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A Study of two Underground Poetesses!

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"
" In ‘Letter to a Sister Underground,’ the American poet and active feminist Robin
Morgan proceeds by addressing one particular ‘Sister,’ but soon adapts her subject to the
universal woman, ‘since all of us are underground’ (49).1 The poem sits in the middle of
Monster, an incredibly angry collection which was published to much feminist acclaim in
1972. Monster was almost denied publication, because of its outright intention to liberate
from underground one of poetry’s most literally (and physically) buried voices. Sylvia Plath
committed suicide nine years before Monster, but her attraction to biographers, academics
and poets was still very much alive. Her presence is evident in Morgan’s work, particularly
with regard to the poetess’ response to the roles that gender dictates. Morgan suggests
that women have to fight harder than men to be heard, even from beyond the grave. In
‘Arraignment (I),’ she gives Plath the voice that suicide muzzled, similarly to the self-
sacrificing speaker in her late poem ‘The Rabbit-Catcher,’ who stands with ‘The wind
gagging my mouth with my own blown hair’ (2).2 Morgan’s poem starts boldly ‘I accuse/
Ted Hughes’ (1-2), and ends by anticipating his response: ‘In the meantime, Hughes/ sue
me (56-57). Unsurprisingly, Morgan’s poem provoked the Hughes estate to do exactly that.
They took her ‘Arraignment’ very literally and protested that ‘the poem was impossible,
highly libelous, unfair to Ted Hughes, unsubstantiated, and endangering.’3 Morgan fought
back, but was ordered by Random House to either remove or substitute the poem. In its
place, she published ‘Arraignment (II),’ which implicitly masks accusation of murder by
underlining the suppression of the female voice, of both herself and Plath.4 This essay
examines how Morgan, Plath and others fragment and attack elements of their ‘roles’ as
women, in order to portray the limitations placed on their gender."
"
"
"

1Robin Morgan, ’Letter to a Sister Underground’, in Monster, London, British Library, General
Reference Collection YA.1996.a.17224. p. 63.
2 Sylvia Plath, ‘The Rabbit-Catcher’, in Collected Poems, (London: Faber & Faber, 1989), p. 164
3 Robin Morgan, ‘Conspiracy of Silence Against a Feminist Poem’, in Monster.
4 Robin Morgan, ‘Arraignment (II)’, in Monster, p. 78.
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" Prior to the twentieth-century, the American woman’s role was inflexibly restricted to
mother or sister. Allowing women to think too much was discouraged, let alone to nurture
these thoughts by writing. The posthumously acclaimed American poet Emily Dickinson
describes her father’s precautions: ‘He buys me many Books — but begs me not to read
them — because he fears they joggle the Mind.’5 Clearly, this did not suppress Dickinson,
but as Anne Stevenson points out, it was tolerable for her to write because she remained
unmarried.6 Plath’s poem ‘Spinster’ portrays a similar figure spurning the institution of
marriage because she would rather be lonely than unable to write:"
"
" ‘Let idiots"
Reel giddy in bedlam spring:"
She withdrew neatly.’ (22-24).7"
"
A large proportion of Dickinson’s female contemporaries were also ‘spinsters,’ who were
creatively empowered by their rejection of the woman’s duty to produce and sustain a
family. Stevenson observes both cost and gain, in that ’These women may have suffered,
but they suffered as women who attempted neither to fight male domination nor
compromise themselves to suit it.’8 Into the twentieth-century, circumstances for female
poets had not progressed much. Plath had her first child in 1960, and Morgan hers in
1969. Both Frieda Hughes and Blake Morgan had poets for fathers.9 Equality of profession
did not mean equality of agency to pursue that profession; ‘motherhood’ carried
considerably more responsibility than ‘fatherhood,’ in the eyes of society and consequently
the mother. Audre Lorde describes the compressive effect of a ‘role’ on the poet: ‘within
living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanisation, our
feelings were not meant to survive.’10 Plath demonstrates this sense of definition in

5Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Vol. 2, ed. T. H. Johnson, (Cambridge:
Massachusetts University Press, 1958), p. 261.
6Anne Stevenson, ‘Writing as a Woman’ in Writing Women and Writing About Women, ed. Mary
Jacobus (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1979), pp. 159-176, p. 163.
7 Sylvia Plath, ‘Spinster’ in The Colossus, (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), p. 68.
8 Stevenson, p. 163.
9 Ted Hughes and Kenneth Pitchford.
10Audre Lorde, ‘Poetry is Not a Luxury’, in Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and
Contemporary Readings, eds. Susan Maxine Shaw and Janet Lee, (UK: McGraw-Hill, 2006) pp.
371-373, p. 373.
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‘Morning Song,’ a poem which both celebrates and elegises motherhood.11 She is as
unconnected to the baby as the reader is, withholding both its name or any term of
endearment. The child arrives by surprise: ‘Love set you going like a fat gold watch’ (1)
jolts it to life without any allusion to the nine month pregnancy period, or anticipation of
starting a family. The poem fizzes with pleasure for the most part, but is weighed down by
the detachment of the third stanza:"
"
‘I’m no more your mother"
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its slow"
Effacement at the wind’s hand.’ (7-9)."
"
By comparing motherhood to the randomised patterns of the elements, Plath rejects it as
an all-encompassing role. It is not her face looking back out of the mirror, but a random,
passing cloud, which is characterised by its endless recycling of water, in contrast to the
permanence of parenting. ‘Morning Song’ yields its ethereal, cloud daydream to return
back to the domestic setting of a child crying in their cot, causing Plath’s speaker to
unpoetically ‘stumble from bed, cow-heavy’ (13) towards the source. She imagines the
crying baby’s ‘clear vowels rise like balloons’ (18), which for all its praise leaves the mother
rooted to the ground, thinking for the second time of release into the unlimited sky. This
feeling is not exclusive to Plath, as shown in the work of the later feminist poet, Eavan
Boland. In her poem ‘Witching,’ Boland evokes the image of woman buried ‘underground’
by motherhood.12 The ‘shifty, bookish’ (3) speaker desires nothing more than to ‘study
dark’ (9) at midnight - ‘The witching hour’ (31) when nobody else is awake. In frantic,
polysyllabic diction, she reasons to herself:"
"
‘You’d think"
you’d think"
"
the bitches"
couldn’t reach"
me here."
"
But here they are."
The nursery lights"
they shine, they shine,"
"
11 Sylvia Plath, ‘Morning Song’, in Ariel, (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 11.
12 Eavan Boland, ‘Witching’, in In Her Own Image, (Dublin: Arlen House, 1980), p. 28.
4 of 10 33243726

they multiply"
they douse"
mine!’ (32-42)."
"
Once again, motherhood invades the poet’s literary space. Boland implies that her
precious midnight reading time is at constant risk of disruption, and an overwhelmingly
bright one at that. Plath loses the license to drift upwards with her dreams, because she is
caught in ‘the tension between the two roles - the woman and the writer.’13 For Morgan, the
child itself buries her underground by dehumanising her femininity. In the title poem
‘Monster,’ her ‘not-yet/ two’ (27-28) year old son associates his favourite television
character with the speaker’s private parts:"
"
’he connected that image with my genitals; laughed"
and said, “Monster” (31-32).14"
"
Morgan’s son vocalises the subjugation which Plath and Boland hint at, but do not
explicitly admit. All three poets suffer the guilt of identifying their children with the
masculine power structure which dismantles gender equality, falsely propped up on
Morgan’s idea that ‘child-rearing is the one area in which we [women] are allowed power at
all.’15 Frustratingly, this power comes at the cost of artistic freedom. This frustration is
enhanced by the fact that their other halves, aptly invisible presences in the poems,
remain above ground as before. Morgan looks at her son and sees a ‘White. Male.
American./ Potentially the most powerful, deadly creature/ of the species’ (21-23). She
daringly challenges the placidity that motherhood is presumed to induce."
"
"
" "
" The generalisation that comes with a role such as ‘mother’ eradicates any trace of
individualism within the female. Michie identifies the resultant apprehension towards
female sameness as ‘sororophobia,’ which is essentially the ‘desire for and recoil from
identification with other women.’16 Plath and Morgan respond by creating a variety of
personas which represent different fragments of ‘themselves as characters within the

