But in twenty-five years she'll be silver, In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk...
You have an eye, it's an image.
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.442
442 Sylvia Plath, The Applicant (1962) in Collected Poems, (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 221.
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Fig. 59. Vilma Bader, The Applicant 2012, Puppet - wood, synthetic polymer paint, textile, 85 x 22 x 17.5 cm.
Fig. 60. Vilma Bader, The Applicant 2012, Book - synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 12.5 x 8 x 4 cm,
The title of my work, The Applicant 2012 is borrowed from a poem by Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963). The work is about fraught relationships, complicity and latent hysteria. It suggests that to conform to the idea of perfection to its logical end, a woman must become an automated and mechanical version of herself and enter the realm of an applicant. The female puppet is dressed in a male black suit, representing both complicity and duality.
Her dollness is emphasised by her Mary Jane shoes. She sits on a plinth with a painted version of Plath’s Collected Poems beside her. The Collected Poems, published in 1981, contains poetry written from 1956 until her suicide in 1963.443
The importance given to the book in The Applicant illustrates the emphasis on reading and writing as gendered practices in the time of Plath. While education was more readily
available for women in Plath’s time, cultural myths of femininity and male domination persisted. If Plath is now acknowledged as a talented poet, during her lifetime her work was overshadowed by that of her spouse Ted Hughes, a British poet laureate. Their marriage was tumultuous and a matter of persistent speculation. Plath used the details of her everyday life as raw material for her art. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the first poet to win the prize posthumously.
Prominent American physician and author Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) was a virulent opponent of higher education for women, a critic of Vassar and Radcliffe and their “horrible system of coeducation”.444 He believed that the quest for knowledge destroyed femininity:
"For most men, when she seizes the apple, she drops the rose”.445 Elsewhere Weir writes:
The woman's desire to be on a level of competition with man and to assume his duties is, I am sure, making mischief, for it is my belief that no length of generations of change in her education and modes of activity will ever really alter her characteristics. She is
physiologically other than man.446
443 Sylvia Plath/ Academy of American Poets, http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/sylvia-plath, accessed February 6, 2012,
444 Silas Weir Mitchell, Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System Especially in Women , 2d ed. (London:
J. & A. Churchill, 1885), 15.
445 Silas Weir Mitchell, Doctor and Patient, (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1888),139.
446 Ibid., 48.
Mitchell, like other Victorian physicians, believed that the female reproductive system and the brain competed to the detriment of the other.447 Henry Maudsley (1835-1918), a
leading British psychiatrist of his day, writes that mental and physical energy were not only set but competing and "what nature spends in one direction, she must economise in another direction”.448 Maudsley believed that the young woman who gave herself over to learning would find her sexual and reproductive organs atrophying, her "pelvic power"
diminished or destroyed, and her fate one of sexlessness and disease.449 German
neurologist Paul Moebius (1853 - 1907) also counselled that too much development of the brain in women would atrophy the uterus:
If we wish woman to fulfil the task of motherhood fully she cannot possess a masculine brain. If the feminine abilities were developed to the same degree as those of the male, her maternal organs would suffer and we would have before us a repulsive and useless hybrid.450
Sociologist and novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 - 1935) argues that, “There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver”.451
Joseph Breuer called the hysterics "the flowers of mankind, as sterile, no doubt, but as beautiful as double flowers”.452 Showalter observes that, “In cultivated flowers, doubling comes from the replacement of the stamens by petals,” and concludes that Breuer understood the hysteric as “the forced bud of a domestic greenhouse, the product of luxury, leisure, and cultivation, whose reproductive powers have been sacrificed to her intellect and imagination”.453 One could argue that the majority of hysterical patients at the Salpêtrière were from poor working class backgrounds.
447 Silas Weir Mitchell, Wear and Tear: Hints for the Overworked, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1872), 38-39.
448 Henry Maudsley, "Sex in Mind and Education," Fortnightly Review 15 (1874): 466-483.
449 Ibid.
450 Paul Moebius, On the Physiological Idiocy of Women, (Halle: Marhold, 1900), 8.
451 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (Boston, MA: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898), 18.
452 Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, "Studies on Hysteria," in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. J. and A. Strachey, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 2:240.
453 Showalter, “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender’’, 291.
From Plato, who viewed the womb as “an indwelling creature desirous of childbearing,” to Plath in the twentieth-century,’ little had changed.454 Post-Darwinian scientists believed that woman's energy was naturally intended for reproductive specialisation.455 This belief that one could not develop one organ or ability at the expense of others implies that reproduction is a woman’s grand purpose in life.456 The female act of reproduction is seen as opposed to the “creative” productive male - the female as natural serial reproducer and the male as unique and individual.