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    A Study Guide for Sylvia Plath's "The Applicant"
    A Study Guide for Sylvia Plath's "The Applicant"
    A Study Guide for Sylvia Plath's "The Applicant"
    Ebook31 pages21 minutes

    A Study Guide for Sylvia Plath's "The Applicant"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Sylvia Plath's "The Applicant", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Studentsfor all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJan 18, 2018
    ISBN9781535846035
    A Study Guide for Sylvia Plath's "The Applicant"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Sylvia Plath's "The Applicant" - Gale

      17

      The Applicant

      Sylvia Plath

      1965

      Introduction

      Sylvia Plath's poem The Applicant, written on October 11, 1962, during a profoundly productive period just before her suicide, was first published posthumously in Ariel in 1965. The poem features an aggressive salesman as its speaker, interviewing an applicant for his miracle product: marriage. At once dark and humorous, the poem's blistering tone toward marriage spares neither the unwitting groom nor the bride—who is presented as a mindless doll, an it, who emerges from a closet when called to do whatever it is told. A shocking satire of the Cold War domestic ideology of the early 1960s that muddled the domestic sphere with consumer culture, The Applicant turns the stereotypical advertising of the time on its head. Rather than advertise a product to a housewife, the housewife herself becomes a product to be bought and sold. Plath's genius is in full plume in this searing poem that seems to laugh out loud to keep from weeping.

      The poem appears in Ariel: The Restored Edition, Harper Perennial, 2004, pp. 11–12.

      Author Biography

      Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father, Otto, was a German immigrant and a professor of biology at Boston University. He died when Plath was eight years old following a long illness. Her mother, Aurelia, taught medical-secretarial training at Boston University and raised Plath and her younger brother. Plath excelled in school from an early age. Her first short story was published in Seventeen in 1950, and she enrolled in Smith College that same year. Along with regular publications in Seventeen, she won the 1951 Mademoiselle fiction contest and served on the editorial board of the Smith Review. She was published in the Christian Science Monitor and Harper's, held

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