle and then what do we notice she seems to daydream a lot about the life that she would love to have and so we've got this kind of repetition of she dreamed off um so the fact that she does dream of these wonderful things makes a desire seem fanciful and really kind of over the top the alliteration as well throughout this day room really represents her excitement of thinking about these things but also the importance that she awards to material objects again nowhere here does she really talk about um finding love she talks about um oh where is it here and just made for intimate talk at five in the afternoon with one's closest friends who would be the most famous and sought-after men of the day whose attentions were much more and so on so you know she okay she daydreams about men but not a man that loves her just to be around people who are the most famous and sought after so there's almost something quite competitive about her but she's absolutely totally superficial and the listing here highlights that there's nothing of substance in this list um have a look then at her husband and the dialogue used for him so she's there um serving him stew ah stew splendid there's nothing i like better than a nice stew so the husband you might argue is the anti antithesis of matild and um [Music] you could even zoom in a bit further and say kind of the exclamations here show his excitement and how grateful he is um and you know he likes the simple things he's he's that excited over a nice stew and that contrast doesn't it to this long list of elaborate things that she wishes for but this also i think encourages a great dislike for matild amongst the readers we've got this wonderful husband who is encouraging who is loving and she just seems so unbelievably ungrateful so i think it's important again that he is so lovely and again it he's important for perspective as well he doesn't take for granted the things that he has in his life unlike her and you might also focus on and the adjectives mythical and enchanted because she really is her dreams her desires are really far off and they're they're extremely unlikely she's not just wishing for a bit of a better life um they're just totally unrealistic and of course we're going to learn that um you know she should have been happy with what she had um and then we come to she had no fine dresses no jewelry nothing so we've got stress the triplets here stress a lack of material wealth it's really important that comes just after um hearing how wonderful her husband is um because this nothing is clearly a hyperbole and it indicates how melodramatic she is but it's also offensive she's got a loving husband she has a girl that they can afford to do some household chores um she's got a roof over her head she's got food to eat she doesn't have nothing and it just highlights how ungrateful she is for the things that she has and again to support this idea that she has delusions of grandeur she felt that god had made her for such things and so there's just this sense of entitlement that she is much better than than what um she has and again to support this idea that she's melodramatic we have this listing of you might say a semantic field of grief sorrow regret despair anguish so you can just imagine um how melodramatic this woman is and again all of this just encourages us to really dislike her um supporting this idea that the husband is loving is um when he presents this invitation um so he looks highly pleased with himself um he mentions how difficult it was to get hold of an invite so it's something he's really tried hard to do knowing it would mean a huge thing for his wife um the words die in his throat so even he's trying to help and there's almost a sense that he's getting nervous because his wife is um is unhappy still and he's totally disconcerted and dis dismayed by the fact that his wife is crying so we're really encouraged to like and pity the husband who seems so loving and attentive in great contrast to his wife who is incredibly selfish and ungrateful and again this just further encourages the reader to dislike mathilde and to support that have a look at the way she treats him look at the verbs and adverbs used she tossed the invitation she p uh peevishly onto the the table and muttered um so there's something quite bratish and spoiled about her she looks at him irritably she speaks to him shortly and then she says it nothing it's just that i haven't got anything to wear and consequently i shall be going to any reception give the invite to one of your colleagues with a wife who's better off for clothes than i am so first of all um we know we learn that she's superficial okay she doesn't want to go to the party because she doesn't feel like she has nice enough clothes so we learned that her appearance is much more important than her experience and again this comes back to this idea of um [Music] of having a certain image but not necessarily having the substance behind it but i would say also she's really manipulative because this is actually a dig at her husband give the invite to one of your colleagues with a wife who is better off for clothes than i am i read that as a dig at her husband because being a woman in that time it would be the man who would have to buy his wife nice clothes and so on she wouldn't have the money to do it herself so i really think this is her being really quite cruel um to her husband and we and it worked he was devastated the short sentence really gives brings our attention to to the fact that he is devastated and it makes it makes us realize how deflated he is he was so excited to give that invite um and now he's just completely broken by what she said and incredibly disappointed with how um she has responded look how calculating she is so he asks how much do you think you would you would