Getting Nerdy about Anger in Plath’s “The Applicant” & the best gateau chocolat
Friends,
If you like getting very nerdy and deep diving into a poem, then today is the day for you. If you like chocolate cake, then today is also the day for you. If you hate poems and chocolate…well, I have no idea why you’re here exactly, but there is also a cat pic somewhere in here for you.
I’m happy to say I’ll be co-hosting an open, free community writing space every Saturday morning starting May 3, at Looky Here in Greenfield - come by and write with comrades! I’ll also be at the MassPoetry Fest out in Salem on May 31, come say hi and if you like, join my workshop on creating a poetry chapbook manuscript.
This gateau au chocolat recipe is based on one from the book The American Boulangerie, by Pascal Rigo. As you can see from the pic above, I have made this recipe a lot. Except I changed his technique quite a lot - Rigo’s recipe involves a lot of egg white whipping, and making a separate ganache to swirl in (which does look very pretty), and I prefer a faster, simpler, delicious cake. If you take this to a potluck, you will have a lot of requests for the recipe. It’s gluten free and absurdly simple and it tastes like what you’ve always wanted a chocolate cake to taste like.
Note: how good this cake tastes depends completely on how good the chocolate you use is. Personally I prefer Callebaut, but I find Ghiradelli chocolate chips work if that’s the best you can get.
Gateau au Chocolat
makes either 1 9-inch cake or 12 cupcakes
chocolate 296 g
butter 148 g
eggs 195 g
sugar 98 g
Either grease a 9-inch springform cake pan or put muffin cups into a muffin pan, and preheat your oven to 325 F.
In a heat-resistant bowl over a double boiler, melt the chocolate and butter together, stirring occasionally, until completely blended and smooth.
While those are melting, whisk together the eggs and sugar with an electric mixer or stand mixer, until lighter in color and increased in volume.
Use a spatula or spoon to stir about 1/4 of the melted chocolate-butter into the egg mixture and blend well. (This prevents you from accidentally scrambling the eggs by dumping all the hot mixture in at once, it’s called tempering.) Once that is well stirred in, you can add the rest of the chocolate-butter mixture to the batter, and stir just until well combined.
Now pour your batter into either your cake pan or your muffin cups, and into the oven it goes. Bake the cake for about 30-35 minutes, just until the edges are set but the center is still a bit wobbly (it will set as it cools). If you’re doing cupcakes, bake for about 12 minutes, until edges are set but center is still a bit wobbly.
Cool on a rack completely before removing the sides of the springform or taking the cupcakes out of the pan—this is a very soft cake and you will have a mudslide disaster on your hands if you try to take it out warm. Enjoy!
(the peach trees are starting to bloom on my neighbor’s hill, hooray!)
And now some nerdy shit. Are you ready?
I have become very interested in how poets write about anger, and how we, as readers, perceive that a poem is angry, or that a speaker in a poem is angry. While considering this question, I began to read craft essays about tone, and also to ask fellow poets (and myself) for poems they liked that were angry. The results were surprising–some of the poems friends shared were not ones that I would have called angry. And some of the poems that came to my own mind as examples, I had trouble articulating how and why I felt that they were angry poems. Some poems, such as “Anger” by April Bernard, use a title to leave the reader no doubts. Other poems seemed to rely on descriptions of physical violence (real or imagined) to indicate that they are angry. One of the poems that came to my own mind as an example of an angry poem, remembered from my youth, was Sylvia Plath’s “The Applicant,” so I decided to apply the lens of craft to this piece and see why I read that poem’s tone as angry.
Ellen Bryant Voigt, in her book The Flexible Lyric, has a chapter called “On Tone” that creates her own definition of tone, and provides examples of the components of that definition. Voigt says:
Tone in a poem expresses the form of the emotion in that poem and is lodged primarily in the poem’s nondiscursive [non-narrative] elements, especially in its music. Music here is meant to include both the broad units of repetition, sentence structure, and lineation and the small units of syllable, vowel, and consonant. As with “tonality” in a composition, tone instructs the attention of, first, the poet, then the reader, through a context of sounds working either with or against the discursive elements of the poem, and it may itself be an element of either unity or energy (plot) within the piece. (Voigt, 92)
In poems, as in life, tone can be difficult to be clear about, and even more difficult to describe. In life, we rely on the aural sound of someone’s voice (which we call, literally, a tone of voice), along with facial and bodily gestures, to create a full picture of the communication being given to us in addition to the literal words being spoken. In a written poem, we do not have the sound of the speaker’s voice, or their facial or bodily movements to guide us. We rely on the words themselves, and their arrangement upon the page, to guide us. Both reader and writer have to work harder to find clarity.
Plath’s tone in “The Applicant” is a complicated one–there is the tone of the speaker, an over-confident, strident sales pitch, and there is the slippery but still-present satirical, angry tone simultaneously undercutting the sales pitch. I will focus on how Plath’s use of line breaks and diction create this complex tone in “The Applicant.”
