"The Applicant" / "Lady Lazarus"

Link To Poems

• The Applicant
• Lady Lazarus

An Introduction

The impersonal rendering of the aspiring groom as ‘The Applicant’ lends the first passage a jarringly formal dynamic, one that becomes representative for Plath of the latent indifference to humanity arising from maintaining the traditional gender roles of the time. Indeed, the poetic voice offers throughout the poem little consideration for the agency of its subject, instead subjecting the reader to its invective demands –  ‘stop crying’, ‘open your hand’, ‘come here’. The ubiquity of these domineering imperatives injects a sense in the reader for the lack of autonomy and freedom in this landscape, depicting a patriarchal world where even men are paradoxically subject to fulfil the expectations ordered of them. Though Plath certainly sees the masculine identity as being impeded upon, the consequences for the woman under these rigid structures are far more corrosive, often rendering her into a ‘doll’, an image suggestive of her predominantly domesticised function in society. In objectifying femininity to little more than some immobile plaything, Plath laments the voice’s haunting metaphor - that even whilst ‘living’, the women of 1950’s America are so often viewed through a myopic pecuniary lens, being valued for only what they are perceived to offer to the patriarchy. As in Lady Lazarus, ‘there is a charge’ for even a mere ‘piece of [her] hair or…clothes’. For the reader, then, femininity becomes some monetary expendability to serve the materialistic considerations of this society. Yet despite these oppressive forces, the narrator in this second passage ultimately becomes synecdochical to Plath of the chance for spiritual rebirth; even whilst suffering under the myopic neglect of ‘Herr God’ and ‘Herr Lucifer’, womanhood can ominously rise ‘out of the ash’.

If The Shoe Fits...

The ‘black and stiff’ suit offered to the male in The Applicant establishes Plath’s critique of the binding conformity impressed on the male gender. Resembling little more than a straitjacket, this wedding suit in its allusion to conventional marriage encapsulates the suppressing bounds on masculine identity. This abrupt, monosyllabic description implicates the immalleable definition of man’s function, clothing that, regardless of whether it is ‘a bad fit’, society presents to the male identity. In embedding these conventional expectations into such an ill-fitting suit, Plath expresses concern for the often myopic views pervasive in her world that apathetically disregard the intrinsic individualism of people, choosing instead to adopt a generic indifference at the expense of human subtleties. A similar lack of empathy is reflected in the poetic voice declaring on behalf of the groom that his head ‘is empty’, implicating to the reader the sweeping hand of the subject that can offer such broad and general assessments. That considerations of the head, symbolic of emotional and intellectual capacity, should come well after those of the simultaneously more functional yet artificial ‘hand’, ‘glass eye’ and ‘false teeth’ is troubling for the readership; this is a society that expresses a very secondary interest in either the spiritual or cognitive capabilities of the male sex. Just as in the fit of the suit, the individual agency is oftentimes forgotten. And whilst the motif of a suit may well allude to an intrinsic material superficiality, Plath implies how the masculine agency is left ‘empty’ and hollow without ‘the ticket for that’. In the absence of a woman’s hand to ‘fill it’, not only is the male spirit left vacuous, but ultimately ‘stark naked’. This exposed image of the groom’s glaring vulnerability synthesises a sinister tone in the first passage, generating the impression of an almost infantilised being, left void without the prescribed dictates of the narrator. As Plath demonstrates here, marriage – representative of traditional gender tropes – is so often ‘the last resort’ for the men a looming ultimatum that depicts the lack of choice given in determining whether to conform to these conventional values or not. Indeed, the question of ‘Will you marry it?’ becomes in its repeated use throughout a rhetorical expectancy, a query not be answered but simply met. For Plath, then, in the same way that the suit’s artificiality gave the illusion of choice, so too do these supposed questions of society for masculinity become tainted by a desire to impose rather than enquire. Ultimately, ‘The Applicant’ may seem to be given autonomy, but in the end, he can only ‘marry it, marry it, marry it’.

From The Ashes

Yet within this base patriarchy that so atrophies femininity, the spirited voice of Lady Lazarus in the final stanzas offers a challenge to these retrograde notions. It is the hand the subject plays in her own rebirth that sees her ‘rise’ from the ‘ash’, an active construction suggestive of an autonomy decisively absent from the ‘living doll’ of the first and second passages. With her ‘red hair’, the narrator becomes this bold, effervescing synecdoche of feminine strength, a being reinvigorated with a powerful vitality at odds with the lifeless ‘flesh, bone’ and ‘nothing’ from which she came. Plath likens the speaker’s fiery reincarnation from the ashes to the mythical phoenix - a symbol of life and hope triumphing over death and despair - thereby becoming a metaphorical embodiment of the chance for spiritual redemption amongst the otherwise oppressive society. Though there is a positive note to this revival, Plath creates a palpably disquieting tone to this awakening; after all, given the narrator being left to ‘turn and burn’ and ‘shriek’, the reader senses the vengeful frustration in the female voice wanting to ‘eat men’, a perverse declaration no doubt confronting for her predominantly male audience at the time. Jarring as it may be, the reader is nonetheless made aware of the irony at play here – the same androcentric society that objectified femininity as an empty ‘hand’, now too has become ‘like air’, an insubstantial being subsumed by the formerly subservient womanhood. Indeed, this rebirth of Lady Lazarus becomes indicative of the potential for the inversion of traditional gender structures. The repetition of ‘Beware, beware’ not only functions as an ominous threat to the ‘Herr Lucifer’, but is a literary allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. But in place of “his flashing eyes” and “his floating hair”, Plath offers the reader a similar awe-inspiring individual, this time clothed in the female identity. The poem’s title, too, is a reference to the rebirth of the biblical figure Lazarus, thereby drawing on well-known historical references in order to augment her challenge to conventional notions of femininity. It is a form of manipulating the preconceived images of masculinity across literature to present the reader with the underlying power of women in Plath’s time – the narrator too, can become emblematic of these traditionally male figures and thereby is representative of the intrinsic potential so often forgotten in this society. The menacing sibilance of ‘So, so… So’ implicates a similar underlying capability, a simultaneous consideration and exploitation of the narrator’s control over her ‘Herr Enemy’. In this way, then, Plath evokes to the reader through Lady Lazarus the dangerously reinvigorated spirit of femininity. Not only does it paradoxically arise from the very remains of its incarcerated body, but at the same time, it undercuts the erosive conventions of gender roles which formerly held women for incapable of such menacing power and vigor.