Tori Trimm

“Empty? Empty. Here is a hand”: Incompletion and Inferiority

Sylvia Plath uses vivid imagery in each of her poems to convey a specific emotion and enhance the poems’ theme. Though some may seem obscure, the images help the reader find the underlying meaning of the poem. The imagery Plath uses often has connections to her own personal experiences as well. Plath incorporates the image of body parts in her poems “The Applicant” and “The Colossus” to show inferiority and incompletion.
Both poems utilize the assemblage of body parts to represent inferiority. For instance, in “The Applicant,” Plath uses body parts to enhance the poem’s theme: women are living dolls. The poem states, “A glass eye,/rubber breasts or a rubber crotch” (“The Applicant” 2-5). She uses many images of body parts, including these artificial ones, to portray a woman as a “living doll, everywhere you look” (33). In a way, this shows the inferiority of women in a feministic way. It is demeaning to say that women are dolls who are bought by men based on their physical characteristics alone. The buyer of a woman doesn’t focus on intellect, but on individual body parts. In addition, “The Colossus” also showed inferiority through the imagery of a human anatomy. When Plath says, “I shall never get you put together entirely/pieced, glued, and properly jointed/” (“The Colossus” 1-2), she is showing control. When the context of the poem is considered, the reader can see Plath is making it seem as though Otto Plath, her father, is inferior. She is constantly trying to put him back together and is manipulating him. In this sense, unlike in her actual life, Plath is in control and is superior to her father. In both poems, the imagery contributes to the feminist tone. She ridicules society’s idea of the “ideal” woman in “The Applicant,” and she glorifies herself as a woman in “The Colossus.”
These two poems also display the theme of incompletion through the use of body parts. In “The Applicant,” the speaker of the poem appears to be a salesperson; selling a woman as an accessory and nothing more. The poem states, “Open your hand/Empty? Empty. Here is a hand” (9-10). This quote depicts the salesperson selling a hand to the man. The hand, a common body part used in Plath’s poems, represents a woman in “The Applicant.” A hand simply does busy work. It has no brain and it does not have to think. In this way, Plath compares a hand to a woman. On its own, a hand is useless, but when assigned to a body (a husband) the hand can perform. The sense of completion cannot be achieved without the hand. Plath, once again, incorporates feminism by stressing the importance of the woman. In “The Colossus” the theme is more personal, but the idea of completion is the same. In this poem, Plath is trying to create the ideal father. She has all of the body parts necessary, but her father figure is still incomplete. Plath tries to connect these body parts and “dredge the silt from [his] throat” (9) and even “mend the immense skull-plates” (14). She is trying to create her father, who is incomplete. In her real life, her father was not very caring and he provided an awkward, insufficient, somewhat marital relationship for his daughter. In this poem, Plath is trying to go back and fix her father, but she realizes that she can’t. At the end of the poem, she says, “No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel/on the blank stones of the landing” (29-30). Plath gives up on her father for good and accepts his incompletion.
All in all, “The Applicant” and “The Colossus” both had similar underlying messages, even though they were based on completely different topics. “The Applicant” displays the incompletion of a woman, while “The Colossus” demonstrates the incompletion of her father. Through the use of body part imagery, Plath expels her frustration over being incomplete and inferior. Whether it was because of her unfaithful relationship with Ted Hughes, or her odd relationship with her father, Plath used this imagery to establish her poems as emotional outlets.