Going Too Far
Authors: Robin Morgan
Going Too Far
The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist
Robin Morgan
For
the Snow Queen
and the Robber Girl,
but especially for Little Gerda.
Contents
I
NTRODUCTION
: Rights of Passage
II T
HE
E
MERGENCE OF
W
OMEN
'
S
L
IBERATION
Women Disrupt the Miss America Pageant
WITCH at the Counter-Inaugural
Being Reasonable: Two Letters to Men
III F
EMINIST
L
EANINGS
: A
RTICLES FOR A
W
OMEN
'
S
N
EWSPAPER
On Violence and Feminist Basic Training
A Country Weekend: Three Prose Poems
A Day in the Life (of a Woman)
On Women as a Colonized People
Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape
Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?
The Proper Study of Womankind: On Women's Studies
International Feminism: A Call for Support of the Three Marias
A New Fable of the Burning Time
V B
EYOND THE
S
EVENTH
V
EIL
: R
ECENT
W
RITINGS
The Politics of Sado-Masochistic Fantasies
Paranoia: Paradigm and Parable
Art and Feminism: A One-Act Whimsical Amusement on All That Matters
PREFACE TO THE 2014 EDITION
O
RIGINALLY PUBLISHED
in 1977,
Going Too Far
still surprises me. Where did it come from, the fool's courage in that young woman who dared employ methods ranging from parable to memoir to prophecy for her scribbles? She shifted between epistolary, journalistic, theoretical, polemical, elegiac, confessional, and dramatic techniques. She invented her voices as she wrote them, as if no single tone or approach could convey her awe at the enormity of her discovery: the emergence of a political self held in common with other women and the simultaneous development of a personal self coming into its own power. The result was this chronicle.
Going Too Far
marked the first time that I allowed my relationship problems at home to make it onto the pageâin prose, that is, because they had already become evident in my poetry. Women were bravely sharing deep, private truths in small consciousness-raising groups, soâgiven the intimacy I have always felt with the readerâthe page seemed a logical step. I decided, with my then-husband's agreement, to risk including my “Letters from a Marriage.” They were an exercise in irony, exposing the private subjugation of a public fire-breathing activist, the projection of intellectual mastery onto my husband, the classic self-blame endemic to that situation. (Feminists had not yet coined the slogan “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry,” but I had come up with “We are the women men warned us about.”) The letters offered a tender bonus, however: They revealed details of the birth of our son, Blake, who was wanted and beloved. When published, these unsent missives had a political as well as literary impact, as did the entirety of the book's last section, “Beyond the Seventh Veil: Recent Writings,” which contains chapters on sexual fantasies, dreams, journal entries, and a one-act play on art and feminism featuring the nine Muses. Honest to god. Little wonder I titled the book as I did.
The journalist here is busy describing the arc of the contemporary Women's Movement, from my Miss America Pageant protest essays in the late 1960s through the formation and happy contagion that was WITCH, to growing intimations of international feminism by the end of the bookâintimations that would become the impetus for my compiling
Sisterhood Is Global
. The political theorist surfaces in such chapters as “On Women As a Colonized People,” the rather audacious “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?” and “Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape.” This last was one of the earliest articulations of that connection, and the phrase “Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice” is among the most often-quoted lines from my work.
But then there's what's happening behind the scenes.
Going Too Far
lends insight into what was taking place offstage in the 1970s, as the Leftâthe hippie flower-and-love movement, peaceful protests for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, and the counter-cultureâfinding itself unable to deliver swift societal change to impatient youth, gave way to more militant tactics. Anti-intellectualism was ascendant, and the descent into violence began; nothing else had worked, so activists thought, Why the hell not? But the subtext vibrating beneath this political combativenessâwhether among the Weathermen, Black Panthers, or nameless “affinity groups”âwas “manhood.” A decade later, I would write about this in greater depth in
The Demon Lover
, but these earlier signs point in that direction. One such indication was the white-hot energy of “Goodbye to All That”âwhich, like my poem “Monster,” written in the same period, seemed to articulate the pain and anger of women on the left, and naming this made it real. The essay landed like an explosion, setting off chain reactions in the public and private lives of activists. I had named names of abusive male leaders and numbered myself, along with other swaggeringly “liberated” women, among the oppressed. This was Just Not Doneâbut once I'd done it, imagine my shock to find it was possible to breathe and act more freely. Astoundingly, “Goodbye to All That” had the same effect on other women. Looking back, I realize that though it takes courage to speak truth to power, it takes as much or more courage to speak truth to powerlessness.
