Sylvia Plath- The Applicant

Plath’s early poetry is well-crafted and traditional, but her late poems exhibit a desperate brilliance and photo-feminist cry of anguish. In ‘The Applicant’, Plath exposes the emptiness in the role of wife, who is reduced to an inanimate ‘it’ (VanSpanckeren 1988: p 96). She is trying to portray the way that women are represented in both marriage and society. Plath is showing how the marriage of a man and women can sometimes be seen as a business contract or, rather, a purchase. This is shown throughout the poem with lines such as, ‘Will you marry it? It is waterproof, shatterproof, Proof against fire and bombs through the roof (lines 22-24)’. Plath has also shown to us clearly how she believes that women in society are seen as separate parts and not as complete beings. She is also trying to convey that women are seen as renewable, and you can make new ones from

The tone of ‘The Applicant’ tends to be quite light-hearted and humorous. Sylvia Plath has used this approach as a way to convey her concerns without shocking the readers with the harshness of what she is actually trying to say. This light-hearted tone enables her to cover a variety of serious aspects within the poem while still keeping the readers interested. Plath does, however, mention death twice in ‘The Applicant’, which adds darkness to the humour. This clever touch adds a slight hint of the seriousness that is ‘The Applicant’.

the dissolved sorrow of the previous. This is shown in lines 16-18; ‘To thumb shut your eyes at the end And dissolve of sorrow. We make new stock from the salt’.

Silvia Plath has used many poetic methods to help propel the concerns of her poem. The first of such is the structural layout of ‘The Applicant’. The structural organization of this poem is complicated. Plath first offers some regularity through a rough organization of eight stanzas, each into five lines, but then suggests an inner struggle to problemise that regularity by enjambing the last lines of five of her stanzas into the next and employing no formal or regular rhyme scheme. Her play with the boundaries and flexibility of structure, in many ways, mirror her intertextual ambiguity of gender and subject identity in the text of the poem (Sheible

Some topics in this essay:
Sylvia Plath, Silvia Plath, Applicant’ Plath, Plath’s Poem, ‘the applicant’, sylvia plath, plath able, throughout poem, role women, language ‘the, masculine traits, imagery tone, poetic methods, ‘will marry,