13 Stevenson, p. 160.
14 Robin Morgan, ‘Monster’, in Monster, p. 84.
15 Robin Morgan, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, (New York: Vintage, 1978),
p. 159.
16
Helena Michie, Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 9.
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poems,’ rather than one complete woman.17 Throughout Plath’s Ariel, Janet Malcolm
notices ‘queen, priestess, magician’s girl, red-haired woman who eats men like air, woman
in white, woman in love, earth mother, moon goddess,’ as well as a paralytic, a miner and
a mother.18 The effect of this is that she becomes indefinable, thus resisting against the
constraints of a female role. Plath caricatures the ways in which society confines women in
‘The Applicant.’19 The title likens marriage to a job interview, with woman as a ‘living
doll’(33) who will ‘bring teacups and roll away headaches’ (12) in fulfilment of domestic
requirements. Plath’s doll is so precisely calibrated to ‘do whatever you tell it’ (13), that her
actions erase any sense of a self and render her an ‘it.’ This gendered depersonalisation
echoes the literary establishment’s attitude towards female writers of the twentieth-century.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin recalls the sexism of publishing before
feminism: ’It was commonplace to be told by an editor that he’d like to publish more of my
poems, but he’d already published one by a woman that month.’20 Difficulties of publication
aside, poetry was one of the only places where women could challenge these pre-
ordained roles. The meek, obedient doll of ‘The Applicant’ is redeemed by a woman of ‘a
million filaments’ (25), in its successive ‘Lady Lazarus.’21 Although the Lady is dead, her
vocabulary sparkles with speed and energy:"
"
‘Dying"
Is an art, like everything else."
I do it exceptionally well."
"
I do it so it feels like hell."
I do it so it feels real.’ (43-47)."
"
By referring to death as ‘an art,’ the Lady asserts agency in her perfection of it. Plath’s use
of anaphora in lines 45-46 end in single-stressed masculine rhyme, whereas in line 47 the
word ‘real’ switches to feminine rhyme. This implies the Lady is capable of power in the

17Mark Doty, ‘The “Forbidden Planet” of Character: The Revolutions of the 1950s’, in A Profile of
Twentieth-Century American Poetry, eds. Jack Elliott Myers and David Wojahn, (Illinois: SIU Press,
1991), pp. 131-158, p. 148.
18Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, (London: Granta, 2005), p.
123.
19 Plath, ‘The Applicant’, in Ariel, p. 14.
20Mary Biggs, Cannot Be Refused: The Writing and Publishing of Contemporary American Poetry,
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), p. 25
21 Sylvia Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’, in Ariel.
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masculine sense, but significantly employs it to her own purposes within feminine prosody.
Woman is no longer the applicant for a role, but the applier of many roles. She has ‘nine
times to die’ (21), but comes back to life each time to perfect ‘the art’ of death. "
"
"
"
" For Plath, who suffered anxiety and mental illness throughout her life, fragmentation
of the female self is liberating. This may be because she died before the feminist
movement took off, when women began to protest their roles in louder terms than
metaphor. Morgan’s view of fragmentation is completely different. The Lady Lazarus figure
in Monster is ‘The Woman That Got Away/ or The Woman Who Made It.’22 She
reincarnates while she is living:"
"
‘She played: matriarch with a sense of humor,"
tough broad, fragile flower, spiritual seeker,"
Jewish princess, a real pal, earth mother goddess,"
tripper, capable unhysterical real woman friend,"
juicy cunt, boyish gamin, lyrical lover, chic swinger, and"
“your equal”’ (22-27)."
"
Morgan’s cynicism about the newfound flexibility of choice in the 1970s is shown in her
use of predictable collocations and the juxtaposition of equality with patronising speech
marks. These devices foreshadow the next two lines:"
"
‘—and anything else the boys dug in a female"
at any given moment’ (28-29)."
"
She shows how fragmentation is the result of inequality; women are forced to play roles
because they are discouraged from developing a whole persona, as men can.
Furthermore, it is men who dictate these roles, appropriately ‘digging’ as if for burial. The
poem progresses to a similar list of formulaic deaths, including ‘hemorrhaging out from a
safe, expensive abortion’ (52). However, she persists through these with a stubborn
insistence: ‘She refused to understand she was doomed from the start’ (59). In the end,
the speaker resolves to kill the Woman. Her death becomes an allegory for exposing the
false agency and equality that women experience. "
"
"

