Sylvia Plath’s “The Applicant”

On October 11, 1962, the English poet Ted Hughes abandoned his American wife, Sylvia Plath, and their children. On the same day, Plath wrote “The Applicant,” a hymn to female independence in the form of a withering critique of marriage.

The poem begins like a dating agency advertisement. “First, are you our sort of a person?” indicates that this agency specializes in finding wives for invalids: “Do you wear / A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, / A brace or a hook, / Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch.” These physical details recall Otto Dix’s famous painting The Skat Players, a post-war German painting that depicts mutilated World War I veterans. 

In June 1961, Plath visited the seaside town of Berck in northern France, where many soldiers, including Algerian War veterans, were convalescing. This trip inspired her poem “Berck-Plage,” which also contains references to limbs and mutilated body parts. In “Berck-Plage,” the speaker is obsessed with a priest’s amputated toe. Plath's father lost a leg because of gangrene caused by untreated diabetes. Plath probably wrote “The Applicant” with the mutilated veterans from Berck in mind, mingling the incomplete male body with questions about insecure masculinity.

Both “The Applicant” and “Berck-Plage” also conjure the figure of a woman assisting an invalid man by using two keywords readers can find throughout the poems Plath wrote between the summer of 1962 and February 1963: crutch (in “The Applicant” and “Berck-Plage”) and hook (in “Berck-Plage,” “The Other,” “Burning the Letters,” “The Detective,” “The Applicant,” “The Jailer,” “Ariel,” “The Munich Mannequins,” “Gigolo,” and “Mystic”). This recurring vocabulary and the image of mended bodies shows that Plath was preoccupied with healing at the time and with who was doing the healing: women.

The speaker-salesman of “The Applicant” wants to confirm that his potential customer is truly an invalid by asking if he has “Stitches to show something’s missing?” After the check, the poem makes clear that the applicant does not have the right profile for this agency as his body is intact. The man is incomplete, but his incompleteness needs to be compensated for by a wife, not by his own body. He is told to “stop crying” when the salesman replies, “How can we give you a thing?” Throughout the poem, the man is described humanely while the wife is referred to as a “thing,” “it,” or “that.” This “living doll” is objectified in the literal sense of the word; the speaker describes her as an object that “works” and can be shaped according to the man’s desires. The wife is then handed over to the customer. She will willingly “bring teacups and roll away headaches / And do whatever you tell it,” looking after her husband physically and emotionally as if he were a little boy again.

Like any product, the woman can be returned if defective. When the man dies, she “is guaranteed // To thumb shut your eyes at the end / And dissolve of sorrow” and to be a good widow mourning her husband and dying of sorrow after his death. This line echoes Plath’s own sorrow at being deserted by her husband, but the irony indicates her outrage at male dominance in marriage. The salesman quickly reassures the customer that his wife will be recycled once dissolved: “We make new stock from the salt.” Salt is a disinfectant that helps the body heal a wound, but salt on a wound burns tremendously. Plath may have chosen salt to symbolize painful healing. 

The man appears to be “stark naked,” a roundabout way of saying that he shows himself vulnerable in front of the salesman or that he is incomplete without a wife. He begs for a wife to console and serve him. The speaker tries to sell him a black suit, an interesting detail as Plath often associated black clothes with negative connotations in her writing: oppressive black gowns in the short story “Stone Boy with Dolphin” ( “It always makes me feel as if I’m in a straightjacket”) or the poem “Three Women” (“My black gown is a little funeral: / It shows I am serious”); the claustrophobic black shoe of “Daddy”; and the old women of “Old Ladies’ Home” “Sharded in black, like beetles.” In “The Applicant,” marriage is cast as a business transaction with a consumer's needs to be met. The salesman asks the applicant if he wants to marry objects (a suit, a living doll) and to choose a wife the way he would buy an object in a shop. 

