Rather than player her part in this counter-productive cycle, Mrs. Gruwell chooses to embrace the students’ potential. In doing so, she shows both students and adults that the class is capable of overcoming the limitations of the dangerous lifestyle they live, and achieving greatness in the classroom and in their communities. While the teachers and administration before her agree upon making students obey authority, Mrs. Gruwell focuses on giving students opportunities to see how an education can help them better their troubled lives. She spends her free time working three jobs, so that she can buy the students books and journals. The students read the books, such as The Diary Of Anne Frank and Twelve Angry Men, and by relating to the characters of these influential stories, they find that they are not alone in their struggles. When Mrs. Gruwell gives the students journals to write in, she offers them a place to share their pain and document their growth, which nobody before her had done for the children. It is because of her hope for the students and their futures that the students gain hope as well, whereas before, they had only foreseen a future of poverty and a daily fear for their lives. It is because of Mrs. Gruwell’s faith in their capabilities that the students were finally able to graduate high school, disproving the adults that doubted that kids who grow up in a dangerous environment are worth any support at all.

But when a first-time teacher who is not yet aware of the lifestyle the students have become accustomed to, the students gain a new appreciation for education, as well as making a positive change in their lives and the community. Mrs. Erin Gruwell gives the students books to read and journals to write in every day, despite protests from school administrators and criticism of staff members who say the students “should not be rewarded” for being destructive and violent “juvenile delinquents”. Rather than surrendering her passion to the harsh words of her principal and her staff-mates, she begins working three jobs to pay for all the books and supplies that she must fund herself because the school will not give them proper reading and writing materials. She and the class arrange dinners, field-trips, and visits from real-life influential people, such as Miep Gies, the woman who hid Anne Frank from the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Because of her determination to help the class better themselves, Gruwell gets the class excited about learning and their future carreers. Students learn to respect one another and ignore the discouraging words of society. The class graduates from high school together, disproving the common belief that they would not even pass the tenth grade.

Cisneros offers her audience a window into the troubled life of an eleven year old girl, prompting the reader to recall their own adolescence, and the burden of young age that all people feel at some time in their life. She presents her own theory about the growing-up process: as people age, they never lose the behaviors and impulses that one has at every age previous to one’s current age. For instance, she tells her mother when she is sad and wants to cry, that it is okay to express her emotions, because that is the part of her that “feels three [years old]”. She compares the years of a person’s age to the layers of an onion, or the rings in a tree trunk; each layer, or year, accumulates over time rather than leaving a person once the next year has passed.

Cisneros intended to reach the reader’s sympathy for the younger generation, and implies that instead of wishing to be younger, as most adults do, one should reassess the supposedly carefree lifestyle that is being in grade school. This concept is successfully communicated through the narration of a real-life scenario and analogies with relatable, everyday objects. More importantly, her theory and the troubles of youth are joined and smoothly illustrated in her repetition of the phrase, “I’m eleven today. I’m eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, and one, but I wish I was one hundred and two. I wish I was anything but eleven”. With this phrase, she lays out before the reader the years she holds within her eleven years of existence, listing them individually to demonstrate the weight each year holds, and the weight they add to the burden of youth. She must carry each year with her; with each year comes new responsibility, and each year stands as another accomplishment in her mind. Her eleventh birthday is an occasion in which she believes she should feel even greater than she was when she was ten, because it is the end of another year that she now must carry with her beneath her present age.

But as a result of her young age, her growth is dismissed by adults and peers alike, and she wishes that she could be much older than everyone else so that she might be worthy of their respect and recognition.

She takes four hundred francs of his money that he had saved up for his personal leisure, shooting guns, despite her awareness of their poverty; she knows it is unreasonable and unnecessary to buy an expensive dress to go to the party, but she asks for the money anyway. Because he is generous, and he loves his wife, Monsieur Loisel gives her the money without hesitation. The two are different in their priorities and the way they interact; Madame Loisel lives for the things outside of the “simple tastes” she can afford, and her husband only wants to satisfy this hunger for wealth and recognition.

But Madame and Monsieur Loisel are also very similar in this way. They are both in pursuit of Madame Loisel’s happiness, but more importantly, they are both in pursuit of proving their own worth.

 “She had no clothes, no jewels, nothing. And these were the only things she loved”; she would never be able to appreciate the things that are within her reach. This is why Madame Loisel is not satisfied with the dress she buys with Monsieur Loisel’s money­― the dress was not impossible to get, and therefore, it is not good enough for her to value; she wanted something else that would be unobtainable by somebody of her class, which is why she loved the extravagant necklace so much.

