Sylvia Plath's poem "The Applicant," a satirical exploration of marriage and gender norms framed through the context of a surreal interview, originally appeared in The London Magazine before being published in Plath's 1965 collection Ariel. Though Ariel was published posthumously, it contained a number of Plath's most enduring works, with "The Applicant" appearing alongside such works as "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy."
Written in eight free-verse quintains, the poem's speaker is a bombastic and menacing businessman. He addresses an "applicant," assessing his suitability for marriage and urging him to take a wife. The speaker repeatedly emphasizes the submissiveness and usefulness of women, borrowing from the hyperbolic language of the advertising and corporate world to make his pitch. Through this unexpected format, Plath emphasizes the relationship between domestic and commercial life, suggesting that normative marriages oppress, overwork, and commodify women while simultaneously encouraging male alienation and incompetence. Plath herself described the poem's speaker as "an executive, a sort of exacting super-salesman. He wants to be sure the applicant for his marvellous product really needs it and will treat it right."
Critics have suggested that "The Applicant," like much of Plath's writing, was directly informed by her own experiences and relationships—in this case her tumultuous marriage to the poet Ted Hughes. At the same time, it responds to wider trends and gendered conventions in post-war British and American cultures. In this period, a backlash against women's new wartime roles led to a renewed valorization of the housewife and a broad social commitment to the ideology of separate, gendered spaces.
"The Applicant" is simultaneously an imaginative, even fanciful portrayal of an alternative reality and a searing critique of gender norms.