As in “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” written just a few days later in 1962, Plath played with sounds to create rhythmic effects. The speaker uses sales language with rhymes and repetitions to manipulate his customer. He hammers his arguments into the applicant’s head to convince him that this product/wife is exactly what he needs: “It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof / Against fire and bombs through the roof.” Plath’s use of rhyme (“waterproof,” “roof”) and alliteration (in/f/ and /t/) makes these lines more memorable and impactful. This poem should be read along with “Daddy,” another entry in her landmark collection Ariel, as Plath wrote these two musically and rhythmically accomplished poems, both concerned with male dominance, over the course of two days. Other than a few irregularities, Plath chose a trochaic meter for “The Applicant.” The succession of one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable reinforces the aggressiveness of the salesman trying to sell his product at all cost: “Black and stiff, but not a bad fit. / Will you marry it?”

The “fire and bombs” foreshadow the spectrum of war that Plath fully explores in the poem “Daddy.” For these two days, Plath wrote with sorrow about the two men who she felt made her suffer the most: her husband, Ted Hughes, by cheating on her and abandoning her and their two children, and her father, Otto Plath, by dying when she was eight years old. “The Applicant” and “Daddy” are direct attacks against patriarchal figures Plath felt oppressed her with their male privilege. 

Plath was invited to record “The Applicant” for the BBC Radio Three Programme, and her reading included a short introduction: “In this poem, […] the speaker is an executive, a sort of exacting super-salesman. He wants to be sure the applicant for his marvelous product really needs it and will treat it right.”¹ Plath’s introductions to her poems never revealed their full meaning, but her allusion to treating the product right recalls a father wanting the best husband for his daughter, which aligns the salesman with the father. During the wedding ceremony, the father symbolically hands his daughter over to the groom, another patriarchal tradition of property exchange that denies the woman agency over her fate. 

In “The Applicant,” the salesman explains that the future wife is “Naked as paper to start”; in other words, like Pygmalion the sculptor, the groom can shape his living artwork according to his needs. With her characteristic sense of humour, Plath used irony to mock the 1960s stereotype of the intellectually limited wife: the salesman politely points out to the man that “your head, excuse me, is empty.” 

The future wife finally emerges from the closet and appears as the solution against the man’s stupidity. Despite appearances, she will be the mastermind of the couple, thus reversing the gender trope of the wife who cannot think for herself and needs her husband to tell her what to do.

The salesman explains the wife’s features as if she were a food processor or a vacuum cleaner: “It can sew, it can cook, / It can talk, talk, talk.” These lines directly echo Plath’s journal, in which she confessed in an entry written before July 1953²

to realize that most American males worship woman as a sex machine with rounded breasts and a convenient opening in the vagina, and as a painted doll who shouldn’t have a thought in her pretty head other than cooking a steak dinner and comforting him in bed after a 9-5 day at a routine business job.³

In “The Applicant,” the painted doll is expected to be brainless, to cook, and to take care of her husband. Plath complained about the limited options for women in 1950s America in her famous novel The Bell Jar:

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard’s kitchen mat.⁴

The line “But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver, / In fifty, gold” is an allusion to the tradition of wedding anniversary names and represents a bitter blow to Plath who, as a freshly separated woman, will never celebrate her silver or gold wedding anniversaries. Three weeks after writing “The Applicant,” she wrote in the poem “The Couriers” “A ring of gold with the sun in it? / Lies. Lies and a grief.” The metaphor of the wedding anniversaries is also a reminder that the wife is guaranteed to last for a long time, like any purchased product. 

The line “My boy, it’s your last resort” is the salesman’s strategy to sign the deal or a real indication that the customer is a desperate case who should hurry to accept this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The salesman asks one last time “Will you marry it, marry it, marry it” with no question mark at the end, as if he asks this question of men all day long at work, to force the customer to buy this woman or perhaps as a final indication of irony.

In “The Applicant,” Plath suggests that men have a consumerist approach to marriage: women are expected to provide services—cooking, housekeeping, childcare, and comfort—in exchange for financial security, although the benefits of marriage for women are not even mentioned in this poem and the focus is entirely on the man’s well-being. As with Plath’s other poems, “The Applicant” interrogates gender relations and the power dynamics between married people. Plath shared her disillusioned vision of marriage and criticized how men reduce women to mere objects. Plath died just as second-wave feminism started, but she was well aware of the limitations that marriage imposed on women, and she later became a symbol of feminist poetry. The grotesque situation depicted in “The Applicant” and the satirical tone Plath used were, likely, a cathartic way for her to cope with the failure of her marriage while acting as a warning for future female readers.