Summary
After offering the applicant a hand, the speaker explains the purpose of that hand: it will fill the applicant's empty one, carry cups of tea to the applicant, and help soothe the applicant's headaches. Generally, the speaker says, the hand will do whatever the speaker asks of it. After explaining the uses of that hand, the interviewer asks the applicant if he would like to marry it. The speaker mentions that the hand is guaranteed to close the speaker's eyes when he dies and then to dissolve due to grief. Rather enigmatically, the speaker claims "we make new stock from the salt," suggesting that the wives' tears are re-used to make new wives. The speaker then stops describing the hand, turning attention to the applicant's nudity and offering him a suit.
Analysis
The third stanza of the poem answers a question raised by the previous two: what is the purpose of this interview? We see that the applicant is potentially being offered a wife. The hand is revealed, via synecdoche (a poetic device in which a part of something represents its whole), to be a stand-in for a woman. It's not stated explicitly that the applicant is a man and that the "hand" belongs to a woman. Rather, it's revealed through context clues. The hand performs a number of domestic tasks, like making tea and caring for the sick, usually associated with femininity and especially with the role of a wife. Moreover, the general idea that the hand will obey the applicant alludes to traditional gender hierarchies in marriage, and perhaps more specifically to protestant wedding vows in which wives pledge obedience to husbands.
At this point, it's evident that Plath is critiquing these gendered marital hierarchies. She makes this type of marriage seem like a bad deal for women, not only because she implies that wives do a lot of difficult and thankless work, but because of her use of synecdoche itself. By representing women as a disembodied hand, Plath suggests that marriage fragments and dehumanizes wives, reducing them to body parts, which can be used like tools by their husbands. The woman, because of synecdoche, ceases to be represented as a person at all and is objectified in a highly literal way. The fragmenting of the female body through synecdoche is echoed here through the fragmenting of sentences themselves. Enjambment, a poetic device in which line breaks divide phrases, produces jarring and unnatural-feeling sentences, mimicking the uncomfortable, unnatural expectations being foisted upon female bodies.
Moreover, the speaker explains that the wives are so distraught following their husbands' deaths that they literally dissolve in a pool of their own tears, evidently left with nothing to live for. The speaker is enthusiastic in describing this scenario, apparently sure that the applicant will be tempted by it, and will find the idea of a woman so completely devoted to him appealing. The speaker also describes the process of gathering the dissolved women's tears to create new "stock." While the word stock is reminiscent of livestock or inventory at a store, further stressing the woman's status as property, the description as a whole hints that the speaker views women as interchangeable: one can be made out of another's dissolved remains. While their husbands are individuals, worthy of intense and self-destructive mourning, these women are not.
Though Plath makes clear that women, entirely deprived of personhood, are the most victimized people in this situation, she also suggests that marriage can be distressing for men. After all, the male applicant here never gets a chance to speak for himself. He's faced with an unending stream of questions, which the interrogator often seems to answer on his behalf. The questioner explains that marriage will help make up for anything "missing" in the man's life by bringing him cups of tea and soothing his headaches—a rather unconvincing argument. The applicant is also humiliated for his nudity and urged to hide it with a suit, his own body controlled, if not entirely objectified and fragmented, by this process. This raises an important question: if both the man and the woman are ill-served by this model of marriage, then who benefits? Or, to phrase the question differently, who exactly is this interviewer?
