In "The Applicant," Sylvia Plath critiques a particularly twentieth-century, Western model of marriage. She paints a picture of a world in which women are expected to serve their husband's every need, sacrificing their own individuality and personhood to do everything from soothing their husband's headaches to cleaning their home. For their part, Plath hints, these husbands are expected to accept total alienation from their own bodily and emotional realities, allowing their wives to take charge of those realms. In a particularly twentieth-century twist, the marriage portrayed in "The Applicant" is framed as more or less a choice, made by two individuals—yet, when the applicant appears uninterested in marriage, the speaker makes clear that he has no other options. But is Plath's portrayal of marriage unique to her Anglo-American, postwar milieu, or is it applicable to other eras? Here, we'll examine a few of those other eras and compare them to the version of married life described in the poem.
In the European Middle Ages, women were expected not to have sex outside of marriage. While pre-marital sex was in reality not uncommon, especially for non-noble Europeans, women generally faced two socially endorsed options: celibacy through entering the church, or marriage and motherhood. Both girls and boys were legally considered eligible for marriage after puberty, according to Canon Law. But contrary to much popular belief, they did not generally marry until they were older. While members of the nobility would often marry or betroth children as young as seven or eight years old, treating marriage as an economic and political tool to unite powerful families, these marriages were unconsummated until the children's teen years. Commoners were likelier to wed in their late teens or early twenties, and were technically allowed to choose spouses of their own accord—though communities tended to be small, with limited options, and choices were generally influenced by social norms and familial pressure. Still, within both noble and peasant marriages, women were broadly expected to play diplomatic and submissive roles. Widows and unmarried women, however, were granted the same legal status as men.
During the nineteenth century, however, newly discrete and defined gender roles came into being—especially for the wealthy. The advent of industrialization created a bifurcated world, in which men were expected to work in commercial settings outside of the home. Women, in the meantime, took on new domestic roles, and were viewed as guardians of an idealized and soothing domestic space to be used as a refuge by their husbands. Accompanying this change were new, fitting ideas not only about how men and women should serve one another, but also how their minds worked. Women, now treated as creators and protectors of domestic safety, were assumed to have superior morality (if inferior intellect) and were often described as moral guides for their husbands. Meanwhile, while premarital sex was still frowned upon, men tended to go against this particular social expectation by visiting brothels. And, as with their medieval predecessors, those outside of the upper classes were far less likely to abide by these sexual norms: the stereotype of a prudish Victorian society is based on the assumption that all people treated ideals as strict, unbreakable rules. People typically married in their twenties, and grooms—who were exhorted to save money before marriage—were usually a few years older than their brides.
Sylvia Plath wrote "The Applicant" in the early 1960s, following the tumult of World War II. Some historians have suggested that the postwar era was a time of backlash against the instability and change created by war. Over the course of World War II, unprecedented numbers of women in both the U.S. and England (the countries where Plath spent her life) were left singlehandedly in charge of their households while their husbands fought in the war. Because of the jobs these men left behind—and because of the need for wartime gear and resources—women were encouraged to join the workforce, offering them newfound financial and social independence. This transition was enabled in part through the creation of workplace childcare services and labor unions. Yet despite these strides, war was traumatic and frightening. Following the mass return of men from war, women—especially white and middle-class women, who were considered standard-bearers of femininity—were encouraged through both social and material pressure to return to the home and to the "separate spheres" of the Victorian era.
Ideals of marriage, and of gender and sexual norms within marriage, have shifted time and again since the medieval era. Perhaps the greatest constant has been rebellion against prevailing norms: regardless of the behavior encouraged in a given era, actual human behavior has tended to be diverse and unpredictable. Plath's poem, and its enthusiastic reception and publication, certainly reflect a hunger for alternative models of marriage and gender in post-war England.