“The Applicant” uses end-stopped line breaks almost exclusively. The Poetry Foundation defines end-stopped lines as “a metrical line ending at a grammatical boundary or break, such as a dash or closing parenthesis, or with punctuation such as a colon, a semicolon, or a period.” If a line contains a complete grammatical phrase, it is also called end-stopped. Enjambment, on the other hand, is defined by the Poetry Foundation as “the running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation; the opposite of end-stopped.”
So what effect do the end-stopped lines in “The Applicant” create? Consider these lines, from the fourth stanza:
To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit——
Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it? (Plath)
These lines are assertive, direct, and clear in their communication. The end-stopped lines facilitate this clarity, by not leaving room for doubt or double meanings or even pauses since they do not leave any phrase hanging without resolution. This same pattern of short declarative lines, crowned by a short direct address question, is repeated in the next stanza:
Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that? (Plath)
These lines mimic, intentionally, the language of advertising and sales. A few quick jabs of description, of the applicant’s need and lack (“your head, excuse me, is empty”), followed by a question to the buyer, intended to move along the purchase–“Will you marry it?” (Plath).
The moments where the lines are enjambed in “The Applicant” work to complicate the tone of the poem. If all of the lines were end-stopped, it might read more purely as a sincere advertisement for the institution of marriage and its glorious benefits to all involved parties. Plath begins the poem with an end-stopped question, followed by an enjambed line:
First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch (Plath)
This combination serves to create internal tension within the poem and within the reader, allowing us to sense that all is not quite right here. No matter how blustering and hyperbolic the words of the salesperson might be, there is a sense of unease created by the tension of the enjambed lines that allows the reader to perceive (even if subconsciously) that there is a more complicated picture and tone being created by the poet. If we use Voigt’s definition that tone “expresses the form of the emotion in that poem and is lodged primarily in the poem’s nondiscursive elements,” then the form of the emotion of “The Applicant” is being built partly through Plath’s modulation of line breaks.
The end-stopped lines are friendly, behaving as we expect them to, putting us at ease. But the enjambed lines kindle the reader’s sense that the speaker’s friendliness is false, is actually the salesman’s bait and switch. Each time the reader begins to think the line breaks are consistent, each time there is a sense of stability or trust being built through repeated end-stopped lines, Plath breaks it again.
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand
To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it. (Plath)
Consider how this would read if all of the lines remained end-stopped. If we take away the lingering of “Then / How can we” and the pause between “Here is a hand” and the resolution of “To fill it” and the ominous quality of what the salesman is claiming “it” (the wife) is “willing” to do (Plath). If all these lines were end-stopped, they might read like this:
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
Stitches to show something’s missing?
No, no?
Then how can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty.
Here is a hand to fill it
And willing to bring teacups
And roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it. (Plath)
With the enjambed lines taken away, the sincerity of the speaker is increased, and the mounting sense of eerie danger is greatly lessened. Put simply, the tension in the poem is decreased if we take away the tension of the lines being broken in a place that the reader’s mind would not naturally expect them to pause. And that tension is essential to the poem. Without it, Plath might seem to be genuinely buying into patriarchal ideals of marriage and the subjugation of women within those marriages. With the tension created by the line breaks, the reader is able to build the sense that the tone in this poem is ironic, and also, I would argue, angry. It is a cold, controlled sort of anger but it is anger. It is both sharp and diffuse, and Plath further builds both the surface tone of a sales pitch as well as the undercurrent of sarcastic fury, through diction.
The Academy of American Poets’ website defines poetic diction as “the language, including word choice and syntax, that sets poetry apart from more utilitarian forms of writing.” I will focus here on word choice, although plenty could be said about the syntax Plath employs in “The Applicant.”
From the very first lines, the words Plath uses create a tension, a sense of dis-ease and distrust for the speaker. The first words are a direct address and are aggressive, nearly accusatory in tone, a tone created by Plath’s choice of words. “First, are you our sort of a person?” asks the speaker (Plath). If the desired tone were a straight forward sales pitch, one intended only to lure the person being addressed into a purchase, we would expect that pitch to open with a warm salutation, such as “Hi, how are you?” or “Good morning!” Imagine for a moment, that “The Applicant” opened with one of these and then continued to the next lines, reading:
Good morning!
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch (Plath)
The disconnect from the first line to the next is too absurd, and pushes the poem from satire or double meanings straight into farce. Satire, according to Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “1: a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn or 2: trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly.” Plath’s word choices in “The Applicant” continually make it clear that she is engaged in holding up the institution of marriage in order to expose and discredit it.
