Plath
Gender Roles According to Plath's the Applicant
The assignment of gender roles is one of the most determinant and irresistible forces in our society. Powerful constructs persist from one generation to the next to indoctrinate us with the duties culturally befitting man and woman. And in a distinctly patriarchal society, these constructs also carry considerable emotional hazard to the feminine experience. So is this described in Sylvia Plath's "The Applicant." The poem, included in Plath's 2nd poetry collection, Ariel, was released in 1965. That Plath committed suicide two years before its released suggests that the despair contained here within was a permeating force in her life.
Indeed, 'The Applicant' is consumed with a numb kind of melancholy that Plath seems to assert comes from a lifetime of objectification and obsequiousness to the will of man. In something that resembles a job interview, the opening of Plath's poem describes the experience of being judged, scrutinized...
Even strong women are feminized in the media and in advertising. Burton Nelson notes, "In a Sears commercial, Olympic basketball players apply lipstick, paint their toenails, rock babies, lounge in bed, and pose and dance in their underwear" (Nelson Burton 442). These are all very feminine characteristics, and women feel they must be feminine not only to fit in society but also to catch a man, and that is
Apparently Plath wrote the poem during her stay in the hospital, which can be a depressing place notwithstanding all the nurses and orderlies dressed in white. The appendectomy followed a miscarriage that Plath had suffered through, so given those realities in the poet's life -- especially for a woman to lose a child she had been carrying -- one can identify with the bleak nature of the poem. Confronted
" In other words, that art springs from within, rather than must be supported from without. The author places the blame for female artists to be culturally central squarely upon culture itself, specifically Western culture's failure to create systems of educational nurturing for females. "The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education -- education understood
These examples show how clothing and fashion generate and support the social construction of a particular reality in a certain historical period. The uniform of the Chinese people in the Maoist period was a factor in enforcing ideological perceptions in much the same way as the Japanese aristocracy promoted the idea of social status and class through fashion and appearance. The Maoist uniform was effective as a means of
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