And now the first half of the stylistic analysis of "The Necklace". I've managed to write everything till the stylistic devices only, but I'm working at the continuation. Hope, you'd enjoy the reading! Have a nice time!!!!!!!)))))))

          The short story under analysis “The Necklace” is written by a popular 19^th-century French writer Henri Rene Albert Guy de Maupassant, who is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the form’s finest exponents. He delighted in clever plotting, and served as a model for S.Maugham and O.Henry in this respect. His stories about expensive jewelry (“The Necklace”, “La parure”) are imitated with a twist by Maugham (“Mr. Know-All”, “A String of Beads”) and Henry James (“Paste”).

          Taking his cue from Balzac, Maupassant wrote comfortably in both the high-realistic and fantastic modes; stories and novels such as “L’Heritage” and “Bel-Ami” aim to recreate Third Republic France in a realistic way, whereas many of the short stories (notably “Le Horla” and “Qui sait?”) describe apparently supernatural phenomena.

          The supernatural in Maupassant, however, is often implicitly a symptom of the protagonists’ troubled minds; Maupassant was fascinated by the burgeoning discipline of psychiatry, and attended the public lectures of Jean-Martin Charcot between 1885 and 1886. This interest is reflected in his fiction.

          Maupassant is notable as the subject of one of Leo Tolstoy’s essays on art: “The Works of Guy de Maupassant”.

          Friedrich Nietzsche’s autobiography mentions him in the following text:

“I cannot at all conceive in which century of history one could haul together such inquisitive and at the same time delicate psychologists as one can in contemporary Paris: I can name as a sample – for their number is by no means small, ... or to pick out one of the stronger race, a genuine Latin to whom I am particularly attached, Guy de Maupassant”.

          The story is devoted to a woman who loses her friends necklace and spends ten years of her life paying for the jewel. This woman (Mathilde Loisel) wasn’t happy because she wasn’t rich but wanted to live bohemian life:

“…Her tastes were simple because she had never been able to afford any other, but she was as unhappy… She suffered endlessly, feeling herself born for every delicacy and luxury. She suffered from the poorness of her house, from its mean walls, worn chairs, and ugly curtains. All these things, of which other women of her class would not even have been aware, tormented and insulted her”.

       To my mind, this short title “The Necklace” is symbolic in the story. The simplicity of the title is common in many of Maupassant’s novels. The necklace is representative of the riches and expensive material possessions that Mathilde wastes her time pining after. Importantly, the necklace that Mathilde borrows from her friend, instead being glamorous and satisfying, dooms Mathilde into a state of poverty and despair. Maupassant expresses Mathilde’s greed saying that when she first saw the necklace, “her heart began to beat covetously”, but Mathilde only enjoyed very temporary satisfaction. Mathilde got of one night of being accepted among rich people, which in the end left her with ten years of suffering. The story is pessimistic and upsetting, and the emphasis on the necklace, especially as the title, reveals that emphasizing material things is harmful and fruitless. 

          The title encourages the reader to focus on the symbolism of the necklace in the story. The theme of fatalism is emphasized in this title, for each time the necklace is brought into the plot of the story, it involves an event where “fate had blundered” over some character. The first time the necklace is brought up, Mathilde is borrowing the necklace from of friend, so that she, doomed into a middle class social status, can pretend for one night to be part of a more fortunate class of people. The next time the necklace is spoken of, it is the cause of a “fearful catastrophe”, its misfortune disappearance which causes Mathilde lots of grief. Then, the final time the necklace is brought up, Mathilde discovers that, as fate would have it, the necklace she spent so long replacing was worthless. Fate interacts with the characters every time the necklace comes into the story, and the title helps to focus the reader in on the necklace’s implications.

        In this short story there are many motifs and themes. However, the important ones, materialism and fatalism, are easily recognized because they revolve around the necklace. The reader knows to focus on these themes because the title encourages the reader to analyze the interaction of the necklace in the plot. Also the themes of wealth, of women and femininity, of pride and of suffering can be found in this story.