22 Robin Morgan, ‘The Women That Got Away/ or The Woman Who Made It’, in Monster, p. 71.
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" Although Plath and Morgan differ in motivation regarding fragmentation, they both
utilise the female imagination for the purpose of shock. Michie observes ‘Feminist writers
necessarily live and write at the centre of a paradox; they are using patriarchal language to
destroy patriarchy and the language it produces.’23 This gendered language cannot
repress female experience, especially throughout Boland’s In Her Own Image, which Jan
Montefiore describes as ‘nearly all dramatic monologues which transform the stereotyped
images of women by speaking directly of the taboo or scandalous aspects of women’s
experience.’24 In In Her Own Image, Boland poeticises menstruation in ‘Menses,’ portrays
the leftover ‘brute site’ (47) of ‘Mastectomy,’ and voices ‘The scream of beaten
women’ (33).25 Fifteen years earlier, Plath’s ‘Daddy’ was published in Ariel, explicitly
revealing the self-destructive effect of subjugation on femaleness.26 The critic George
Steiner described it as ‘the ‘Guernica’ of modern poetry,’ indexing Plath’s references to the
Holocaust, masochism and most importantly, the speaker’s erotic pull to her harmful
subject.27 "
"
‘Not God but a swastika"
So black no sky could shine through."
Every woman adores a Fascist,"
The boot in the face, the brute"
Brute heart of a brute like you.’ (46-50)."
"
The word ‘brute’ appears as in Boland’s ‘Mastectomy’, and its specific masculine
etymology backfires onto patriarchy in line with Michie’s paradox theory. By utilising a
general word, Plath and Boland inflict the limitations of female experience onto its
perpetrator: man. ‘Daddy’ portrays female suppression as an obstruction of vision, for the
sky is blocked and the boot comes down to the eyes. The Daddy figure becomes one of
history’s despised persecutors, a Nazi ‘man in black with a Meinkampf look’ (65), to the
speaker’s Jew. This horrific relationship contrasts with the playful assonance of the
repeated ‘oo’ sound, and the speaker’s unlikely emancipation from Daddy: ‘Daddy, daddy,

23 Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 130.
24Jan Montefiore, Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women’s Writing,
(Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 215.
25 Eavan Boland, ‘Tirade for the Mimic Muse’, in In Her Own Image, p. 9.
26 Sylvia Plath, ‘Daddy’, in Ariel, p. 54.
27George Steiner, ‘Dying is an Art’, in The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium, ed. Charles Newman,
(London: Faber and Faber, 1970), pp. 211-218, p. 218.
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you bastard, I’m through’ (80). Unburying the darkest truths of womanhood empowers
Plath on the page far more than she was able to whilst alive, hence her need to write in as
extreme language as possible. She succeeds in proving that the female imagination is
irrepressible. "
"
"
"
"
" Morgan’s experience with the publication of ‘Arraignment (I)’ shows that some
elements of feminist thought are condemned to remain buried underground. Aptly, she
focuses her poem on Plath’s oppression, which the Hughes estate continued to censor
long after Plath’s death in 1963. Their fierce protection of Ted’s reputation is explained by
Malcolm in The Silent Woman:"
"
‘We must always take the novelist’s and the playwright’s and the poet’s word, just
as we are almost always free to doubt the biographer’s or the autobiographer’s or
the historian’s or the journalist’s. In imaginative literature we are constrained from
considering alternative scenarios —there are none.’28"
"
Morgan’s poem invites speculation about the facts of Plath’s suicide. Her feminist
imagination condemns him as a ‘one-man gynocidal movement’ (36), which positions the
poem in the crossfire between biography and poetic license. From the Hughes’
perspective, Morgan circulates the idea that Ted Hughes harbours ‘real blood on real
hands’ (17), and writes the poem for the purpose of accusation. They consider Plath’s
suicide too taboo to withstand the interpretative literary imagination. For Morgan, ‘the
poem was a descendent of a long line of honorable literary tradition in a polemical and
accusative tone,’ and ‘Arraignment (I)’ simply follows in the male wake of Dante’s placing
of his enemies in hell, Robert Bly’s anti-war poems, LeRoi Jones’s court poem accusing
Lyndon Johnson of murder, and the enduring Dryden, Pope, Marvell and Byron.29
Furthermore, she wonders at the discontinuity of what was taken seriously and what was
not; to Morgan, the oppressed female personas in Plath’s poetry implied facts of these
very accusations, which she simply converts into a poem. ‘Arraignment (I)’ contains many
highly literary phrases like ‘mind-rape’ (9) and ‘plagiarism of her imagery’ (11), none of
which would stand up in a real courtroom. In contrast, Plath’s continuous allusion to
mistreatment and discontent is not taken literally. Lady Lazarus, Daddy’s daughter and the

