Point of View

“The Applicant” is narrated from the perspective of a speaker who represents the obtuseness of bourgeois patriarchy. While never explicitly gendered, the speaker’s language and tone are suggestive of a reactionary social figure such as a bourgeois father, who is trying to reproduce the bourgeois family and ensure the stability of property relations through it.

Sylvia Plath ridicules this perspective by attributing a crude and an overtly transactional tenor to his speech. The author, who herself separated from her husband prior to composing the poem, suggests that the inner voice of the poem comes from the hawked bride, commenting on the cruelty and absurdity of the situation in which she finds herself.

The perspective of the applicant, who may be plausibly construed as a young bourgeois male aspiring to preserve his affluence and social position, is never explicitly represented in the verse. However, his...