The Iron Woman: 1

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Kerslake, Lorraine. (2020). Ted Hughes: The Importance of Fostering Creative Writing as Environmental Education. Children’s Literature in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-020-09427-4. Set in 1937 during the so-called “Roosevelt recession,” tight times compel Mary Alice, a Chicago girl, to move in with her grandmother, who lives in a tiny Illinois town so behind the times that it doesn’t “even have a picture show.” Children’s literature and posthumanism have long shared much in common. As a genre, children’s fiction abounds in non-human creatures and hybrid human-animal beings, toys, robots and other machines and it can offer readers multiple and alternative ways of envisioning human interconnections with the artificial. As Maria Nikolajeva puts it “Negotiations within the hybrid human-animal or human–machine body are omnipresent in real life, but in fiction they can be amplified, and in children’s fiction they can be used for didactic purposes” (Nikolajeva, 2016, p. 135).

Nikolajeva, Maria. (2016). Recent Trends in Children’s Literature Research: Return to the Body. International Research in Children’s Literature, 9(2), 132–145. Another direct allusion to Carson’s seminal work can be seen at the beginning of Hughes’s narrative in the figure of the birdwatcher who discovers that the bittern, an endangered species, and her eggs, whose hatch he had spent all day waiting for, are stone dead, uncannily recalling the premise behind Carson’s Silent Spring. Carson had been prompted by a letter from her friend Olga Owens, a newspaper reporter, who had written in 1958 telling her how pesticides were wiping out the birds. Not only did Carson’s book demonstrate the effects of DDT on the whole food chain but she revealed how “the earth’s vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the earth” (Carson, 1962, p. 64) laying the foundations for a more holistic view of Nature. Long before the term ‘ecocriticism’ existed, Footnote 1 Carson embodied the movement through her writing, endorsing the notion that, as humans, not only can we alter nature, but that the key to change, and mending the damage we have caused, lies also in our hands.Written half-way between a modern fairy-tale and a science-fiction myth, Hughes’s narrative describes how a giant “metal man” appears from the sea and falls from a cliff, only to reassemble himself, and begin devouring anything metal. He soon becomes a problem for the local farmers who decide to dig a pit to capture him and bury him. However, after being buried he rises again and when a monstruous alien descends from outer space and threatens the extinction of all life on Earth, the Iron Man defends the people and restores peace. Curry, Alice. (2013). Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Children’s literature has long been concerned with nature. The way we portray the natural world and the environment we live in matters. The image we present to children and young adults about the world they live in can offer creative settings that can excite their imagination and perhaps prompt them to consider their own relationship with our damaged planet. Whilst in America Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax (1971) is considered by many as the book that began “the environmental movement in children’s literature” (Dobrin and Kidd, 2004, p. 11) and as a canonical text of literary environmentalism for the classroom, Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man (1968) has long been part of the curriculum throughout schools in Britain and continues to remain on the reading lists as a standard text for primary schools in the UK. Both read as examples of early environmental texts that convey didactic messages about the need for humans to become better caretakers of the earth. One of the primary functions of such texts is that they can help young children understand contemporary ecological issues and reveal how humans have disrupted the harmony of our planet, positioning young people to reflect on responsible ecocitizenship.

Taylor, Diana. (1997). Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War”. Durham and London: Duke UP.Like Carson, Hughes also believed that humans and nature were part of the same web of life and that you could not harm a part of nature without harming the whole. Raising environmental awareness and instilling in the reader a sense of connection with the natural world was part of the poet's project. From the very beginning of his career, he strived to make his environmental thinking public, and throughout his life he was actively involved in a number of educational projects and charities, many of which were directed at children and young adults. Footnote 2 More recently, Eman El Nouhy ( 2017) has compared Hughes’s narrative to that of the Medusa, claiming that by fusing the myth he is able “to facilitate an archetypal awakening that might reach his readers’ unconscious and hence force them to recognize the atrocities they have committed against Nature, who is also ‘‘the female in all its manifestations’’” (El Nouhy, 2017, p. 349). Despite noting the female aspect, El Nouhy fails to mention the importance of Lucy in the novel, and instead repeatedly insists that Hughes uses the Medusa myth as a metaphor for a “defiled, victimized woman—for Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide shortly after she discovered that Ted Hughes had committed adultery” ( 2017, p. 350) overlooking the overtly environmental dimension of the novel and the fact that Hughes had already written The Iron Man as a healing myth for his children and as a way to express his own grief. These robotic lamentations should convince the reader of her seemingly mechanical origins, however these are the cries of the river and its wildlife, of which she is born. We learn that this river is linked to a nearby waste disposal plant, which is beginning to kill everything natural nearby to it due to its rapacious growth as a business. Greenaway, Betty (Ed.). (1994). Special Issue: ‘Ecology and the Child’. Children’s Literature Quarterly, 19:4. Young, Rebecca. (2018). Confronting Climate Crises Through Education: Reading Our Way Forward. Lanham, Lexington Books: Rowman & Littlefield.

