The essence of Mannequins is Plath’s portrayal of the domination of artificial mannequins over real women, and male society’s transformation of women into puppets. The unnatural figures represent male “disgust with” and “fear of women”. Munich Mannequins portrays a perfect, dehumanised society of bland prettiness. Society’s inhumanities are kept hidden under this superficiality. Plath believed that the idea of female perfection as constituted by men suppresses individuality and kills humanity.

Clearly, Plath’s perceptive critique is reflected in today’s concern and obsession with body-image, especially amongst teenage girls; the unnatural figures of Barbie-dolls; and male objectification of women. Plath shared many of the views — particularly relating to misogyny and male fear of women — of 1970s feminist Andrea Dworkin.

It may be significant that this poem is set in Munich. Plath visited European cities, but she may have associated this sterility with her father’s coldness. Otto Plath was German and, according to his daughter, a Nazi. Therefore she might have felt the setting appropriate.

Ultimately the poem is obscure. The dense, complex imagery can be interpreted in multiple ways and some, as with most of Plath’s poetry, remain elusive.

Structure
The poem comprises fourteen stanzas, thirteen of which are couplets, and one single line stanza. This is a typical Plath construction. The lines are in free verse and of uneven length. There is no regular rhyme scheme.

Language and Imagery
Plath uses condensed, concise imagery, piling up ideas, often picking up in later stanzas images to be found earlier in the poem. Winter and snow usually represent hibernation before spring and rebirth, but in this context — a harsher, social, male-dominated setting — winter represents death. Other images include blood and children and the moon, the latter a recurring reoccurring metaphor in Plath’s work for female ova.

NB It is worth reading
Lant, Kathleen Margaret, and Sylvia Plath. “The Big Strip Tease: Female Bodies and Male Power in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.”
‘The Applicant’; Sylvia Plath
‘Exposure’; Wilfred Owen.

See Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study, Time Kendall, Faber and Faber