          The expensive nature of the necklace (the gorgeous piece of diamond jewelry) is not the only way in which wealth is central to this story. The main character of “The Necklace” is obsessed with wealth. She wants nothing else than to escape from her shabby middle-class life with a shabby middle-class husband and live the glamorous life for which she was born. She's so jealous of her one wealthy friend it hurts.   

       Mathilde Loisel is a 19th century French version of a desperate housewife. Because she’s a woman in a man’s world, she has almost no control over her life. She finds herself married to a husband she doesn’t care for, and cooped up in a house she despises. What she wants more than anything else is to be desirable to other men. And what’s particularly irritating is that she has all the “womanly virtues” she needs in order to be desirable: she’s charming, graceful and beautiful. She’s just doesn’t have the necessary wealth.

          This story is also about pride. Mathilde Loisel is a proud woman. She feels far above the humble circumstances she’s forced to live with by her common birth. In fact, her current situation disgusts her. It could be that it is also pride that prevents Mathilde and her husband from admitting they’ve lost an expensive necklace. After the loss of the necklace makes Mathilde poor, and her beauty fades, she may learn a pride of a different sort: pride in her own work and endurance.

          It’s also about nonstop suffering, caused by the cruelty of life and chance. At the opening, we meet Mathilde, the classic dissatisfied housewife, who spends her days weeping about how boring and shabby her life is. Mathilde finds one moment of real joy when she goes to a ball, but chance is cruel. Her happiest night becomes her worst nightmare when she loses the diamond necklace she borrowed. Then she and her husband experience a very different sort of suffering: the suffering of real poverty.

          The events in the analysed text happen in magical, glamorous city of lights, in Paris in the 1880s or so I’d say. The hint for such suggestion is that Mathilde dreams of being rich, but doesn’t seem to think a whole lot about being noble. If the story were set earlier, noble blood would have mattered more, and Mathilde probably would have thought about it just as much as money. At this point in time money practically makes nobility. Money’s what enables you to pay for the “high life”, and surround yourself with fancy, fabulous things. And the fancy, fabulous things that Mathilde fantasizes about – the oriental tapestries, “tall lamps of bronze”, the “precious bric-a-brac” in “coquettish little rooms” – all hint at the fashions of the time, as does the intimate, small-party social life that she idolized. So, the setting of the events in the given story is realistic. It’s presented in a detailed way. It provides a historical and cultural context that contributes to our understanding of the characters.

          From the point of view of presentation the story is the third-person omniscient, to my mind. The story’s focus is certainly on Mathilde, but the narrator does not speak from her point of view. Instead, he talks about Mathilde as if he were from the outside looking in. When he brings her up at the beginning, she’s just “one of those girls”. It sounds like he’s seen a lot more of them than just this one. Mathilde’s also not the only character whose thoughts he can see into; he’s able to speak into her husband’s thoughts just as easily, when he wants to.

          The characters we meet in the text under analysis are Mathilde Loisel (the main character), M. Loisel, Mme. Jeanne Forestier and M. Georges Ramponneau (the secondary characters). The writer reveals all the characters, especially, the main one – Mathilde, by means of narrative summary without judgment. Maupassant’s descriptions of his characters are an interesting mix of detachment and intimate understanding. He sees into the emotions of Mathilde clearly, and can make us as readers feel “inside” her world. But the narrator doesn’t share her emotions, and we don’t either. That doesn’t mean Maupassant seems cold or indifferent to the characters, though. In the few telling moments when he moves beyond detachment, it is to express what looks like sympathy, or even admiration:
“Mme. Loisel learned the horrible life of the needy. She made the best of it, moreover, frankly, heroically. The frightful debt must be paid. She would pay it”.
Maupassant’s detachment also keeps his narration from ever being judgmental, which is remarkable. You might want to judge Mathilde, but Maupassant never does. 

          The plot of the story runs as follows:

•    The introduction. At the beginning of the story, essentially nothing happens. The narrator’s interested in telling us about Mathilde (even though we don’t yet know her name). We learn about her back-story, her character, and her unhappiness with her mediocre life.

“SHE WAS ONE OF THOSE PRETTY AND CHARMING GIRLS BORN,… She would weep whole days, with grief, regret, despair, and misery”.

