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Plath, domesticity, and the art of advertising
College Literature, Summer 2002 by Bryant, Marsha
The second ad presents a mechanical "woman" to replace housewives in their key role of preparing the evening meal. Like Plath's housewife-- machine, Frigidaire's `57 electric range reconciles opposing traits; it is both an intelligent machine and a glamorous cook (Figure 10). This example comes from the Sheer Look campaign, launched in December of 1956 to promote Frigidaire kitchen and laundry appliances. It appeared in Ladies' Home Journal, and is the source of the epithet "the thinkingest ranges," discussed above. In its central image, the ad shows an elegantly dressed woman standing next to a streamlined range; her gesture mimics the "sheer" angles of Frigidaire's new design. Framed by the headline, the two models embody the ad's central comparison of a smart appliance with a beautiful woman: "Meet the perfect cook with the new Sheer Look! "Yet on further examination, the ad shows the "strain" of the industry's "insistent glamorization" of the American housewife, to use Friedan's terms (1983, 65).The ad copy suggests that the product's competing qualities are unusual in a range, but impossible in a woman: "You'd hardly expect a range as stunning as this to be a marvelous cook.... And these wonderful ranges have beauty to match their brains." Contradicting these claims is the small photo beneath the copy, a close-up of an aproned housewife placing a dish in the oven. Though she is bare-armed (more "sheer"?), she isn't sexy like the model (whose gloved gesture resembles a stripper's). Dismembered into torso and arms by the framing, this housewife is literally incomplete (unlike Plath's housewife-- machine). And she, not the model, most resembles the ad's target audience. If beauty and brains combine in the Frigidaire, they could be incompatible traits for 1950s women-a dilemma Plath explores at length in The Bell Jar. Moreover, they were traits that often proved difficult for Plath to balance in her early poems. In April 1958, she singles out as her preferred work "The Disquieting Muses" and "On the Decline of Oracles" because "they have that good lyrical tension: crammed speech and music at once, brain and beautiful body at once" (2000, 371). In December of that year, her poem "Second Winter" appeared in the Journal, along with an ad for the even "more beautiful" Sheer Look Frigidaire of 1959, "the most feminine refrigerator ever." The housewife who chose the Sheer Look was buying an image of wholeness as well as an appliance,just as her male counterpart did in "The Applicant." For her, Frigidaire's mechanical woman was an empowering image.
Plath wrote "The Applicant" on the day that "marked the end of her marriage," as biographer Paul Alexander points out, and much of the poem's bitterness undoubtedly reflects this event (1991, 299). But as we have seen, the poem's ambiguities reflect the larger issue of domestic woman's complex position in consumer culture. As "the chief customers of American business" in the postwar years, as Friedan puts it, housewives were crucial players in the economic boom (1983, 207). May also points out their considerable buying power: "In the five years after World War II, consumer spending increased 60 percent, but the amount spent on household furnishings and appliances rose 240 percent" (May 1988, 165). So falling in love with appliances meant consumer clout and housewifely subservience, free choice and automatic living, upward mobility and domestic confinement. If we consider these multiple affiliations that Plath factors into her domestic poems, we must complicate standard debates that position women as either rebels or victims. Plath's poems reflect the contradictions of a male-dominated industry that depended on women consumers, and the complexities of texts that both reflected and shaped women's desires.
