On the Saturday greeting of Labor Day weekend, my champion person Dani, besides a writer, wrote to archer maine that Robin Morgan, the landmark American feminist activist, organizer, and writer, had died. In the midst of the unreserved to decorativeness my syllabi and opening week assignments, arsenic my hubby shuffled the kids into their sneakers and Crocs and the car for 1 past back-to-school outing, everything stopped. I stood astatine the room descend watching the airy filter done the holly bush astatine the model and cried.
Born January 29, 1941, Robin’s database of accomplishments, which included 23 books, organizing the famed protestation of the 1969 Miss America Pageant (when feminists crowned and sashed a sheep connected the adjacent Atlantic City Boardwalk), and the founding of the National Network of Rape Crisis Centers, is extraordinary, and outlined successful the outpouring of obituaries successful newspapers here and abroad. But lone a fistful of these tributes notation Robin’s profound power connected Sylvia Plath’s legacy, 1 which successful crook dramatically affected Robin’s beingness and career. If they do, this bequest is reduced to the notation of Robin’s poem “Arraignment,” which began with the lines
How tin I
accuse
Ted Hughes
of… the execution of Sylvia Plath?
In fact, conscionable trying to punctuation the opening lines of “Arraignment” points instantly to the ways Robin’s narration with Plath’s enactment volition not beryllium reduced. Robin included “Arraignment” successful her 1972 poesy postulation Monster, but the published “Arraignment” wasn’t the mentation she wanted successful print. Robin’s archetypal mentation of “Arraignment” began “I impeach / Ted Hughes / of… the execution of Sylvia Plath.” As she elaborate successful a 1973 effort written for Feminist Art Journal, prior to Monster’s publication, but aft galleys had already been printed, Robin was called into a gathering with Random House lawyers, who informed her that “Arraignment” had to beryllium pulled oregon rewritten. The poem arsenic it stood, she was told, accused Ted Hughes of raping and murdering his wife, and was grounds for libel.
Robin’s effect to these men was two-pronged: first, she had not accused Ted Hughes of the literal execution of his archetypal wife, who she agreed had surely died by termination connected February 11, 1963. Robin was alternatively arguing that done his utmost (and well-documented) censorship of Sylvia’s enactment aft her suicide, Hughes had killed Plath’s creator corpus and her extremist politics. “Arraignment” utilized the connection “murder” satirically, arsenic portion of a agelong creator tradition: Marvel, Swift, Donne. Second, successful her clip researching Sylvia Plath, Robin had seen a bid of letters Plath wrote that described abuse, including intersexual abuse, by Hughes—about 20 letters, she wrote successful Feminist Art Journal—so her accusation of rape successful “Arraignment” was based on, and backmost up by, Plath’s ain words. Robin quoted 1 of these letters: Why indispensable the sidesplitting of maine beryllium truthful elaborate? “A purely Plathian line,” she wrote.
The poem arsenic it stood, she was told, accused Ted Hughes of raping and murdering his wife, and was grounds for libel.
Robin’s concise and insightful statement meant thing to Random House’s lawyers who, similar galore literate ineligible teams of the time, were apt alert of Ted Hughes’s propensity for lawfare to unopen down anyone trying to situation his mentation of Plath’s beingness and work. So, Robin rewrote “Arraignment,” changing “I impeach / Ted Hughes” to “How tin I / impeach / Ted Hughes,” a superb rhetorical determination that managed to incorporate her quagmire successful enactment breaks and punctuation. How tin I bash this and get distant with it? she asks herself connected the page—while getting distant with it, since the poem successful its 2nd signifier went to print.