need and she's working out her sums but also wondering how much she could decently ask for without drawing an immediate refusal so she's not just simply answering the question of how much a dress would be she's really trying to figure out in her mind how she could get the most out of him and she asked for 400 francs and he just so happens to have exactly that amount of money which he was supposed to use for a hunting trip is that a coincidence or does she know about that money so maybe she could have got something for 200 but she's decided to say 400 because she knows it's available and look at his selflessness this means he is going to give up his hunting trip so his wife can have a nice dress i'll give you your 400 francs so again his selflessness contrasts to how self-centered matilda's and it just encourages us even more to dislike her and to pity him um but despite that she still is unhappy so she appears sad worried anxious the that should say a synthetic um there i don't know why um that must have been autocorrect that's one word um so this her grief i would argue the asyndetic listing suggests that her grief is endless she's never going to be happy and you might even link that to a wider message she's never going to be happy because she's looking for happiness in the wrong places in the material wealth that she doesn't have um but you know it just really shows that she's incredibly spoiled there's nothing that's going to make her happy and again supporting this melodrama i'll look like a church man so this poor husband's given up 400 francs and it's still not enough apparently she'll look like a church mouse um look how practical the husband is okay he suggests wearing a prose a posie sorry um and that contrast of the diamond necklace which highlights how different the husband and wife are in this in this short story um he's much more practical where she wants a diamond necklace um and then looking at the dialogue here there's nothing so humiliating as to look poor so she's preoccupied with appearances this is quite ironic as well you could link this to later because she's talking about looking poor remember she is obsessed with perception with her image she doesn't really care so much about the substance behind it she wants to wear a really fancy dress that they can't really afford because she cares so much about looking rich and again here there's nothing so humiliating as to look poor this is ironic because she's going to become poor so she thinks this is humiliating wait until the end when she's haggling and she's scrubbing the floors and whatever else and then she goes to her friends you could mention i haven't highlighted this but you know earlier on it did mention that she um lost contact with her friend because she couldn't handle being around someone who was richer than her it made her really upset so again here comes this woman who's totally self-absorbed who can't even hold on to a friendship because of her jealousy and rather she doesn't even value something as important as a friendship because she doesn't want to be reminded of how poor she is um but it's interesting that she soon gets over that and suddenly comes kind of back asking if she can borrow something so again she's quite manipulative she uses people so look at the semantic field of wealth that really represents her friend we've got pearls gold diamonds of course this is irony as well because we later find out that the necklace at least the one that she picks out is an imitation maybe all of these are as well um but even despite this this list here of these wonderful things um mathilde says have you got anything else and that just really highlights how spoiled she is she has this insatiable desire nothing's ever going to be enough for her um and then the irony she finds this magnificent diamond necklace we later find out it's an imitation and this really um encourages us to think about um the way we view others and how on the surface we may think we have an idea of of one's life of their wealth of their happiness but really we have no idea what's really happening at home or within themselves um and then look at the dramatic change in her demeanor okay it reveals how fickle she is she throws her arms around a friend she kisses her extravagantly she runs home she takes her treasure that's ironic as well you could highlight that for irony um this just angers me she's just been so upset over absolutely nothing and a diamond necklace which actually is fake makes her this happy this highlights just how materialistic and vain she is so i think it's important to note when we learn of this evening they are really two um just two paragraphs in this whole short story and so what we should learn from that is even though these two paragraphs she seems extremely happy um i think it stresses how fleeting one's happiness will be when it relies on superficial means so if you look if you seek happiness in material wealth then your happiness will not last very long and we certainly see this with mathilde so she's described as a success but why is she a success because she was the prettiest woman there so again we have this idea that uh beauty equates to happiness or beauty equates to success you could link that to the society of paris that she has kind of grown up in that's what um it was believed um a woman should be to be successful she needs to be beautiful and she's wonderfully happy i would say this is irony it calls into question is she really happy does this last she's been miserable all the way up to this point and she's going to be miserable all the way to the end after this moment is that true happiness it's gone so quickly it relies on material wealth um i would argue she's not truly happy but she seemed it or she felt some kind of buzz for a moment but i would question if this is