How Guy de Maupassant creates moral dilemmas.

“Veracity is the heart of morality” - Thomas Henry Huxley. Morals are probably the most important thing in the British Government, because it keeps the country under good order, and provides different ideas and opinions; without morals our country would be perfect. Does Guy de Maupassant create moral issues because it is based on the truth of his past? The only way to answer this question is to look at several short stories, and explain the context and text of how he adds morals, and how this makes us think.

Maupassant’s childhood consisted of a good education and upbringing. Although, since 1863, his life became quite troubled by the separation of his parent’s and the experience of the Franco-Prussian war; this could have had an affect on his writings. The war played a great tribute to his attitude towards Normandy, of which he describes is “the chamber-pot of France.” This tells me that he was quite annoyed at the fact that France was left in ruins by Germany. An example of a theme in Mother Sauvage.

The moral issues in his stories could have been affected by Maupassant’s mixed feelings about his Norman homeland. This �

The moral dilemma’s are striked off by a complication or conflict. He uses this to structure the whole story, adding new complications as the story goes on, or ‘sorting-out’ the problems beforehand.

In Mother Sauvage she reads a letter about the death of her son and “little by little the tears came to her eyes and the sorrow filled her heart,” gives me the impression of sympathy to her, but then she murders the soldiers in the cottages and tells the officer, quite unsympathetic, that is was her. The change in morals, once again, has made me change my mind, too. A recurring feature also in The Jewels, but this time, with money.

In The Jewels, Maupassant describes Monsieur Lantin as being quite a well-off man, but when his wife dies he becomes poor and sells his wife’s jewels for large sums of money. This makes me think of Monsieur Lantin as being quite greedy, where as before I felt sorry for him. Then, at the end, Lantin marries a second wife, who we are told makes his life a misery. Now, our attitudes have changed to sympathy for the man, again. Maupassant does this deliberately for our entertainment. We try to make our minds up about what we think of the characters along the way, but the decisions they make alter our morals. A very clever trick.

Maupassant causes morals to arise by using a mixture of absolute and circumstantial morals. This is shown in The Adopted Son and puts the idea in our heads that either one of the two families is morally correct.

As I have said, how Guy de Maupassant created moral dilemma’s is very clever. He twists and t

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