The Applicant

Sylvia Plath’s biography has become almost as famous as her poetry. Much of this is because her life inspired her poetry, and she wrote candidly about her life in her poems. But the other reason is the sensational nature of many aspects of her life. Perhaps most famous, Plath experienced depression for most of her life. Near the end of her life, this depression increased and fueled most of her best poems during this intense period of writing, including “The Applicant."

There are many reasons for this time in Plath’s life being chaotic and tragic. First, she had a miscarriage in 1961, and she claimed that Ted Hughes, her husband, abused her just two days before the event. Next, Plath discovered that Hughes was having an affair with German Jewish writer Assia Wevill, and he refused to end the affair. As a result of this, Plath and Hughes separated, and Plath took her two young children to live together in a small flat.

“The Applicant” presents a negative view of marriage: Women are merely commodities that men buy and sell. The poem also takes place during the heyday of conservative social values, where women were expected to be subservient to men. This social order took off especially in the US after WWII when men returned home from the war, and women, who had supported the war effort by working in factories at home, were driven out of the workforce and into the domestic sphere.