It was vintage Robin, the pistillate who erstwhile derided women’s attempts to signifier alongside leftist men arsenic “the imagination that being successful the enactment corporate volition get you thing but gonorrhea.” But successful galore ways, it devastated her. She felt Monster had been ruined, and that her originative and governmental ethics, which for her were ever 1 and the same, were compromised. She was virtually sick implicit it, penning successful Feminist Art Journal that she took to gobbling Dramamine earlier meetings with the Random House lawyers. But a reprieve was connected its way: erstwhile the archetypal mentation of “Arraignment” was printed successful Feminist Art Journal, women each implicit the satellite reprinted pirated versions of Monster with the archetypal “Arraignment” restored. Their mentation of Monster was blistery pink, with a metallic sticker emblazoned with Robin’s face. “Those women,” she said astir the pirated Monster, successful 1 of our telephone conversations, “all those fantastic women,” her dependable breaking, decades later, astatine the ways they rallied astir her.
“Arraignment” and its surrounding contention inspired 1 of the astir potent Plath mythologies, the communicative that Ted Hughes stopped giving readings successful America due to the fact that women would protestation them by shouting “Arraignment” astatine the apical of their lungs. This communicative persists, adjacent though the Plath student Janet Badia, successful her foundational publication Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers, proved definitively that these protests ne'er happened. What happened alternatively was the literate constitution went each successful connected shutting down Robin Morgan, who told maine that Doris Lessing called her astatine location to archer her to “knock it off,” successful nary uncertain terms. This was borne retired by my ain archival research—a missive by Ted Hughes’s sister Olwyn, held by Emory University, describes her efforts to enlist Lessing successful the efforts to quiescent Robin—but it was stunning to perceive it confirmed by Robin, successful her ain voice, implicit my bureau telephone, arsenic though the telephone was coming from the agelong dormant past.
The powerfulness of Robin’s dependable was each implicit that agelong dormant past, arsenic I delved into archives to constitute Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, a publication written mostly successful effect to “new” letters by Sylvia Plath that emerged successful 2017. The letters were not really new, of course, conscionable agelong hidden. There were fourteen of them, each written to Plath’s psychiatrist-turned-confidante, Dr. Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher, betwixt 1960 and 1963, the past wrong a week of Plath’s 1963 suicide. They contained first-hand accounts of Ted Hughes’s violence, including a statement of a beating that Plath thought induced her February 1961 miscarriage. The letters had been stolen from Ruth Beuscher sometime successful the precocious 1960s oregon aboriginal 1970s by a young researcher named Harriet Rosenstein, who was commissioned by Knopf to constitute a “critical biography” of Plath, 1 that ne'er made it to print. In 2017, Rosenstein tried to merchantability the letters; their beingness astatine the New York Antiquarian Book Fair made planetary headlines, namely that Plath’s allegations of Hughes’s unit were “shocking.”
Robin knew amended than anyone that the idiosyncratic is governmental (a slogan she helped to write!) and that creation is the astir captious look of this.
As a longtime Plath researcher, I knew the revelations weren’t shocking, but erstwhile I truly tried to delve into the origins of my knowledge, what kept coming to caput was Robin Morgan’s “Arraignment,” a poem I had been told to work and disregard arsenic a young pistillate pupil of lit and originative writing. When I revisited “Arraignment” to constitute Loving Sylvia Plath, I was astonished to spot Robin laying retired ample parts of my “radical” statement astir Hughes’s unit and power of Plath’s beingness and legacy—in 1972.
So, I wrote to her to inquire for an interview. She declined done her adjunct but generously sent maine 2 archival documents: an nonfiction she herself had written successful effect to the emergence of Plath’s letters to Beuscher, which the Times Literary Supplement had planned to run, and pulled astatine the past minute, and her 1973 nonfiction from Feminist Art Journal, a mag agelong retired of print. When I work it, the hairs connected the backmost of my cervix stood up. That “purely Plathian line,” Why indispensable the sidesplitting of maine beryllium truthful elaborate? came verbatim from 1 of Plath’s letters to Beuscher. It appears successful thing other she wrote.
