SYLVIA PLATH (The Applicant)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

I have chosen for this last paper Sylvia Plath because in my earlier papers I had always talked about men, so I thought there must also be a place for women’s poetry. As they have always played a different role in literature and in general in life, their themes in poetry are unique and they talk about some aspects as only women can do. Men are usually “authority figures associated with technology, abstract and analytical thinking instead of feeling, a will to exercise control and gluttonous demand for admiration” while women are characterized by spontaneity and denounce against “the hypocrite males inaccessibility to emotion”[1]. I have chosen to reflect better this poetess’s work, The Applicant, which is a portrait of marriage in contemporary Western culture.

 

 

Plath’s poetry

 

Plath and her work has been a studying object to the feminists who dramatized her life and presented her as her husband’s victim, who was the noted poet Ted Hugues. As Viorica Pâtea says: “they made her become a woman symbol that fought against patriarchal values and the traditional way of life and that fell tormented like other poetess’s generations”[2] But Sylvia Plath can’t be considered a feminist because she doesn’t show any sort of hate against men, her anger is directed towards “all the people who threat psique’s autonomy and its freedom”.[3] This way, her verses reflect daily life and deal with the things known and experimented by humans. We’ll see these aspects through the analysis of The Applicant:

 

 

Analysis

 

This poem was written in 1962 and published posthumous by Ted Hugues in the collection of poems Ariel in 1965. It is her last poemary and it contains some of her most famous poems. It was the cause of much controversy among feminists because at the time of Plath's death, she left a nearly completed manuscript entitled Ariel and Other Poems. The version that was published was similar but not identical: some poems were trimmed to reduce what her husband Ted Hughes considered to be redundancy, and additional poems composed in her final weeks were added to the manuscript. Some critics consider this to have been an intrusion upon her intent, while others note that even at that late date Hughes and Plath frequently helped edit each other's work.[4]

 

[5]The Applicant

First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

 

Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

 

To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed

 

To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit –

 

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they'll bury you in it.

 

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start

 

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.

 

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it's a poultice.
You have an eye, it's an image.
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

 

In this poem there seems to be three people involved: a man, a woman and an interviewer. The one who is being interviewed is the man, who is “the applicant”. The interviewer represents the system, the one who is requiring a man to marry a woman.

We find here a connection between the capitalist economic system, the patriarchal family structure, and the general depersonalization of human relations.[6]

This way, though this initial reading we see how Plath attacks the forces in society which believe we must conform to marriage.

 

In the first stanza, the applicant is described as a whole made of artificial pieces as a machine, beginning with an imagery of dehumanization. We are so involved in this system, that we have become a part of this artifact ourselves.

The speaker asks only for physical features, he does not ask about the man’s other qualities, suggesting that the marriage being offered here does not require any emotional attachment and that it is merely an arrangement.

 

In the second stanza, the speaker offers him a hand, which personifies the marriage to a woman. He says that the men’s hand is empty without a woman’s hand, so men need necessarily a woman in this system to be fulfilled and to work on well.

 

In the third stanza, she describes the women’s role in society as they are supposed to serve their husbands and do whatever they tell them. The speaker refers to women as “it” as they are nothing until they get married so the marriage is guaranteed because there is no other possible option for them to be recognized in society. It also gives and identity to women as they get their husband’s name when they get married.

In the fourth and fifth stanzas, a suit is offered to the applicant. Without that suit he is “naked”, so it means that marriage is the only choice and he will be defined by the suit he will wear. If you don’t wear that suit you will be looked badly from society, meaning that a person who doesn’t marry does not have a good role in society. That suit is “black and stiff”, so it isn’t easy to wear because men have to work hard to maintain also a family, but you have to do it anyway because it is the normal thing almost everybody does. However, it is “waterproof, shatterproof, proof /against fire and bombs through the roof” because marriage means security for women. But he at least has the choice of marrying the suit. In contrast, the woman is the role she plays; she does not exist apart from it.

In the sixth and seventh stanzas, she refers to women’s play saying that they are just empty-minds who act just in a family role. She appeals her with qualifying adjectives as “sweetie”, as a usual husband does. She asks her to come “out of the closet” because she doesn't even exist unless the black suit needs and wills her to and she is seen as making contact with the world only through the medium of the man. Her social existence depends upon her husband’s recognition.

Then, the stages of marriage come into scene (silver, gold...), but at the beginning she is presented only as a paper. However, she is like a toy “a living doll” made to serve the man as “it can sew, it can cook” but also “talk, talk, talk”, which are the roles usually expected for a woman to do in marriage.

 

In the final stanza, the speaker mentions that “there is nothing wrong with it”, that it is perfectly functional, like a machine. This woman is like the answer the man is looking for, the “poultice” that soothes his pain and an “image” or a pleasant sight for his “eye”. As his last sales pitch attempt, he refers to the woman as the man’s “last resort”.

Plath considered that humans can’t be vassals and although capitalist system needs a man and a woman to be married in order to be consumers of the things a family needs, it isn’t the only choice that exists in life. Also in this poem full of sarcasm and very personal, she is speaking directly to the reader, addressed as "you" throughout because we too are implicated, for we too are potential “applicants”.

 

Conclusion

 

We have seen through this paper that Sylvia Plath wasn’t a feminist, but a poetess who denounced human relationships in general and not only those based between men and women. She talks not only about the way women are stereotyped, but also about the faults in society. We seem manufactured to marry each other and have a “happy life” and this is the normal thing to do.

Plath’s words reflect the decade in which the poem was written, a momentous era of awakening of repressed feminism in the 1960s. Marriage, therefore, is portrayed as an absurdly narrow existence perpetrated by weak men and obliviously tolerant women within cultural paradigms.

With this poem, Plath makes a statement against the ideals society imposes on what true functions a wife and husband serve. Women are generally characterized as docile, fragile creatures who should serve as unwavering epitomes of loyalty. Mockingly, the poet suggests that such women eventually become automated, mechanical versions of a person. Men, similarly, are then portrayed to desire and accept these qualities as inherent or necessary to being good women.[7]

 

 

Bibliography

 

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_%28Plath%29

 

http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/applicant.html

 

§         Sylvia Plath Page, Anja Beckmann. 9th May 2007.

http://www.sylviaplath.de/

 

http://library.thinkquest.org/2847/poetry/applicnt.htm

 



Academic year 2006/2007
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Sandra Gisbert Sánchez
sangis@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press

 

 

 

 


[1] Ostriker Alicia, 81.

[2] Pâtea Viorica, 41

[3] Pâtea Viorica, 56