•    The exposition. The action proper begins when M. Loisel (Mathilde’s husband) comes home with the invitation to the fabulous ball and Mathilde reacts by having a fit. Now we have a specific problem: Mathilde’s now has the best opportunity she’s ever had to have a taste of the high life, but she has nothing to wear. That problem sets the rest of the plot in motion.

“One evening her husband came home with an exultant air, holding a large envelope in his hand…"And what do you suppose I am to wear at such an affair?"”.

•    The story itself.

“He had not thought about it; he stammered… She took off the garments in which she had wrapped her shoulders, so as to see herself in all her glory before the mirror”.

•    The climax. The necklace is missing! Mathilde’s discovery is the most exciting and dramatic moment in the story. It’s also the turning point in the plot. Before, the story was a build-up to Mathilde’s one glorious night with the rich and famous. Now it transitions into a desperate search. We have a feeling things are not going to end well.

“But suddenly she uttered a cry. The necklace was no longer round her neck!”

•    The denouement. When Mathilde meets Mme. Forestier on the Champs Elysées, it looks like we’re just about to tie up the last loose end in the story. The main action is over – the Loisels have finally finished paying off their debts for the necklace. All that remains is for Mathilde to see whether her friend ever noticed the substitute necklace, and tell her the sad story of the whole affair. But then things don’t quite wrap up the way we expect.

 “One Sunday, as she had gone for a walk along the Champs-Elysees… And she smiled in proud and innocent happiness”.

•    The conclusion. Sometimes critics say that the twist ending is the climax of the story, but I guess, that it’s rather the conclusion.

“Madame Forestier, deeply moved, took her two hands."Oh, my poor Mathilde! But mine was imitation. It was worth at the very most five hundred francs! . . . "”.

          The type of speech employed by the author of the analysed text is a mixture of narration and description with direct speech (dialogues).

WATCH THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Here is an amazing video - a short retelling of the story I've chosen. 

    A little addition to the previous information)))))

    As Guy de Maupassant is the representative of the movement of Naturalism and Realism, here some information about them. 

     Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was depicted as a literary movement that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. Naturalism is the outgrowth of literary realism, a prominent literary movement in mid-19th-century France and elsewhere. Naturalistic writers were influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. They believed that one's heredity and social environment largely determine one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (e.g., the environment or heredity) influencing the actions of its subjects. Naturalistic works often include uncouth or sordid subject matter; for example, Emile Zola’s works had frankness about sexuality along with a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, violence, prejudice, disease, corruption, prostitution, and filth. As a result, naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for focusing too much on human vice and misery. 

Defining characteristics 

     There are defining characteristics of literary naturalism. One of these is pessimism. Very often, one or more characters will continue to repeat one line or phrase that tends to have a pessimistic connotation, sometimes emphasizing the inevitability of death. 

   For example Bernard Bonnejean quotes this passage of Huysmans where the symbolism of death is visible, such an allegory, in a portrait of an old woman:

[...] une vieille bique de cinquante ans, une longue efflanquée qui bêlait à la lune, campée sur ses maigres tibias [...] crevant les draps de ses os en pointe.

[...] an old hag of fifty years, lonely and outstretched, bleating at the moon, poised on her skinny shins [...] smashing the skin of her bones to a point (transl. Joiner).

     Another characteristic of literary naturalism is detachment from the story. The author often tries to maintain a tone that will be experienced as "objective". Also, an author will sometimes achieve detachment by creating nameless characters (though, strictly speaking, this is more common among modernists such as Ernest Hemingway). This puts the focus on the plot and what happens to the character, rather than the characters themselves.

   Another characteristic of naturalism is determinism, the opposite of free will, essentially. For determinism, the idea that individual characters have a direct influence on the course of their lives is supplanted by a focus on nature or fate. Often, a naturalist author will lead the reader to believe a character's fate has been predetermined, usually by environmental factors, and that he/she can do nothing about it.

      Another common characteristic is a surprising twist at the end of the story. Equally, there tends to be in naturalist novels and stories a strong sense that nature is indifferent to human struggle. These are, however, only a few of the defining characteristics of naturalism.