After the initial confrontational “Are you our sort of person,” the speaker in “The Applicant” continues straight into asking about a litany of physical “disfigurements.” Plath’s word choices here keep the poem teetering on the edge of humor and horror. In our firmly ableist culture, the reader cringes at the thought of “a rubber crotch” while at the same time, the word choice makes it undeniably funny. Plath could have said “prosthetic genitalia” or used an obscuring metaphor that referenced genitals, making it scientific and both less horrifying and less funny. Instead, she uses words that evoke schoolyard insults. Plath’s use of humor, throughout “The Applicant” is shown through word choice, and contributes to the tone of satire. If we return to Voigt’s idea that “tone instructs the attention,” then Plath is directing our attention, right from the beginning, to question the truthfulness of the speaker, and whether we want to be aligned with the speaker, with the “you,” or with the invisible hand of the poet behind the words.
A childish quality continues through the poem’s diction, in phrases such as: “It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof /Against fire and bombs through the roof” (Plath). These lines have a singsong cadence and rhyme that evoke a nursery rhyme. Throughout the poem, Plath employs rhyme and near-rhyme, both of which increase the nursery rhyme or lullaby cadence, such as “crutch” and “crotch,” “fill” and “willing,” “stock” and “stark.” These childlike allusions serve to increase the tone of underlying scorn for both the speaker and the applicant, suggesting that they are infantile in their view of the world. Like the child seeking a mother, the applicant seeks a woman to make everything alright, and the speaker promises just that:
Here is a hand
To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it. (Plath)
The simple, short words throughout “The Applicant” reinforce the sense that the applicant is childlike, or at least not very intelligent, and that the poet is laughing at them. The vast majority of the words are monosyllablic, with only a few exceptions, such as “dissolve,” “waterproof,” and “shatterproof.” Primarily, Plath has chosen to limit the vocabulary of the poem to single syllable, conversational words, like the vocabulary of a small child:
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk. (Plath)
Here again, a reference to childhood, with the “living doll.” Not only has the wife-to-be been reduced to a “living doll” but the applicant themself is rendered childlike, as someone who desires–needs, actually–a doll, something children play with.
Plath made the very simple but profound choice to use the word “you” throughout “The Applicant.” Doing so inherently ties the reader to the applicant being addressed by the speaker. This complicates the tone and helps to create dissonance, forcing the reader to decide if they are, in fact, in alignment and agreement with the “you.” From the first line, “Are you our sort of person?” Plath’s use of “you” puts us as reader on guard, feeling defensive and a little irritated at the speaker who is confronting us so immediately. We don’t even know who the speaker is and already they are interrogating us.
As the poem continues, “you” continues to be paired with insults or near-insults, helping to create the tension that while the speaker claims to be offering the you (merged with us, the reader) something wonderful, we cannot trust them. For example, “How can we give you a thing? / Stop crying” and later “your head, excuse me, is empty” (Plath). And the continual refrain throughout the poem, “Will you marry it?” reinforces that sing-song, nursery rhyme quality, making the speaker (and reader) seem infantile. We associate babies and young children with crying, with heads that are empty and need filling with knowledge, and with parents who must repeatedly ask the same question over and over.
Within that same question refrain, we find Plath’s other careful pronoun choice: it. The wife-to-be is never named as a person. Never called a wife, even. Only an “it,” or as an isolated body part– “here is a hand” or “a living doll” (Plath). The “it” is not a human.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it’s a poultice.
You have an eye, it’s an image.
My boy, it’s your last resort. (Plath)
As the poem builds towards its ending, the frequency of the use of “it” ramps up, hammering into the reader’s consciousness that in a marriage, what the applicant is applying for is not a collaborative partnership with another human being. The applicant is being sold an “it,” a device that can perform tasks, that has “nothing wrong with it” (Plath).
Throughout “The Applicant,” Plath uses line breaks and word choice to create a tone of satire, fueled by fury. Instead of saying directly, “Marriage is terrible,” or “Marriage is set up to turn husbands into children and wives into their mothers,” Plath creates a salesperson persona to sell the reader this marvelous product, while simultaneously undermining that sales pitch. Plath’s line breaks and word choice ensure that we are never confused that the speaker is trustworthy, or correct. From the first, “Are you our sort of person?” we are on guard against this aggressive, belittling speaker and their promises. Voigt described tone as “an element of either unity or energy (plot) within the piece” and that may be the best way to describe what Plath has created in “The Applicant.” A complicated, twisting energy that bucks with anger below a seemingly simple surface.
Works Cited
Plath, Sylvia. “The Applicant by Sylvia Plath.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57419/the-applicant. Accessed 10 Oct. 2023.
“End-Stopped.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/end-stopped. Accessed 11 Sept. 2023.
“Enjambment.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/enjambment. Accessed 11 Sept. 2023.
“Poetic Diction.” Poets.Org, Academy of American Poets, 21 Oct. 2019, poets.org/glossary/poetic-diction.
“Satire Definition & Meaning.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/satire. Accessed 10 Oct. 2023.
Voigt, Ellen Bryant. The Flexible Lyric. University of Georgia Press, 1999.
And at last, a cat pic.
xoxo
Adrie
