On the Saturday morning of Labor Day weekend, my best friend Dani, also a writer, wrote to tell me that Robin Morgan, the landmark American feminist activist, organizer, and writer, had died. In the midst of the rush to finish my syllabi and opening week assignments, as my husband shuffled the kids into their sneakers and Crocs and the car for one last back-to-school outing, everything stopped. I stood at the kitchen sink watching the light filter through the holly bush at the window and cried.
Born January 29, 1941, Robin’s list of accomplishments, which included 23 books, organizing the famed protest of the 1969 Miss America Pageant (when feminists crowned and sashed a sheep on the nearby Atlantic City Boardwalk), and the founding of the National Network of Rape Crisis Centers, is extraordinary, and outlined in the outpouring of obituaries in newspapers here and abroad. But only a handful of these tributes mention Robin’s profound influence on Sylvia Plath’s legacy, one which in turn dramatically affected Robin’s life and career. If they do, this legacy is reduced to the mention of Robin’s poem “Arraignment,” which began with the lines How can I accuse Ted Hughes of… the murder of Sylvia Plath?
In fact, just trying to quote the opening lines of “Arraignment” points immediately to the ways Robin’s relationship with Plath’s work will not be reduced. Robin included “Arraignment” in her 1972 poetry collection Monster, but the published “Arraignment” wasn’t the version she wanted in print. Robin’s original version of “Arraignment” began “I accuse / Ted Hughes / of… the murder of Sylvia Plath.” As she detailed in a 1973 essay written for Feminist Art Journal, prior to Monster’s publication, but after galleys had already been printed, Robin was called into a meeting with Random House lawyers, who informed her that “Arraignment” had to be pulled or rewritten.
The poem as it stood, she was told, accused Ted Hughes of raping and murdering his wife, and was grounds for libel. Robin’s response to these men was two-pronged: first, she had not accused Ted Hughes of the literal murder of his first wife, who she agreed had certainly died by suicide on February 11, 1963. Robin was instead arguing that through his extreme (and well-documented) censorship of Sylvia’s work after her suicide, Hughes had killed Plath’s artistic corpus and her radical politics.
Second, in her time researching Sylvia Plath, Robin had seen a series of letters Plath wrote that described abuse, including sexual abuse, by Hughes—about twenty letters, she wrote in Feminist Art Journal—so her accusation of rape in “Arraignment” was based on, and back up by, Plath’s own words. Robin quoted one of these letters: Why must the killing of me be so elaborate? Robin’s concise and insightful argument meant nothing to Random House’s lawyers who, like many literary legal teams of the time, were likely aware of Ted Hughes’s propensity for lawfare to shut down anyone trying to challenge his version of Plath’s life and work.
So, Robin rewrote “Arraignment,” changing “I accuse / Ted Hughes” to “How can I / accuse / Ted Hughes,” a brilliant rhetorical move that managed to contain her quagmire in line breaks and punctuation. How can I do this and get away with it? she asks herself on the page—while getting away with it, since the poem in its second form went to print. It was vintage Robin, the woman who once derided women’s attempts to organize alongside leftist men as “the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you anything but gonorrhea.” But in many ways, it devastated her.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
