Angelina Sorokin

Is Marriage truly "your last resort"?: the element of injury
The poetic images of injury are intertwined in “The Applicant” and “Two Sisters of Persephone” to emphasize how life with and without marriage and sex has a negative effect on women. “The Applicant” shows the injuries of life before marriage and “Two sisters of Persephone” contradicts the theme of a happy and pain free life that is shown in “The Applicant” by showing life during and after marriage and this is accomplished by involving the element of injury.
Both poems use injuries to affect the different aspects of marriage that are presented in the two poems. In “Two Sisters of Persephone”, marriage is transformed from a wonderful awaited experience into something dreadful that brings no lasting happiness. Although the marriage of the second girl in the poem starts off good in the beginning, with her being “bronzed as earth” (13), it slowly changes her into a “bitter” (24) women. This girl was the care free one who decided to get married unlike her sister who stayed in her “dark” (5) room and in the end of her life “goes graveward with flesh laid waste” (27). The married girl felt that she was making her life easier and better in a since, but for some reason she still turns as “sallow as any lemon” (25). This shows that marriage may keep you happy for a while, but that happiness doesn’t last forever. On the contrary marriage is glorified and held in high regard in “The Applicant” and the use of injury in the beginning of the poem enhances the benefits of marriage. When the speaker of the poem asks if “you war a glass eye, false teeth or a crutch…” (3), the poem tries to show that everyone is incomplete without marriage and that if you have ”stitches to show something’s missing” (6) then marriage will surely work for you. Interestingly enough the rest of the poem only shows how marriage completes the male figure, leaving the women empty. Line 39 tells the man that “it’s your last resort” as if the women will survive without marriage but not vice versa. Marriage becomes a trap that women fall into because of the injuries that they experience in life, and the feeling of being “empty” (10).
Marriages usually involve sex and both poems use the element of injury to shed new light on what sex actually does to the women and to show that it is not entirely a good thing. In “The Applicant” the theme of sex is hidden and not a main part of the poem. The “living doll” (33) in the poem will “do whatever you tell it” (13) and that’s a “[guarantee]” (15), showing the women’s vulnerability when it comes to sex. The women doesn’t want to go back to her old life which was full of injuries so she continues with whatever she has to do to keep her marriage . Sex is a clear theme in “Two Sisters of Persephone” and the strong words that Sylvia Plath uses make it clear to the reader that sex brings many injuries. The carefree girl is the target of injuries because of her choosing sex. “She sees how their red silk flare of petaled blood burns open to the sun’s blade” (17). This one sentence has so much emotion in it, showing all the hurt of marriage. By using words such as red, blood, burns, and blade we see that sex is negatively portrayed. Especially because it leads the girl to becoming “bitter” (24) no matter how good it was. These two poems definitely use injuries due to sex to show that trying it doesn’t give you anything to be proud of in life, because in the end you will still end up empty.
Examining these two poems shows that the usage of injury makes the themes what they are and that marriage and sex both dont bring any lasting please to a women, but just leave her empty and lost.