Analysis Of Sylvia Plath's 'The Applicant'

Ariel, a collection of Sylvia Plath’s poems released in 1965 after her suicidal death, transmit melancholy and agony to anyone who reads it. This depression in her poems was caused after her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, left her for another woman. Plath’s writing style has always been criticized for being excessively autobiographical and because of her continuous suicidal suspicion. However, Plath has never been criticized for the irony of the poem “The Applicant” compared to the rest of her poems.
“The Applicant” talks about a consumer based society, condemned by Plath for objectifying women. She starts the poem directly speaking to the reader, making the reader the person being interviewed. The speaker is not only one person, as it uses third person to refer to themselves; it is society as a whole. This …show more content…
In the poem “Daddy”, also recognized as being one of her best poems, she describes her husband as being “the black man who bit my pretty read heart in two” (Stanza 12). It is understandable for someone who is left by their partner to get gloomy, but what I do not think is adequate is her prey attitude. In “The Applicant” she criticizes society for making women have this image of being weak and dependent, when really, she is the exact representation of it. For example, in stanza 15 of “Daddy”, she refers her husband as “the vampire who said he was you and drank my blood for a year”. In this line Plath is blaming her father for her marriage with Ted, and believes that if her father hadn’t died, she would have never married a man like her father. The fact that she called Ted a ‘vampire’, proofs that she was immensely dependent on him. Just as the known tale goes: when you are “bitten by a vampire” it means you become owned by