The Iron Woman is a science fiction novel by British writer Ted Hughes, published in 1993. It is a sequel to the 1968 novel The Iron Man. urn:oclc:863542439 Republisher_date 20120517214318 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20120516215950 Scanner scribe7.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition) Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Yes we have fantasy in full flight both in how it dealt with and how it is concluded but for me that is not the point. The point here is that something that does not have a voice is given one and from there the real power comes. Ironically this could be applied to a lot of things today - where currently there is no way of them to tell their story and share their pain - what would come if of it if suddenly they were able to do so.Plumwood held that humans needed a new ethics to restore harmony in the natural world. Read in the current crisis, her words seem to ring truer than ever. Given this bleak scenario, what value does it have to read a children’s text which is approaching its thirtieth anniversary, when we are currently immersed in a global environmental crisis which has worsened dramatically over the past three decades? It becomes clear early on that this story, and the Iron Woman herself, is retaliating to the built-up destruction of the planet by humanity's excesses and waste. However, it is not only hope that these young women provide but potential solutions to the ongoing issues of climate change, standing up, like Lucy, to the threats from patriarchal systems or neoliberal capitalism and the effects of the Anthropocene. Their call to action can inspire change and empower other women, challenging traditional gender roles. As Castro claims: “In this cultural moment of political “girl power”, girls are reshaping concepts of gender in line with their cultural, historical, material and social circumstances” (Castro, 2021, p. 202). Relke, Joan. (2007). The Archetypal Female in Mythology and Religion: the Anima and the Mother of the Earth and Sky. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 3(2). Accessed January 5, 2017, from http://ejop.psychopen.eu/article/view/401/html.

Gifford, Terry. (2008). Rivers and Water Quality in the Work of Brian Clarke and Ted Hughes. Concentric, 34(1), 75–91. Hughes was well informed about river pollution, as can be seen when in 1981 he formed the Torridge Action Group and acted in the cause of public health with local authorities over the Bideford Sewage system, which emptied its effluent directly into the river, causing severe pollution. When the group called for a public enquiry to clean up the river, he spoke on their behalf and wrote a reasoned campaign statement which, in turn, expanded into a national research and monitoring organisation concerned with water quality in the nation’s rivers (Gifford, 2008). Hughes was also an active campaigner for a hygienic water supply in Southwest England, and after sitting on the committee for the National Rivers Authority, he set up the Westcountry Rivers Trust in 1993. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-02-13 23:03:40 Boxid IA177901 Boxid_2 CH110001 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York DonorCixous, Helene. (1976, Summer). The Laugh of the Medusa. Keith Cohen & Paula Cohen (Trans.). Signs, 1(4): 875–893. These creatures were obviously not aliens quarantined on another planet. Cell by watery cell they were extensions of ourselves, our early warning system, physically our own extremities. The Letters Editor asked me to cut out all the gruesome, close-up stuff about the disintegrating tumour-crammed body bags of the otters. I insisted, this was the whole point of my letter. He then refused to publish it […] And when I asked him why, he told me: ‘We simply can’t put that sort of thing in front of our readers at breakfast’ (Hughes, 1992, p. 34). What is perhaps more relevant, in line with Carson, is that Hughes uses The Iron Woman to explore how environmental issues are social issues. This political discourse which would now be recognised by ecocritics as environmental justice—the concern for both environment and human’s dependency upon it—can also be read in the novel. As Zoe Jacques points out, “Both children’s fiction and posthumanism, then, might be said to have the unique potential to offer a forward-focused agenda that unites the possibilities of fantasy with demonstrable real-world change” (Jacques, 2015, p. 206).