Literary Analysis: The Necklace and The Hand Puppet

The Necklace and The Hand Puppet 

Literary Comparative Analysis 

Characterization Action Event

           

             

    Short stories that I’m going to compare are very famous “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant and “The Hand Puppet” by Joyce Carol Oates. These stories are common when we observe the female characters and events they’ve been in. In this paper, the discussion will be on how characters are developed by their actions and events that occur.
           In The Necklace, the leading female character Mathilde Loisel is a charming, beautiful woman. She is a woman who has everything: a loving supportive husband and a comfortable home. Though she wants to be rich. She doesn’t feel like she belongs to her social cast and she wants more wealth. She doesn’t even want to go to a party where nobody will envy her because she lacks a proper dress and jewelry. It’s also presented that she was not thankful for the little that she has, even when her husband secured the invitation to the ball. (Sari, 2017) This is Mathilde’s identity crisis that leads to an unexpected ending for which she and her husband paid the price for. On The Hand Puppet, we have Loraine Lake who is a wife and a mother to an 11-year-old daughter. She has her identity crisis. Loraine is in constant denial of the incidents that occur in her life. She denies her tumor, feelings, and her daughter’s behavior. Tippi’s behavior in the opening scene with the hand puppet that she created made Loraine felt annoyed and repulsed. She started denying that this is her daughter's manner.
"MISSUS I BEEN HERE BEFORE YA! AN' I GONNA BE HERE WHENYA GONE!"
“It was not possible to believe that Tippi had said such things.”
“Someone else, an older student, perhaps a teacher, had put her up to it. I know my daughter, Lorraine thought. And that isn't her.”
    A similar action is seen when the mother passes by Tippi’s school. Loraine thought “that child is mad.” Inside her mind though she refused to believe it. Here, we see her struggle as a mother. However, in 1981 Gardiner said “Women never form a self because they “never undergo an identity crisis,” yet they have an identity to lose: “the price of wifehood is the abandonment of self”. “. With this standpoint, Loraine’s identity stress makes more sense when her “passing years” are mentioned in the story.
Time is another aspect that has a huge effect on both stories. We can discuss the time factor of Maupassant’s short story as “Before and After the Necklace”. Before the necklace Mathilde lives as a charming wife of a clerk than they are invited to a party and with the borrowed necklace her life changes. After the Necklace, Mathilde "showed heroism at once" and decided to "repay this terrible debt. (Yadav, 2019) She loses 10 years of her life just in one night. Towards the end of the story her appearance changed. “She had become the robust woman, hard and rough, of a poor household.” the narrator says. She wonders what would happen if that necklace was not lost. She lost her beauty, her admiration, which was her only asset. This made her realize that she lost herself too. She paid the piper for her actions. In the other story, Loraine felt the same. Loraine lost her physical athletic and self-assured being through time with denial and inner crisis. She also looks back at her life and how much she aged. This leads to her current state of isolation. Both characters pine for their young and beautiful souls and physics that they had before the time lost. Everything they felt and affected the situations they’ve been.
    Another apparent thing is the dishonesty those female characters have towards themselves and others in their lives. Loraine tries to say how clever she is to her daughter although she felt so uncomfortable by her puppet voice. But instead, she reassures herself that it’s not Tippi’s conduct. She also keeps secrets from her daughter and husband. She doesn’t want to confront the reality she’ living. In the other story, Mathilde is dishonest to Madame Forestier and Madame Forestier is not honest to her. If it was known that she lost the necklace and that necklace was a cheap imitation, then 10 years of Mathilde and her husband’s life might be quite different. This shows Mathilde’s dissatisfaction. Even though characters have different settings not being loyal is hunting them and causes a lot of unpleasant events and feelings.
    These stories have a different perspective on female characters’ positioning. In the lines from The Hand Puppet, the narrator tells the story with an indirect speech by using past tense and 3rd person perspective.
“The mother was of course taken totally by surprise. She'd had no idea that her daughter had come downstairs before her, and so stealthily!”
    This perspective changes in lines: “It was deliberate, she thought. Premeditated. Because I'm alone.” In this example, we see Loraine’s inner speech. When she thinks about herself, the narrator uses the 1st person. However, a short paragraph later narrator called her “Lorraine Lake” while she was preparing breakfast. This is the character’s mother role. It can be seen that the narrator is changing pronouns and adjusting the distance of the character. She started as a mother and wife then developed an inner talk through her actions and problems. After she ended up again as a mother and wife, at home hiding from reality. We can see her struggle and denial from her positioning throughout occurring events. The Necklace, Mathilde does not have her voice other than the dialogues she had with Madame Forestier. We see her from an outer perspective. Because we cannot feel her real emotions, it gives us an easy judgment of her character through the story. Although she takes action to solve her problem, in the end, Mathilde remains the one who is being judged because of her desires.
    Overall, both female characters have different settings, stories, and different personalities, therefore they show a lot in common. In both of these short stories, we see women’s past actions determined their current psychological states and situations they end up in. I tried to show how women are depicted and how the representation of characters affected actions and events in these stories.
           
References
·   SARI, Y. The Analysis of the Characters in Maupassant’s The Necklace. ENGLISH PROSE ANALYSIS, 57.
·    Judith Kegan Gardiner, "On Female Identity and Writing by Women," Critical Inquiry 8, no. 2 (Winter, 1981): 347-361.
·   Yadav, S. (2019). Character Analysis of ‘Mathilde Loisel’ in the Maupassant’s “The Necklace”. International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences (IJELS), 4(3).