The Applicant

Throughout “The Applicant,” Plath utilizes a unique structure, point of view, and tone to make her thematic points. Plath uses aspects of satire and sarcasm, and she positions her poetic voice in the hands of those she criticizes. This approach, along with the way she demonstrates objectification with horrific and vivid imagery, makes the poem a powerful indictment of the era’s consumerist and patriarchal treatment of women.

The poem opens without context and in the second-person perspective. The first stanza focuses on physical limitations and needs, quickly revealing that the speaker is a salesperson speaking directly to a consumer, the applicant. The salesperson’s pitch hinges upon a common trick in advertising, which is to identify a potential audience lacking something that the product can fill. The first line of the poem identifies this tactic as the speaker asks, “[A]re you our sort of a person?” (Line 1), meaning are you a person who lacks something? The list of potential deficiencies is trivial. The deficiencies all focus on physical things like a missing eye, fake teeth, an atypical walk, or “Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch” (Line 5). This final line is the most visceral and, for its time, controversial, but it introduces the concept of dehumanization that will appear later in the poem when the salesperson compares the wife to a doll, another fake, rubber thing.

In the second stanza, the speaker expands the pitch by moving from physical to emotional need. The speaker suggests that if the applicant does not need something to fill a physical need, the applicant still needs a hand to fill his own empty hand. This image plays off the traditional romantic image of a couple holding hands but twists it. It is now an image based on an unequal power dynamic: The man sees the woman’s role not as an equal but as an accessory like a fancy watch or jewelry. In addition to this objective role the woman must play, the speaker also claims the wife is “willing / To bring teacups and roll away headaches / And do whatever you tell it” (Lines 11-13). This section introduces another way that the speaker dehumanizes the wife: The speaker refers to her as “it” (Line 13), something that will repeat often as the poem progresses. The use of the informal pronoun is a subtle but powerful way for an oppressor to enforce an unequal power dynamic over another person or group—dehumanizing language strips away humanity and reduces people to the status of a thing instead of a person.

As the poem continues, the speaker’s pitch gets more frantic, and he introduces the rhetorical question, “Will you marry it?” (Line 15), which will slowly evolve, as most pitches do, from a question to a demand.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker insists that the wife can fill any emotional need of the applicant, including the ultimate one, which is to “shut your eyes at the end / And dissolve of sorrow” (Lines 16-17). These lines suggest that the perfect wife must only be obedient and selfless. When the man dies, she is not to live on; instead, she is to be there to take care of him until the end, and when he dies, she is not to have a future of her own. The man can rest easy knowing that he is her entire world, and his death will result only in her own death, as she will dissolve away like salt under water. The use of salty tears carries into the next line, where the speaker claims that they make “new stock from the salt” (Line 18), suggesting that in this society, women are expendable and replaceable. There is no individuality; there is only the purpose they serve: to wait upon their husbands. Without a husband, they are nothing. This mimics the lifespan of any sold product. Its only purpose is to fulfill the needs and desires of its user, and when the user is done with it or gone, the product is deemed useless and discarded into the trash.

Midway through the poem, the speaker offers the applicant a suit. The suit is “Black and stiff, but not a bad fit” (Lines 21). It offers no individualization or expression. It is merely a signifier that the applicant will go along with what is expected of him. The suit, like the wife, fills a need. The wife, in essence, is the suit. The man is “stark naked” (Line 19), meaning he needs something that will allow him to fit in with everyone else. So why not a suit that offers him everything he needs: “waterproof, shatterproof, proof / Against fire and bombs through the roof” (Lines 23-24)? Just like the wife who will soon emerge from the closet, the suit serves the man and protects him. It will be there for him no matter what, and its only function is to allow him to conform to the rigid society of which he is a part.

As the poem comes to a close, the speaker becomes more pushy with the applicant, calling his head empty and demanding that he buy the wife. When he calls the wife to him, she is “(n)aked as paper to start” (Line 30), just as the applicant is stark naked. The wife’s nakedness has two meanings: It suggests that she is a blank canvas—paper—that the applicant can choose to modify however he wishes. She is there to be drawn and painted upon—she is nothing but possibilities for the man. The line also refers to her worth as an object. The speaker claims that she is worth nothing now, but with time and investment, she will become silver and gold. Here, Plath plays on the traditional symbolism of long marriages, where a 25-year anniversary is silver and a 50-year anniversary is gold. In this world, though, it is the wife who increases in value as she selflessly gives herself to the husband year after year. She grows in value like a stock or a piece of art, and her worth is entirely dictated by and related to the husband’s valuation.

The poem ends with the speaker’s final exaggerated pitch as he fully embraces the image of the doll and completely eradicates the wife’s humanity by constantly referring to her as “it” (Line 13). Plath’s final images in the poem focus on two things: “You have a hole, it’s a poultice. / You have an eye, it’s an image” (Lines 37-38). The speaker concludes his pitch by telling the applicant that the wife will be dressing to any wound he has and eye candy whenever his eye desires her. This plays on the traditional “housewife” ideal, which is a woman who exists to serve her husband in a motherly role (cook, clean, sew, heal) and a sexual role (beauty). The speaker mires his pitch in sexism and patriarchy, but Plath presents it in such a casual way that it feels like something one might find in a 1950s infomercial. This is the way she demonstrates the insidious and prevalent way this patriarchal society operates, and it’s an ironic approach washed over in sarcasm because Plath, a woman, writes the poem without incorporating the wife’s voice at all; instead, Plath mocks and criticizes the male-dominated world that perpetuates this system.

Finally, Plath makes one more statement at the end of the poem. While the entire poem mixes anti-consumerism with feminist critique, the last two lines drive the connection home. The speaker tells the applicant that buying a wife is “your last resort” (Line 39). This, along with the badgering nature of the speaker throughout the poem, suggests that even for men in this culture, the pressure to conform to this conservative life makes them products of the larger force of capitalism and consumerism. In the end, this is no longer even a sales pitch; it’s a demand. Plath ends the poem with the speaker not asking if the applicant will marry the wife but with the speaker demanding it, repeating, “Will you marry it, marry it, marry it” (Line 40), with no question mark at the end.