The Jewelry

3 Pages 649 Words

Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Jewelry” is a critical look at the nineteenth century French bourgeois’ lust for wealth. Maupassant was born in France near the city of Dieppe and lived from 1850-1893. This time frame is critical because “Maupassant took the subjects for his pessimistic stories and novels chiefly from the Norman peasant life, the Franco-Prussian War, the behavior of the bourgeoisie, and the fashionable life of Paris.” (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/maupassa.htm, 1st paragraph) He was also known for writing about things that had occurred to him, and just fantasized them. In the story “The Jewelry” the main character M. Lantin is a civil servant working under the Minister of the interior. Maupassant held two very similar functions just before the time he wrote this story. “Between the years 1872 and 1880 Maupassant was a civil servant, first at the ministry of maritime affairs, then at the ministry of education.” (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/maupassa.htm, 5th paragraph) The role of the bourgeois is very important in this story because M. Lantin falls into this social class. “Bourgeoisie, in socioeconomic theory, the social order that is dominated by the so-called middle class.” (Encyclopedia Britannica, Book #2 page 428) Because of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, “the medieval craftsman began to separate into two classes – the employers and the employees – and the growth of a new kind of class consciousness tended to restrict the idea of bourgeois to the employers. Thus arose a system of economic and social classification that emphasized the distinction between bourgeoisie (or capitalists) and proletariat (nobles).”(Encyclopedia Britannica, Book #2 page 428-429) Since the bourgeois of de Maupassant’s time was a capitalist, he was always lusting for wealth. The whole capitalist idea is geared towards profits, to be used as capital to make more profits. The word itself ...