After beginning the story “The Necklace” you learn about Mathilde and her ungrateful and unaspiring nature as she attempts to navigate life as a woman in the middle class in the 19th century. She constantly expresses her disdain for her current situation and birrates her husband about not having more without ever providing a plan to improve their lives. So I was surprised by the end of the story when Mathilde pulls herself up by the bootstraps and works 10 hard years to pay off a necklace she needed to replace after borrowing it and losing it at a party.
What intrigued me can be found in the same story. After Mathilde’s debts were paid she ran into her childhood friend who she had borrowed the necklace from. After keeping a secret from a friend for years, she grabbed her attention without hesitation, letting Jeanne know she was and what happened to her necklace. This interested me because before this Mathilde was self conscious and insecure about her appearance because she didn’t look wealthy, but in that moment she didn’t care that Jeanne couldn’t recognize her at first due to the physical wear of working hard for 10 years straight. All she cared about was letting an old friend know the truth. You can almost say she felt proud, as if she was humbled by the experience.
After reading the poem “The Wife” by Emily Dickinson, the first stanza confuses me. It reads:
She rose to his requirement, dropped
The playthings of her life
To take the honorable work
Of woman and of wife.
I don’t understand the almost militarized approach to 19th century domestic roles. Why do “playthings” of one’s life need to be dropped? Does a Man have the same responsibilities to sacrifice things they consider fun in order to fulfill their role as a husband? This mentality and the way people collectively choose to blindly agree and follow the status quo leaves me puzzled.
One thought on “Toribio Mendez Discussion 9”
Toribio, these are all good questions you ask at the end. I think the lines infer that a female person is not truly an adult until she becomes a wife. There is the suggestion that everything a woman does before marriage is frivolous and unimportant—just a childish game. A woman is not really a woman until she is married to a man.