Every individual has a different perception on values. Some may think that life is about the little things that make them happy, however others may feel the opposite way and that expenses are the way to live. In Guy de Maupassant's short story, "The Necklace" there is a clear relationship of the theme individual and society. He mentions the main character, Madame Loisel, who is a beautiful woman that lives in a wonderful home with all the necessary supplies needed to survive and more. However, she is very unhappy with her life. She feels she deserves a much more expensive and materialistic life than what she has. After pitying herself for not being the richest of her friends, she goes out and borrows a beautiful necklace from one of her friends. But when she misplaces the closest thing she has to the life she dreams of and not telling her friend about the situation, she set herself up for ten years of hard work. .
Mathilde Loisel is one of those pretty and charming girls, born, as if by an accident of fate, into a family of clerk. With no dowry, no prospects, no way of any kind of being met, understood, loved, and married by a man both prosperous and famous, she was finally married to a minor clerk in the Ministry of Education. Maupassant sets Madame Loisel in conflict with society, for she could easily have been a lady had her parents been wealthy. Consequently, she is as "unhappy as a woman who has come down in the world" because she possesses natural poise, instinctive good taste, and the mental cleverness that make daughters of the common people the equals of ladies in high society.
Thus, because Mathilde Loisel realizes that she could be the equal of aristocratic ladies, she is discontent and places excessive value upon material possessions as she perceives monetary things being the means to higher positions in society. This is why she thinks that Madame Forestier has loaned her a real diamond necklace, for in her mind, no wealthy woman would possess faux diamonds; this is why she does not confess to Mme.