This is not the first example of her insatiable desire for more and different than she and her husband are capable of attaining and the consequences of its insatiability. Monsieur Loisel’s wife wants to be “known, understood, [and] loved” by a man, but these things are of no value to her unless the man is “of wealth and distinction”. Monsieur Loisel is aware of this; because her standards are so high, he feels that he must show her that her life can be fulfilling even though she “let herself” be married to a “little” clerk, as opposed to the “big” people of high-status at the ball. He goes through “tremendous trouble” to get her things, like an invitation to a ball or a dress, in hopes that she might acknowledge his efforts. But she never does, and he is constantly disappointed in his failure to please her, and therefore disappointed in his failure to prove his worth.

His wife also feels this disappointment, but in herself. She believes she was wrongly fated into a family of artisans, and wrongly fated into her marriage. The things she wants are forever impossible to acquire, not only because she is poor, but also as a result of her inability to appreciate the things that she can get.

Rather than appreciating him and his determination to create a happy life for her, Madame Loisel uses her husband’s selflessness to feed her obsession, and in the end, they both end up unsatisfied with themselves and their quality of life.

This is the theme exhibited in the life of Madame Loisel in The Necklace, by Guy de Maupassant.

Impaired by her hunger for wealth, Madame Loisel believes she was mistakenly fated to a life of frugality, and fails to see worth in her own circumstance. She considers herself “born for every delicacy and luxury”, and desires more than anything “to charm, to be desired, to be wildly attractive and sought after”. Her ideal life would entail a great number of riches and material possessions that show off an extravagant lifestyle, as well as a personality to which others would be unable to resist. However, she “let herself” marry a little clerk, rather than “a man of wealth and distinction”, and although she is poor just like her husband, she is “as unhappy as though she had married beneath her”. Her self-entitlement to the qualities and possessions worthy of “the highest lady in the land” contribute to her unhappiness; it is because of her envy that this insatiable need for financial wealth causes her to suffer so greatly.

Had Madame Loisel not allowed the “poorness of her house”, and all of the things “of which other women of her class would not even have been aware”, torment and insult her, she never would have felt it necessary to attend a party, especially one of which guests were so highly casted and wealthy, where she would be out of place. For other low-class women, the thought of attending an affair of that stature, where they would not be amongst poorer people like themselves, would torture them more than the poor lifestyle they live. But for Madame Loisel, she jumps at the opportunity to be amongst the people who she so desperately wishes to be. She is eager to play the part of the high-class beauty she was born to be, who she believes only her poverty can disguise.

At the ball, she gets a glimpse of her dream-life, living in a small piece of her fantasy for one night. Her experience comes with a price, however, and Madame Loisel and her husband’s wallets are not accustomed to accommodating such a cost. She asks her husband for all of the money to his name, four hundred francs. She spends all of this on a gorgeous dress, and borrows her friend’s extremely expensive-looking diamond necklace. At this time, she believes that the money spent is worth being able to make her dream come true.

But she does not realize how distracted by this dream she has become. The consequences of her pretentiousness cost her ten years of her life and thirty-six thousand francs; she loses herself in the euphoria of the evening, submitting herself completely to “the pride of her success”. Because of this, she does not notice when the beautiful diamond necklace slips off of her neck. Indebted to her friend and desperate to replace the necklace, Madame Loisel and her husband take out loans and borrow money; for an entire decade they work to fill the hole in their pockets caused by only one night of “happiness made up of this universal homage and admiration”.

Madame Loisel’s desire for a life of opulence took her away from finding happiness and success in the life she was born to live. Blinded by an impossible aspiration, she wastes both her and her husband’s youth literally paying for her mistake; precious time that could have been spent bettering her life, she spends as the epitome of the very societal role she had dreaded playing her entire misguided life as she “[fights] for every wretched halfpenny of her money”. She often daydreams of the “evening long ago, of the ball at which she had been so beautiful and so much admired”, and still thinks that the life she lives now is a reasonable expense for that event. Forever having been in a state of abstraction as to what she deserves and what her life must be, she does not regret being so obsessed with fortune and wealth, and fails to see how severely it has ruined her and her husband’s lives.

When she is told that the necklace for which she had thrown her life away is made of imitation diamonds, and only worth five hundred francs, she is forced to pull away from her delusion and recognize the suffering, the money, and ten years of her life could have been saved, had she not let the disadvantages of her so-called misfortune take over all of her priorities.  And just as any other being obsessed with achieving a status not within their reach, she is left with the disappointment of finally having to acknowledge the unreality of the perfection she pursues, and experience guilt and regret for the rest of her life.

The author chose to include the element of disappointment by revealing that the necklace was synthetic. This accurately demonstrates the concept that there is no lifestyle one can live that is absolutely perfect; the life one is given is the only life one is capable of improving, rather than trying to change one’s circumstance to be like another’s. This story supports the cliché that people too frequently ignore: the grass is not always greener on the other side. And the diamond necklace on the prettiest girl at the ball can look like it cost more than your house, but can easily turn out to be worth about a third as much as the shack that she lives in.