Sylvia Plath & the Institution of Marriage

Sylvia Plath is known as a confessional poet. In particular, much of her poetry revolves around the emotional toll of family relationships, such as she experiences as a wife and mother. Though the poems are of course not all exactly the same, for the most part they do all feature speakers where some component of the poem is related to their feelings or state of mind. "The Applicant" is interesting in that the speaker is less an individual and more a kind of collective that addresses the poem's subject

It's clear from the first line of "The Applicant" that the applicant is a man applying for the position of husband. In that same stanza, the speaker lays out the criteria for applicants, "our sort of a person" (1). They must "show something's missing" (6), meaning that people, specifically men, are expected to be unfulfilled until married, until they find wife, "a hand / To fill [theirs] and willing / To bring teacups and roll away headaches" (10-12). This description is also the first introduction to the wife, a character whose compliance "is guaranteed" (15). She is "A living doll" (33). Unlike the man, who at the very least has the autonomy to apply for marriage, the woman in this paradigm is merely a hand, a doll, something to fill the man's "hole" (37), his "last resort" (39). Based on this construction of the wife, "The Applicant" takes on another dimension. Though it seems at first like the man is applying for marriage due to his own autonomy, by the last stanza it is clear that in reality the speaker of the poem is trying to construct the model of marriage in a way that will convince the man that he needs it, that he will be fulfilled by it. The speaker is trying to compel the man into marriage through a series of  symbolic images. The first of these is the woman's hand, the second is the "waterproof, shatterproof" (23) suit, and the last is the living doll that's to be his wife. These constructions, ideas about marriage's purpose and what's expected in a marriage form what sociologists call the institution of marriage. Through "The Applicant," Plath reflects an image of marriage as an institution during the 1950s in America, a subject which has also been discussed at length in sociological research.

Andrew Cherlin chronicles the evolution of the American institution of marriage into the 20th century in "The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage." Cherlin's contention is that the institution of marriage in the United States has so far existed in three stages. The first is the "institutional marriage" which refers to the pre-World War II idea of marriage as a compulsory business transaction (Cherlin 851). Though there are remnants of this idea in "The Applicant," especially in the title, in the poem Plath is speaking more to the second stage, the "companionate marriage." The companionate marriage is the idealized, "single-earner, breadwinner-homemaker marriage that flourished in the 1950s" (Cherlin 851). This is the dynamic Plath refers to when she juxtaposes the applicant's suit against the "living doll" (33) that "can sew... can cook / ...can talk, talk, talk" (34-35). Though, as Cherlin points out, the companionate marriages were an improvement over institutional marriages in that spouses were "supposed to be each other's companions-friends, lovers-to an extent not imagined by the spouses in the institutional marriages of the previous era" (851), the strict definitions of the homemaker and breadwinner roles could be oppressive, such as in "The Applicant." The subject of the poem is asked to marry not just the woman but also the suit because the suit represents his role as the man and the provider. The suit is "black and stiff" (21); it constricts the speaker as does his role, metaphorically speaking.  

There is a silver lining, as Cherlin continues past the companionate marriage of "The Applicant" and into the third stage, the "individualized marriage." This version of marriage, Cherlin contends, is deinstitutionalized, meaning the rules society places about what a marriage should look like and what it means are relaxed or nonexistent (848). This means that the subject in "The Applicant" wouldn't feel compelled to listen to the speaker. If he didn't want to think about marriage, or wear a suit he wouldn't have to. Similarly, the woman would be a living human, not a doll, with agency. The result, Cherlin concludes, is that the compulsory feeling of marriage has eroded making it instead "a marker  prestige and personal achievement" (848).

Works Cited

Cherlin, Andrew J. "The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage." Journal of Marriage 
             and Family 66.4 (2004): 848-61. JSTOR. Web. 21 Nov. 2015.
Plath, Sylvia. "The Applicant." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 8th ed. Vol. 

             D. New York/London: W.W. Norton, 2012. Print.

NOTE: I really just give an overview of Cherlin's research. It's worth checking out the full text (see the Works Cited) to get the full scope of his ideas.