l, in the triumph of her beauty. In the glory of her success, in a sort of cloud happiness composed of all this homage, of all this admiration, of all these awakened desires, and of that sense of complete victory which is so sweet to a woman’s heart. (Guy De Maupassant 163) Flynn 3Her husband sleeps for four hours waiting for her to be ready to stop socializing. She is so ashamed of her coat that she rushes outside even though her husband wants to call a cab for her. She is very upset when the night is over, especially when she finds out that the borrowed necklace is missing.Mathilde has no inner strength. Her poor husband goes out in the middle of the night to look for the necklace, but she is worthless: “She sat waiting on a chair in her ball dress without strength to got to bed, overwhelmed, without fire, without a thought.” (Guy De Maupassant 164) Ironically, when Mathilde and her husband replace the lost necklace, and must pay back the debt for ten years, Mathilde changes. She becomes brave and hard working, and the author says: “What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? How life is strange and changeful! How little a thing is needed for us to be lost or to be saved.”(Guy De Maupassant 166) John Updike’s story, “A&P” was written almost 80 years after Guy De Maupassant’s “The Necklace,” but it expresses a similar viewpoint about Flynn 4the shallowness of women. Like the husband in “The Necklace,” the speaker in this story, a nineteen - year old store clerk, is under the spell of women even though he has a negative view of them, especially older women. He refers to one 50 year-old customer as “a witch” and says, “If she’d been born at the right time, they would have burned her over in Salem.” (Updike 12) He also refers negatively to “women with six children and varicose veins mapping their leg...
