The Applicant Literary Elements

The speaker is a salesperson or businessperson interviewing a potential applicant, both attempting to assess his fitness for marriage and attempting to convince him of the need to marry.

Eight free-verse quintains

The poem contains a great many metaphors and similes, with the job interview itself serving as an extended metaphor for the courting and engagement process. Other metaphors include the comparison of a woman to a doll or a poultice, while similes include the comparison of a woman to paper. In general, these uses of figurative language display the speaker's eagerness to dehumanize women, since he constantly likens the wife to inanimate objects and tools.

In describing the ill-fitting marriage suit, assonance is combined with repetition and parallelism to replicate the pattern of advertising pitches: “It is waterproof, shatterproof." The assonance in the phrase "To fill it and willing," draws a parallel between the two wifely roles described: emotional fulfillment and enthusiastic submission. Meanwhile, alliterative, sibilant S sounds in the phrase "Stitches to show something's missing?" contribute to the sense that the speaker is slippery and untrustworthy.

The poem's greatest irony is its revelation that marriage tends to harm husbands as well as wives. The speaker repeatedly stresses that a wife will fulfill the applicant's every need, making clear that women are ill-served and overworked by the institution. But the speaker is also cruel and manipulative to the applicant, who appears to cry during the interview, and Plath suggests that men—rather than benefiting from wives' labor—in fact are numbed and deprived of humanity by it.

In a second irony, Plath suggests that, despite the fact that the applicant can ostensibly choose whether or not to marry, he actually has no choice. The speaker wheedles, threatens, and repeats in order to wear down resistance. This indicates that, while marriage is not a choice, it is presented as one—and this in itself causes pain to potential husbands and wives.

Satire/Social commentary

The setting is implied to be an office or a commercial setting in twentieth-century Britain or America

The tone mimics corporate or advertising dialect, veering from bombastic to ruthless

The protagonist is the applicant, whose (implied) choices and feelings guide the poem's arc. The antagonist is the speaker, who manipulates the applicant and the woman to reinforce norms around marriage.

The conflict is that between the speaker, who wishes for the applicant to marry, and the applicant, who appears skeptical or resistant. Interestingly, the woman being advertised for marriage appears neutral or disinterested, reflecting women's total lack of agency in marriage.

The poem comes to a climax in its closing lines, as the speaker repeats the refrain "marry it"—no longer as a question, as he did earlier, but now as a command, indicating that the applicant will have to either obey or put up a fight to avoid entering a normative marriage.

The speaker's initial questions about the applicant's various body parts foreshadow the more aggressive fragmentation and objectification of the wife.

Death is described using understated, euphemistic images: “To thumb shut your eyes at the end / And dissolve of sorrow," and "they'll bury you in it."

The phrase "Living Doll" may allude to the 1959 hit song “Living Doll” by Cliff Richard. The poem's references to the nudity and subsequent clothing of men and women allude to the book of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve become ashamed of their nudity and seek out clothing. The speaker's comparisons of a woman to paper, gold, and silver allude to the tradition of couples giving one another prescribed gifts on specific marriage anniversaries.

The poem uses synecdoche to describe a woman solely by referring to her hand, and uses metonymy to symbolically represent the man through descriptions of a suit.

A type of personification occurs when the wife being sold to the applicant is referred to by the speaker in three straight lines as the “It” with which each line begins. The use of this pronoun raises the question of whether the wife is actually to be considered human at all or merely a humanoid machine invested with human attributes.

The speaker's sales pitches are hyperbolic, reflecting both dishonesty and eagerness with reassurances that the woman will "do whatever you tell it" and threats that marriage is a "last resort."

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