      Naturalism is an extension of realism, and may be better understood by study of the basic precepts of that literary movement. The term naturalism itself may have been used in this sense for the first time by Émile Zola. It is believed that he sought a new idea to convince the reading public of something new and more modern in his fiction. He argued that his innovation in fiction-writing was the creation of characters and plots based on the scientific method.

    Realism in the arts may be generally defined as the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, implausible, exotic and supernatural elements.

      In its most specific sense, Realism was an artistic movement that began in France in the 1850s, after the 1848 Revolution. Realists rejected Romanticism, which had dominated French literature and art since the late 18th century. Realism revolted against the exotic subject matter and exaggerated emotionalism and drama of the Romantic Movement. Instead it sought to portray real and typical contemporary people and situations with truth and accuracy, and not avoiding unpleasant or sordid aspects of life. Realist works depicted people of all classes in situations that arise in ordinary life, and often reflected the changes wrought by the Industrial and Commercial Revolutions. The popularity of such 'realistic' works grew with the introduction of photography — a new visual source that created a desire for people to produce representations which look “objectively real.”

       More generally, realist works of art are those that, in revealing a truth, may emphasize the ugly or sordid, such as works of social realism, regionalism, or Kitchen sink realism. The movement even managed to impact on opera, where it is called Verismo, with contemporary working-class heroines such as Carmen, who works in a cigarette factory, and Mimi in La boheme.

Literature

   Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality", Realism as a movement in literature was based on "objective reality", and focused on showing everyday, quotidian activities and life, primarily among the middle or lower class society, without romantic idealization or dramatization. It may be regarded as the general attempt to depict subjects as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation and "in accordance with secular, empirical rules." As such, the approach inherently implies a belief that such reality is ontologically independent of man's conceptual schemes, linguistic practices and beliefs, and thus can be known (or knowable) to the artist, who can in turn represent this 'reality' faithfully. As Ian Watt states, modern realism "begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through the senses" and as such "it has its origins in Descartes and Locke, and received its first full formulation by Thomas Reid in the middle of the eighteenth century."

    While the preceding Romantic era was also a reaction against the values of the Industrial Revolution, realism was in its turn a reaction to romanticism, and for this reason it is also commonly derogatorily referred as "traditional" "bourgeois realism". Some writers of Victorian literature produced works of realism. The rigidities, conventions, and other limitations of "bourgeois realism," prompted in their turn the revolt later labeled as modernism; starting around 1900, the driving motive of modernist literature was the criticism of the 19th-century bourgeois social order and world view, which was countered with an antirationalist, antirealist and antibourgeois program.

        Unfortunately, I had no time to write something in my blog. Pity!!! But FINALLY, I've managed to read my story and now I'm ready to present some of my materials. So, 