Robin, then, had work those letters, earlier they were stolen (she aboriginal confirmed this to me, but declined to elaborate connected the circumstances). When, successful “Arraignment,” she made her statement against Hughes, it was some rhetorical and textual. The disappearance of those letters—which would past for fractional a century—aided successful the literate establishment’s attempts to overgarment Robin arsenic the madwoman successful the attic of Plath studies. It was this, she aboriginal told me, that wounded her the most, the smear run against her poesy arsenic baseless inflammatory libel, erstwhile successful information she had done specified meticulous, groundbreaking probe to nutrient it. “Arraignment” not lone told the communicative of Hughes’s unit against Plath, it made the lawsuit for his wide signifier of unit against women, by telling the satellite astir Assia Gutmann Wevill, Hughes’s person from 1961-1969—the twelvemonth that Assia, too, took her ain life, and the beingness of Shura, her kid with Hughes. In 2006, the Plath student Judith Kroll took recognition for being the archetypal idiosyncratic to sanction Wevill publically successful her 1976 book, Chapters In A Mythology. But she was either lying oregon misinformed—it was Robin, successful 1972.
In 2009, Honor Moore wrote accurately of Plath’s relation successful 2nd question feminism that Sylvia was “an avatar” for everything women were past thinking, feeling, speaking, and writing. But that didn’t hap by accident. Robin propelled Plath’s enactment to the forefront of the question by including poems similar “The Jailer,” which Hughes had excised from Ariel, in RAT, a extremist mag she helped edit, successful the precocious 1960s, and successful her groundbreaking anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, published truthful aboriginal successful Plath studies that it misdates Plath’s property astatine the clip of her decease successful her abbreviated biography astatine the back. That biography closes with the line, “There was nary women’s question then,” which I number arsenic the earliest illustration successful people of Robin’s forthright content that marital unit contributes to women’s deaths, whether they are killed by their abusers oregon instrumentality their ain lives. It’s the aforesaid statement I made successful Loving Sylvia Plath, one I was able, finally, to backmost with empirical research, probe Robin’s enactment connected Plath laid the groundwork for, fractional a period ago.
I sent Robin a transcript of Loving Sylvia Plath when it debuted successful July of 2024. About a period later, I picked up a voicemail and heard her unforgettable dependable accidental the words, “I americium conscionable calling to speech to you astir your wonderful book, my dear. Call maine back!” I had to telephone Dani for courageousness first, but I dialed Robin’s Manhattan number. When she picked up, the archetypal happening she said was, “Hold on, dear, I’m listening to these criminals astatine the Republican National Convention, I person to crook them down.”
That was the archetypal of galore conversations connected the phone, and email, that went connected until this past spring. We meant to conscionable up successful idiosyncratic doubly (“You’ll person to travel and person beverage successful my garden”), but she was sick some times. When I told her I was moving connected a caller task astir field intersexual violence, she instantly enactment maine successful interaction with respective organizations doing groundbreaking enactment connected that grimly perennial subject. She was the literal embodiment of generosity and love, ne'er divorcing those emotions from justifiable rage astatine the authorities of the world.
When I learned of her death, I was trapped successful the obsessive hustle of the summer’s waning days, wherever I, similar truthful galore teaching parents, person tried to prep my classes, beryllium a full-time mother, and (ha) “relax,” events which have, frankly, taken maine to pieces. For weeks, I person walked astir connected the verge of tears arsenic I tried to inhabit 2 lives astatine erstwhile and felt my selves divided and splinter. I’ve entered each time disembodied, my hands successful 1 place, my caput successful another, my bosom successful a third. The civilization hums beneath this all: mudslides successful Nepal, wedding-goers successful Iran murdered by American bombs. In Palestine, the ongoing genocide. And Lindsay Clancy’s case, proving that immoderate American mode we’re allegedly trying to sphere with the second actions should person died agelong ago, arsenic a mercy for truthful many.
No 1 knew this amended than Robin, who worked her full beingness to grant her profound emotion for her lad by making the satellite a amended spot for mothers everywhere. This was informed successful nary tiny mode by her speechmaking of Sylvia Plath’s final, large poesy astir art, motherhood, marriage, and violence. Robin knew amended than anyone that the idiosyncratic is governmental (a slogan she helped to write!) and that creation is the astir captious look of this. Anyone who tells you different is trying to merchantability you something, unopen you up, oregon both.
English (US) ·