Summary
Having previously offered the naked applicant a suit, the interviewer describes it—the suit is stiff but fits the applicant fine. The speaker asks the applicant whether he'd like to "marry it," presumably now discussing the suit. The suit can survive and protect against all kinds of dangers, including fire and bombs, and the applicant can go to his grave wearing it. The speaker then turns his attention to the applicant's head, which is completely empty. He calls someone out of a closet, addressing them as "sweetie," and reassures the applicant that this person will be the fix for his empty head—though at the moment she's as naked as a sheet of paper.
Analysis
In these stanzas, the poem's focus shifts away from the role of the wife in marriage—represented as a disembodied hand—and towards the role of the man. The husband is represented as a suit, covering and protecting the applicant's naked body. Whereas the hand is related to the wife via synecdoche, a poetic device in which part of something comes to represent the whole of it, the suit is related to the man via symbolism. This means that, while the hand stands in for the woman's entire body here, the suit merely represents truths about the man—but it doesn't entirely replace his body. That is to say, while the "hand" is referred to in place of the woman, the man still maintains an identity discrete from his suit.
The difference between synecdoche and symbol here isn't an arbitrary matter of literary terminology. Rather, by choosing these parallel but different types of figurative representation, Plath hints towards some of the variations in the oppression that the husband and wife will face. The wife is represented by a decontextualized part of her own body, hinting that she is being reduced to her physical existence and used for her body. At the end of the poem's fifth stanza, the speaker calls the woman out and mentions that she is naked—but her nakedness is not immediately resolved with a suit, as the man's is, perhaps because her body itself is the desired commodity at hand. However, the man's body here is obscured rather than objectified, represented through a veil of symbolism—and symbolized by an object used to cover nudity. Thus, Plath proposes, while gender roles may reduce women to their bodily existence, they actually alienate men from their bodies. The fact that the suit is described as a kind of protective gear only heightens that idea: the applicant is shielded from danger, feeling, or exposure of any kind via his own masculine role and the soothing, coddling nature of the "hand."
Moreover, Plath's mention of the suit clothing a naked person may be an allusion to the biblical story of Adam and Eve. In that story, Adam and Eve have to clothe themselves during their fall from innocence and expulsion from Eden. This suggests that, at least for men, marriage is a kind of expulsion from utopia—a curious idea, given the fact that the applicant will have his every need fulfilled, according to the interviewer. Interestingly, the woman seems to be allowed to remain naked, suggesting that she is idealized as an innocent. She is also positively compared to a blank sheet of paper, the simile indicating that she is deprived not only of her own thoughts but of her own narrative.
