Plath, domesticity, and the art of advertising

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 1981, 221)

This second reference to the Applicant's emptiness underscores his lack, as does the last stanza's analogy of the husband-hole and wife-poultice. In the salesman's final pitch, the product becomes the Applicant's "only hope," and the repeated question becomes a command: "Will you marry it, marry it, marry it." Employing what Twitchell calls "the power of threes," the poem's speaker completes his Hard Sell (2000, 151). Anacin works fast Fast FAST. The housewife-machine "can talk, talk, talk" (Plath 2000, 222). After the transaction is finished, the woman has been sold and the man has been shamed.

What of the poem's "marvelous product" and her ambiguous agency of being "willing" to obey the Applicant's commands? To what extent is Plath reinforcing 1950s norms, and to what extent is she revising them? In answering these questions, my students and I have turned to ads for major home appliances. Surely Plath had large kitchen appliances in mind when she designed her housewife-machine. Ranges and refrigerators dominated the full-page ads in Ladies' Home Journal, and copywriters extolled them as "fabulous" (Westinghouse electric range), "sensational" (Philco Duplex refrigerator) and fill of"wonders" and "miracles" (modern gas ranges). The vacuum cleaners and sewing machines that Plath invokes in the poem were also pitched with dramatic claims, but major kitchen appliances occupied a more hyperbolic-and surreal-realm. Lilliputian families gaze in wonder at a colossal Hotpoint refrigerator in an ad from 1950 (anticipating the Murray "Cook's Tour" ad), and the proud owners of Frigidaire appliances become Queens by the end of the decade. Moreover, these "smartest" of appliances offer the starkest contrast with the empty-headed Applicant. By the mid-- 1950s, as Juliann Sivulka notes, appliance manufacturers promoted "sophisticated new push-button gadgetry designed to activate unseen machinery" instead of the "obvious labor-saving benefits" of their products (1998, 246). In the early 1950s, ads for the Caloric gas range claimed that the product was "So AUTOMATIC it almost thinks for me." Later in the decade, Frigidaire ads hailed the "Thinking Panels" on the 1956 range, and "the 'thinkingest' ranges yet devised" in 1957. This was, after all, the era of the fully "automatic" kitchen where food preparation was not strictly active or passive, human or mechanical.

When we factor this context into Plath's poem, the issue of the housewife-machine's agency becomes rather complicated. She does the thinking for her apparently brainless user, but she also responds automatically to his voice commands. She is fully loaded ("a living doll" that "works"), while he remains vacant. He buys her, and she consumes his income. She will outperform and outlive him, but will die of grief when he is gone. And she will apparently outperform any household appliance on the market by accruing value over time: "Naked as paper to start / But in twenty-five years she'll be silver, / In fifty, gold" (1981, 221). Plath's allusions to traditional anniversary gifts position the "marvelous product" within the confines of lifelong marriage, an institution supposedly "built to last" in the 1950s (as one of my students put it). But Plath also positions the housewife-machine outside the short trajectory of planned obsolescence, manufacturers' major strategy for encouraging consumer spending. The Applicant, too, falls outside consumer norms because as historian Elaine Tyler May states, "it was the homemaker's responsibility" to purchase household goods (1988, 167).Therefore, Plath has feminized the Applicant by placing him in a position reserved for housewives. Husband and wife, consumer and product, are entangled so that power relations become less clear.