Biography of the author

       Henri-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5, 1850 at the château de Miromesnil, near Dieppe in the Seine-Inférieure (now Seine-Maritime) department in France.
       He was the first son of Laure Le Poittevin and Gustave de Maupassant, both from prosperous bourgeois families. When Maupassant was 11 and his brother Hervé was five, his mother, an independent-minded woman, risked social disgrace to obtain a legal separation from her husband. After the separation, Le Poittevin kept her three sons, the elders Guy and Creig and younger Hervé. With the father’s absence, Maupassant’s mother became the most influential figure in the young boy’s life. She was an exceptionally well read woman and was very fond of classical literature, especially Shakespeare. Until the age of thirteen, Guy happily lived with his mother, to whom he was deeply devoted, at Étretat, in the Villa des Verguies, where, between the sea and the luxuriant countryside, he grew very fond of fishing and outdoor activities. 
       At age thirteen, he was sent to a small seminary near Rouen for classical studies. In October 1868, at the age of 18, he saved the famous poet Algernon Charles Swinburne from drowning off the coast of Étretat at Normandy. As he entered junior high school, he met the great author Gustave Flaubert. He first entered a seminary at Yvetot, but deliberately got himself expelled. From his early education he retained a marked hostility to religion. Then he was sent to the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen where he proved a good scholar indulging in poetry and taking a prominent part in theatricals. The Franco-Prussian War broke out soon after his graduation from college in 1870; he enlisted as a volunteer and fought bravely. Afterwards, in 1871, he left Normandy and moved to Paris where he spent ten years as a clerk in the Navy Department. During these ten tedious years his only recreation and relaxation was canoeing on the Seine on Sundays and holidays. Gustave Flaubert took him under his protection and acted as a kind of literary guardian to him, guiding his debut in journalism and literature. At Flaubert's home he met Émile Zola and the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, as well as many of the proponents of the realist and naturalist schools.
       In 1878, he was transferred to the Ministry of Public Instruction and became a contributing editor of several leading newspapers such as Le Figaro, Gil Blas, Le Gaulois and l'Écho de Paris. He devoted his spare time to writing novels and short stories. In 1880 he published what is considered his first masterpiece, "Boule de Suif", which met with an instant and tremendous success. Flaubert characterized it as "a masterpiece that will endure." This was Maupassant's first piece of short fiction set during the Franco-Prussian War, and was followed by short stories such as "Deux Amis", "Mother Savage", and "Mademoiselle Fifi".
       The decade from 1880 to 1891 was the most fertile period of Maupassant's life. Made famous by his first short story, he worked methodically and produced two or sometimes four volumes annually. He combined talent and practical business sense, which made him wealthy. In 1881 he published his first volume of short stories under the title of La Maison Tellier; it reached its twelfth edition within two years; in 1883 he finished his first novel, Une Vie (translated into English as A Woman's Life), 25,000 copies of which were sold in less than a year. In his novels, he concentrated all his observations scattered in his short stories. His second novel Bel-Ami, which came out in 1885, had thirty-seven printings in four months. His editor, Havard, commissioned him to write new masterpieces and Maupassant continued to produce them without the slightest apparent effort. At this time he wrote what many consider to be his greatest novel, Pierre et Jean. With a natural aversion to society, he loved retirement, solitude, and meditation. He traveled extensively in Algeria, Italy, England, Brittany, Sicily, Auvergne, and from each voyage brought back a new volume. He cruised on his private yacht "Bel-Ami," named after his earlier novel. This feverish life did not prevent him from making friends among the literary celebrities of his day: Alexandre Dumas, fils had a paternal affection for him; at Aix-les-Bains he met Hippolyte Taine and fell under the spell of the philosopher-historian. Flaubert continued to act as his literary godfather. His friendship with the Goncourts was of short duration; his frank and practical nature reacted against the ambiance of gossip, scandal, duplicity, and invidious criticism that the two brothers had created around them in the guise of an 18th-century style salon.
       Maupassant was but one of a fair number of 19th-century Parisians who did not care for the Eiffel Tower; indeed, he often ate lunch in the restaurant at its base, not out of any preference for the food, but because it was only there that he could avoid seeing its otherwise unavoidable profile. Moreover, he and forty-six other Parisian literary and artistic notables attached their names to letter of protest, ornate as it was irate, against the tower's construction to the then Minister of Public Works. Maupassant also wrote under several pseudonyms such as Joseph Prunier, Guy de Valmont, and Maufrigneuse (which he used from 1881 to 1885).
        In his later years he developed a constant desire for solitude, an obsession for self-preservation, and a fear of death and crazed paranoia of persecution that came from the syphilis he had contracted in his early days. On January 2, 1892, Maupassant tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat and was committed to the celebrated private asylum of Esprit Blanche at Passy, in Paris, where he died on July 6, 1893. Guy De Maupassant penned his own epitaph: "I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing." He is buried in Section 26 of the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.

WOW!!!

     It was a real challange for me. I mean the creating-blog-activity. To tell the truth, it was not so difficult to create the blog itself but to find the link or whatever where to write about my impressions. Aber das macht nichts! In any case I'm fully agree with my groupmates that it's marvolous that we have an opportunity to study online.  

     So, here I'm going to share with the results of my project in stylistics. I'll try do it every week for everybody to follow my progress.

     I have chosen the story by Guy de Mapaussant "The Necklace". Unfortunatelly, I've never read it before but I hope that its reading will bring me joy. 

     Judging by the title I can predict that this story will be connected with some kind of mystery or, maybe, even murder on the basis of the stealing of the necklace. Who knows...

     I'm really eager to know whether I'm right or wrong.

P.S. For those who are interested in the story, the link is HERE.

Information about the author you can find HERE.