I'm proud of certain small acts of courage in this book. In an era of leftist intellectual downward mobility and correct-line thinking, it was a challenge to reclaim one's own art and aesthetics, in fact to unapologetically affirm art itself. I'm proud that as far back as the mid-seventies I was drawn to what I termed
metaphysical feminism
: “the refusal to simplify or polarize, the insatiable demand for a passionate, intelligent, complex, visionary, and
continuing
process ⦠which dares to celebrate contradiction and diversity.”
The humor in this book also pleases me, like my parody of my own poem “Monster,” satirized here in a piece of light verse entitled “Muenster,” about the world of political big cheeses. I'm proud that I learned to prick my own pomposity with humor, which always blesses one with perspective. Central-committee types were and are lamentably bereft of a sense of humorâa clue not to trust them.
In the original preface to
Going Too Far
, I mentioned that the dialogue between present, past, and future selves at first unsettled me but that I'd come to respect it. All this time later, I've come to realize that there is no past or future, not really; the sole continuity is dynamic change, which vibrates perpetually in the present. And that means, no matter how far you think you've come, it's necessary to go further.
Robin Morgan
October 2014
New York City
PREFACE
The contents of this book tell a story which covers the last decade and a half. In selecting the pieces assembled here I have chosen those which seemed best to represent my own evolving political/personal thought of a given period. These writings were map notations in the journey of an individual woman through uncharted territory, via the intertwined roads of daughterhood, artistry, marriage, motherhood, radicalism. The interior terrain was one of ambivalent love, of dreams and fantasies, an exploration of “madness,” and an affirmation of the artistic process. The exterior reality was of the 1960's: reform and then revolutionary politics, militant tactics (and rhetoric), and the emergence of feminist consciousness. The progress is revealingly reflected, I think, in that basic measure of human communication: language.
By 1962, I was a professional writer, one who loved and was addicted to wordsâand the subsequent changes in content and consciousness would be shown most clearly in the changes of style. Sand, Koestler, Camus, de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Fanon are only a few of the many writers who have explored the problem of style for the artist who is also an active political person of her/his time. Does one retain (indeed, strive to heighten) the subtle and elegant possibilities language has to offer in one's work, even at the risk of appearing dense, elitist, or irrelevant perhaps to the very people one wants most to reach? Does one dare write “down” for the sake of accessibility? If so, how far can the words be simplified before the ideas themselves begin to lose the integrity of their own complexities? How do urgencies of the time, pressures by one's political peers, feelings of guilt for a private joy found in the so-called individualistic act of writingâhow do all these affect one's work? The essays in this book show, I think, part of the effect on one such writer's development. My “pre-political” respect for words was driven underground, so to speak, not so much by the civil-rights movement beginning in the late 1950's, as by the New Left in the 1960's; the very tools which were my best offering to the politics of my own generation were often regarded with contempt. Right and Left anti-intellectualism
united when middle-class guilt drove my contemporaries into rebellion not only against educational institutions (which highly deserved such a revolt), but against education itself. Television had replaced books for many; rhetoric, in time, replaced thought. Or is this last an occupational hazard of all dedicated idealogues, an expedient if tragic inevitability?
I myself, then in my twenties, careened between my own fierce and often melodramatic individuality and a surrender to the intense pressure we radicals mutually exerted upon one anotherâall of us eagerly conforming to the dogma of nonconformity. I remember more than one demonstration of revolutionary sisters and brothers standardized in the regalia of psychedelic splendor and chanting in unison some slogan that conveyed our rejection of a society which processed people into identical robots. Irony (perhaps alone) still lives.
As feminist consciousness trickled into my life, however, another shift in my attitude toward language came about. It was not mere coincidence. Many of us began to recognize that we as women were trying to communicate hitherto unspeakable truths about our condition in the very language and concepts of the patriarchal culture (of the Left
or
Right) which caused that condition. Alma Graham and other feminist lexicographers and linguistic scholars explored the biased usage of everyday language, and began to devise new ways of freeing our speech. Synchronistically, an awkward but intrepid feminist culture was born, making it possible, among other things, to use in a poem words previously considered unpoetic, such as
menstrual, dishcloth, diaper
. Meanwhile I was finding my own way, as these essays reflect, back to that original concern for language, but a concern informed and transformed by the political consciousness gained in the interim. No revolution has yet dared understand its artists. Perhaps the Feminist Revolution will.