true happiness um look at the short sentence here as well which gives importance to the minister remember she wants she wants uh the attention of important men um so that has stuck out in her mind and then looks look at the addiction here which implies that she's really having this kind of euphoric moment um ecstatically wildly intoxicated victorious beauty glorious success floating on a cloud of happiness so it's also quite uh hyperbolic as well um so it gives an idea of this sense of excitement and sheer joy that she is experiencing but so important to bring it back to this idea that this is short-lived and it all relies on really a lie she's wearing a dress she can't really afford and she's borrowed a necklace that she thinks is real but is actually an imitation so then when she um is ready to leave the adjectives here contrast with the previous descriptions we've got all this excitement through this diction here okay and then suddenly we've just got modest everyday commonplace so she's brought right back down to earth and and very quickly reminded of the world she really does belong to um look at how she um treats her husband again she refused to listen to him when he said stay inside so she's really quite dismissive this is important because later she's going to really hang on to his every word when she needs support from him on um on what to do next and when they when they walk outside they're shivering with cold that pathetic fallacy really mirrors the way she feels she's incredibly deflated um she starts to describe the the taxi or the cab nocturnal hackney calves which only emerge in paris after dusk as if a shame to parade their poverty in the full light of day so it's almost um it really mirrors the way she feels doesn't it she's ashamed to parade her poverty um and then look at the street they live on i'm sure i'm going to butcher this i'm definitely not a french speaker but it translates to martyr street rue de marte i think but i could definitely be wrong in in translation there um sorry i'm pronouncing that um this is foreshadowing so she lives on martyr street this foreshadows the life they both will have to sacrifice you could go further and say it's actually a husband who really sacrifices rather than her but she certainly gives up the life that she knew um to pay back for the necklace she's about to lose um for her it was all over while he was thinking that he would have to be at the ministry at 10. so i think this is a really important sentence and i'm going to spend a little bit of time here talking about a different way of viewing mathilde um so for her it's all over that's a limited moment of happiness for her now you could say this is because she has placed so much importance on superficial things like having a nice dress and wearing a fancy necklace and while he has work to think of but i think this might also represent the limit limited moments of happiness for women in general of this time women were confined to the house they had very little control of their own lives um it was the men who could go out to work and take some control um over their their life or their quality of life um and it you could argue this encourages you to start seeing matild as a victim of the times so yes she does seem very superficial but could it be argued that she has been born into a society that has an obsession with material wealth that has a social rank i mean that's the first two things we learned about her that she's that she was beautiful um and that she was of a lower class so isn't it inevitable that she would end up obsessing over material things and feeling like what she had wasn't enough so is she actually a victim and that would certainly be an original interpretation we definitely get the sense that we that um more passion doesn't want us to like her but we could see it from from a different lens so maybe you could offer that as an alternative opinion and then she loses the necklace the exclamation reflects complete shock um the ellipses and fragments show the disbelief she cannot believe what she has done you could go further there's kind of shorter sentences here which help build suspense as well so you if you had a question that focus on feelings and experience you could talk about this moment of panic um have a look at the way they both handle this situation her mind is blank she stays at home um whereas her husband is much more proactive he went he called at he advertised he tried she waited so there's a real contrast he's proactive she's passive you could argue society has made them that way the woman was encouraged to be passive um so again is she a victim or you could look at it in the other way and just say the poor husband's doing all the work and it was her fault um but notice now a difference with the way that she uh views her husband she wrote to his dictation she's now following his lead he's giving her ideas of how they can handle this and she's following it previously she was incredibly dismissive of him and i would argue from this point you start to see a change in their relationship notice the pronouns they they they they so there's an indication here of unity they come together to pay off this debt and to very quickly replace um the necklace without um it being detected by her friend it's important that we learn that actually the husband has 18 000 francs again important for perspective they were not as poor as matild felt she was and then what happens we have this semantic field of debt borrowed exorbitant rates of interest money lenders mortgaged and it's just this long list which mirrors this relentless grind which is really the nature of being a debt you're constantly every month trying to pay it off interest right interest gets added and you feel like you've taken two steps forward one step back and you definitely