Defamiliarization of “The Applicant:” Marriage and Gender M Callaway College

Sylvia Plath’s “The Applicant,” is a 40-line poem first published in The London Magazine in 1963, then later republished posthumously in Plath’s second poetry collection, Ariel, in 1965. Her poem describes an unknown, presumably eligible male who undergoes an application process to be married to an unknown female. The female presented to the male is described as a “living doll” that “works and has nothing wrong with it,” the narrator of the poem urges the male to marry “it” as it is his last resort of getting married. Plath’s poem perplexes its readers by turning marital courtship into a superficial process rather than having it remain an intimate gesture, which is present in this specific passage for example,

Will you marry it? …

(…)

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.

You have a hole, it's a poultice.

You have an eye, it's an image.

My boy, it's your last resort.

Will you marry it, marry it, marry it. (Plath 14-40)

Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization” provides a useful way to dissect Plath’s nontraditional courting perspective. He states, “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known … Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the...