28 Malcolm, p. 154-155.
29 Morgan, ‘Conspiracy’, 12/72.
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spinster are all mere fragments of fact, whilst Hughes, as a man, constitutes enough of a
human being to suffer offence. Indeed, there is currency in Hughes’ defensiveness, but the
complications of publishing Monster highlight the measures he took to bury Plath beneath
the ground, in literature and in life. "
"
"
"
" "
"
" The differences between ‘Arraignment (I)’ and ‘Arraignment (II)’ underline the issues
of gender burial that Plath, Morgan and Boland explore. That ‘her accusation of rape could
be conceived as/ metaphor’ (15-16), demonstrates why female poets opt for imagery
which will shock. Anyhow, their experiences are not likely to be taken seriously within a
literary establishment which continues to suit men better, one example being Ted Hughes,
who benefits ‘to make a mint/ by becoming her posthumous editor’ (23-24). Morgan
captures the belittling response towards any woman who is angry: ‘Plath, for example, was
clearly unbalanced/ for writing such terrifying poems about Hughes’ (49-50). Amongst so
many disparate attitudes towards women, it is surprising that the feelings Lorde spoke of
have survived, let alone developed into poetry. Lorde’s essay provides an explanation: ‘For
women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital part of our existence…Poetry is the way we
give name to the nameless so it can be thought.’30 As Morgan did for Plath, and as Plath
did for her speaker in ‘Daddy,’ poetry pulls women ‘out of the sack’ (61) and sticks their
fragmented selves ‘together with glue’ (62).31"
"
Words: 3163!
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30 Lorde, p. 372.
31 Plath, ‘Daddy’, p. 56.
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Bibliography!
"
"
Biggs, Mary." " Cannot Be Refused: The Writing and Publishing of Contemporary American
! ! ! Poetry, (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990)."
"
Boland, Boland." In Her Own Image, (Dublin: Arlen House, 1980)."
"
Dickinson, Emily." The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Vol. 2, ed. T. H. Johnson, (Cambridge: "
" " " Massachusetts University Press, 1958)."
"
Doty, Mark. " " ‘The “Forbidden Planet” of Character: The Revolutions of the 1950s’, in A !
! ! ! Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, eds. Jack Elliott Myers and "
" " " David Wojahn, (Illinois: SIU Press, 1991), pp. 131-158."
"
Lorde, Audre." " ‘Poetry is Not a Luxury’, in Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and
! ! ! Contemporary Readings, eds. Susan Maxine Shaw and Janet Lee, (UK: "
" " " McGraw-Hill, 2006) pp. 371-373."
"
Malcolm, Janet." The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, (London: Granta, 2005)."
"
Michie, Helena." Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture, !
! ! ! (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)."
"
Michie, Helena." The Flesh Made Word, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)."
"
Montefiore, Jan." Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women’s Writing,
! ! ! (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994)."
"
Morgan, Robin." Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, (New York: Vintage,
" " " 1978)."
"
Morgan, Robin." Monster, London, British Library, General Reference Collection YA.1996.a.
" " " 17224."
"
Plath, Sylvia. " " Ariel, (London: Faber and Faber, 1968)."
"
Plath, Sylvia." " Collected Poems, (London: Faber & Faber, 1989)."
"
Plath, Sylvia." " The Colossus, (London: Faber & Faber, 1967)."
"
Steiner, George." ‘Dying is an Art’, in The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium, ed. Charles "
" " " Newman, (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), pp. 211-218."
"
Stevenson, Anne," ‘Writing as a Woman’ in Writing Women and Writing About Women, ed. "
" " " Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1979), pp. 159-176.