Speaker

The speaker of the poem is plausibly construed as a stand-in for the bourgeois patriarch of the social world with which Plath was intimately familiar. He is a figure of ridicule and contempt in the poem. His language is crudely transactional and debasing to the applicant and the bride who is callously offered up for marriage as if she were a commodity.

Applicant

The applicant is addressed throughout much of the poem by the speaker. He is debased and humiliated by having his deficiencies held up before him by the speaker, who suggests that a bride will cure him of his ills and ensure a secure and stable future for him. In the penultimate line of the poem the applicant is addressed in an explicitly gendered and generational way: “My boy, it’s your last resort” (39). The speaker thus confirms that the applicant is male and likely of...