get this sense of rel a relentless grind to pay off this huge debt um poverty is described as ready to pounce so we've got this personification as if they were attacked by poverty their lives have really been attacked and destroyed by this debt and then she starts also this horrible life of the very poor so the um intensifier here grindingly but also here as well very um is important because we it emphasizes her her her living conditions and this you might argue is um is ironic because she thought she was poor before now she is very poor and hopefully is starting to look back and realize what she had we certainly looked back and realized she had much more than she realized she was determined to pay they dismissed the maid they moved out of their apartment and rented an attic these short sentences show that she is resolute so there's a strength in her now she realizes she's got to put her head down and get on with it and she's described as doing all of this heroically so you might argue at this point we're starting to see a bit of character development for matild she's not that sport brat anymore she's got a little bit um something to her um and then this paragraph here um reveals all the terrible things that she has to do so she has to do heavy domestic work ghastly kitchen chores she wears down her pink nails washes dirty sheets and so on okay so this kind of long um description of all the horrible things that she has to do and this really contrasts to her dreams but also that evening as well okay where everyone was talking about her and noticing her now she's frequently abused um so she's not the kind of princess of the night anymore and again that just kind of um highlights how short-lived that happiness was for her the temporal marker here each month again supports um this feeling of how relentless poverty is it's just inescapable for them it just keeps every month it's the same thing but eventually they do pay off their debt but it took 10 years so this was again linking to the street that they lived on martyr street this was a huge sacrifice really they sacrificed 10 years of their life just to pay off this necklace and she looks old now so we know the physical toll of poverty and this is really um knowing that she is so superficial and she cares about the way she looks this has got to be really hard for mathilde and she's described as a battling hard uncouth housewife um she's untidy her skirts are skew her hands are red she's got a gruff voice so the this description completely contrasts with that glamorous evening with a beautiful dress and that being the prettiest woman in the room but she's still daydreams um she would sit by the window and think of that evening long ago when she had been so beautiful and so admired but what's interesting here is previously we would see long uh paragraphs listing all the wonderful things that she would imagine um but now it's it's it's just one not even one whole sentence so she doesn't get time to daydream but it does suggest that maybe she hasn't learned her lesson she still looks back at the time that one evening when she was so beautiful and admired she realized that she needs to still look around her and realize she's got a really supportive husband for instance that's one way of looking at it and then look at this short paragraph here when she starts questioning why what might not have happened had she not lost the necklace who could tell who could possibly tell life is so strange so fickle how little is needed to make or break us so the questions show that she's been quite reflective she's been regretful so that shows character development she's starting to think about her actions in the past the exclamation um really show her realization of how quickly you can lose things okay she lost the life that she had and maybe she shouldn't have taken for granted and then finally it's all revealed so she um sees her old friend and this shows growth because she tells her the truth she would tell her everything and she says well i lost it this great character development she's chosen honesty she should have chosen honesty at the beginning unfortunately it's taking taken her ten years um notice the way her friend responds to her she stammered but i'm sorry i don't know there's some mistake the ellipses reflect a fear of the poor and again come back to this idea that matilda has been born into a society where the poor are looked down upon the poor are feared of course she would want to to climb that social ladder of course she would daydream about having more that is one way of arguing it um and she says to her friend we had nothing and again that's this irony there because if you recall earlier on she said she had nothing and now she's starting to realize she had no idea what nothing really was um and look at this finally she's described as proud so she's gained pride from something of substance hard work before she'd be proud of herself for looking good um and so there is an element here there's got to be some hint here that she has improved as a person um and she's got much more substance now than she did before and then of course the plot twist um that the necklace is an imitation necklace really stresses the importance of honesty so i would say there's two big ques big messages here i think one is about being honest um the second i personally i take the second message um for me um is more effective and i think it's about taking not taking for granted the life that you have having perspective looking at those around you realizing what you have and also realizing what you have in contrast to others and and not seeking happiness in superficial ways such as a necklace and as always please share your opinions um in the comments section i do always read through them and share them with my my class and that's it