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The well-renowned poet Sylvia Plath is recognised not only through her powerful verses but also through her distressed life, plagued by agonizing circumstances. Her poems are about encounters she faced through her life, and hence her poems have strong and sometimes disturbing imagery. However, the poem “The Applicant” reflects a depth of emotion, seemingly out of place in comparison to the anguish seen in her other poems, called humor. Her particular style is intermingled with sarcasm and sharp comments on the state of marriage. By highlighting stereotypical roles, Plath’s words embody a caustic irony, which in turn, reflects the decade in which the poem was written, a crucial era of awakening of repressed feminism in the 1960s. Marriage is therefore portrayed as a narrow existence perpetrated by weak men and obliviously tolerant women within cultural paradigms. Plath mocks, or rather ridicules, the conventional notions of the society for what a man should look for in his wife, making a statement against the ideals society imposes on what true functions a wife and husband serve. The man, the “applicant,” is introduced, by the narrator, Plath, to three women, having different qualities, from which he must chose to marry one of them.
The title, “The Applicant”, gives the reader an immediate impression of someone applying for a particular post or job. When the applicant arrives, he is asked a series of seemingly bizarre questions by the narrator. He is asked, first, whether he is “our sort of person,” and then she asks him what fallacies he possesses any or whether something is lacking in him. Hence she implies that he would only fit in if he lacked certain things. She asks if he wears “A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, a brace or a hook” thus asking him whether he has any such flaws. This is a complete contradiction to our ordinary perception of questions asked to an applicant. Thus, by the first stanza itself we know that the poet is clearly not talking...