Write a critical analysis of Plath’s “The Applicant”, bearing in mind the voice of the speaker.
The Applicant hinges upon the central idea of how human relations are a cynical filling of a physical need, and how marriage is the last resort of crippled personalities, where women are no more than a set of appendages and functions. The Speaker addresses the readers directly, with the constant referral to ‘you’, making the poem even more disturbing with the realization that we too are the potential applicants, where the fragmentation of alienation of the applicant are also part of our world. The interrogative, formal tone begins the poem as an interview, “First, are you our sort of person?” where the applicant is harshly torn down as parts which characterize his self, as if he is a cog in a bureaucratized market place forced to engage in the exchange because of his own inadequacies. The language of market executives runs through the poem, with the repetition of the word ‘proof’, like the persuasive tone of one trying to promote a product incessantly, an echo ringing in the head, it is a necessity. At the end of the poem it even becomes a sharp command, with the removal of a question mark it becomes no more than a necessity, an order, we are forced into marriage as a necessary social institution to plaster our fractured souls.
The crippling inadequacies of the self are constant features of the poem, where people are no more than hollow, empty personalities. Thus the poem begins with the imagery of dehumanization, a synecdoche that reduces the body to mere cogs and functions. The applicant is questioned whether he has ‘a glass eye, false teeth or a crutch’, he is ineffectual and aimless, his basic functions to recognize, interpret or even digest are removed, he is but a jumbled heap of parts. There is nothing to sustain his whole, he has to be propped up like a puppet with a ‘brace or hook’, all these artificial materials remove a sense of humanity from his character, he is absent from flesh or even homogeneity in his parts, his basic functions are sterile. Even his sexual identity is questioned by the ‘rubber breasts or rubber crotch’, the flippant tone of the word ‘rubber’ sadistically pokes fun at his sterility and reduces sexual needs to a mere function which bears no real purpose either than for procreation in a mechanized world. Furthermore, the speaker does not differentiate between male and female, there is no actual difference in them underneath, they are both ‘naked’, a messy collection of fragmented parts. The sharp ‘k’ sound in ‘stark naked’ further emphasizes in harsh and cold tones the applicant’s emptiness and lack of an identity, like the woman who is like ‘paper’, absent of a throbbing, living soul, white and barren. The repetition of the word ‘Empty? Empty’ further reinforces that fact, there is a kind of finality in it which marks the applicant and the woman herself, and furthermore the pre-note of repetition in ‘No? No’ gives us the feeling that the speaker already expected the answer and the statements before were merely rhetorical questions, meant to derogate and expose blatant the applicant’s already present inadequacies. There is no soul to the applicant, his head is ‘empty’, absent of any mental substance, opinions or memories, and he is controlled by the insistent, repetitive voice of the speaker who exposes his inadequacies.
