Gender Norms and Marriage
This poem revolves around the process by which two people decide to marry, and it has three characters: a possible husband, a possible wife, and an external entity pressuring and incentivizing the two to marry. The amount of agency and input granted to each one of these characters hints at uneven power dynamics between each person involved in a marriage, or more broadly, a family with traditional gender roles. The applicant, a man, is addressed but never actually heard. Moreover, the speaker continually hints that he is vulnerable and broken, in need of a wife to make him safer and more whole. The woman, meanwhile, is neither heard from nor, for the most part, addressed: she is referred to with the pronoun "it" as a useful object capable of making the man safer and more whole. The mysterious speaker is the only character whose voice actually appears in the poem, suggesting that neither wives nor husbands truly are served by or powerful in marriage—rather, larger entities pressure husbands and wives into gender roles to suit their own needs. Meanwhile, their respective treatments in this poem suggest that wives and women are commodified and used, while husbands and men are cloistered and spoiled to a suffocating degree.
The Individual’s Shortcomings
The speaker goes out of their way to highlight the flaws of the applicant. They suggest that a wife will “fix” the applicant and fill any missing areas in his life, ensuring his comfort. Interestingly, the speaker also suggests that the applicant will only be allowed to take a wife if he is somehow flawed or empty, since the purpose of a wife, according to the speaker, is to fix the applicant's problems. Plath critiques this model of relationships, in which spouses are expected to wholly compensate for or obscure their partners' flaws—and in which prior happiness or wholeness is seen as disqualifying in the romantic realm. She suggests that it is unreasonably and even immorally utilitarian, offering surface-level fixes for deeper problems while failing to provide companionship for either men or women.
Dehumanization
The applicant in this poem is treated rudely and dismissively, but the woman is entirely dehumanized, treated as a tool or object rather than a person. The most heavy-handed way in which Plath hints at this dehumanization is through the use of the pronoun "it," usually used to describe inanimate objects. But every part of the speaker's description is dehumanizing. His many descriptions of what the woman can do—rather than how she feels or acts—reduce her to a useful tool. He even refers to women as "stock," making explicit what is implied throughout the interview—that he is essentially selling the wife as property. Finally, he repeatedly uses metaphorical language to compare her to different objects or fragment her into body parts, effectively denying her the status of a full and living person.
