The Iron Woman

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The Iron Man arrives seemingly from nowhere, and his appearance is described in detail. He first appears falling off a cliff, but his various pieces reassemble themselves, starting with his hands finding his eyes and progressing from there. He is unable to find one ear, which was taken by seagulls earlier, and walks into the sea to find it. L'Uomo di ferro, transl. into Italian of The Iron Man by Ilva Tron, illus. by I. Bruno. Milan: Oscar junior, Mondadori, 2013 ISBN 978-88-04-62032-7 The Iron Man: A Story in Five Nights title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Retrieved 6 October 2013. Select a particular edition (title) for more data at that level, such as a front cover image (7 available) or linked contents. For the 1968 and 1985 editions, later printings only. 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. 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.”

That same eerie silence can be found in the opening of The Iron Woman, as related by Lucy, the young heroine: “The marsh was always a lonely place. Now she felt the loneliness” (Hughes, 1993, p. 3). If Carson’s fable of doom is a “spring without voices” (Carson, 1962, p. 2), then the silence depicted in Hughes’s fable, with birds and fish dying from the chemical poisoning of the waste dumped by the factory where Lucy’s father works, seems directly indebted to her.

About Ted Hughes

When things turn into a national disaster and get out of hand, the children, Lucy and Hogarth, who reappears from The Iron Man, beg the Iron Woman to stop. Eventually the men emerge from the water, with their hair turned white. Hughes’s urgency for that same “deep change” (Hughes, 1993, p. 85) voiced by the Iron Woman, to save Western society, comes in the form of a healing miracle to save nature and humankind. Overnight strange yellow webs grow, dissolving the waste from the factory and turning it into a magic non-toxic fuel. Curiously enough, the same day that Hughes sent The Iron Woman to his publisher at Faber, he read in New Scientist that two Japanese scientists claimed to have found a way to convert plastics into fuel (Morrison, 1999, p. 166).

Dexter, Miriam Robbins. (2010, Spring). The Ferocious and the Erotic: ‘Beautiful’ Medusa and the Neolithic Bird and Snake. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 26(1), 25–41. After playing this game for two rounds, the dragon is so badly burned that he no longer appears physically frightening. The Iron Man by contrast has only a deformed ear-lobe to show for his pains. The alien creature admits defeat. When asked why he came to Earth, the dragon reveals that he is a peaceful "star spirit" who experienced excitement about the ongoing sights and sounds produced by the violent warfare of humanity. In his own life, he was a singer of the " music of the spheres"; the harmony of his kind that keeps the cosmos in balance in stable equilibrium. 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).

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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. Young, Rebecca. (2018). Confronting Climate Crises Through Education: Reading Our Way Forward. Lanham, Lexington Books: Rowman & Littlefield. Gifford, Terry. (1995). Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Seeling, Beth J. (2002). The Rape of Medusa in the Temple of Athena: Aspects of Triangulation in the Girl. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83, 895–911. 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. Gifford, Terry. (2008). Rivers and Water Quality in the Work of Brian Clarke and Ted Hughes. Concentric, 34(1), 75–91. Castro, Ingrid E. (Ed.). (2021). Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds. Lanham, Lexington Books: Rowman & Littlefield.

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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). 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). Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. In August 2019, an updated illustrated version was released in the UK with new illustrations from artist Chris Mould. Basu, Balaka, Broad, Katherine R., and Hintz, Carrie (Eds.). (2013). Contemporary Dystopian. Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. NY: Routledge.

Massey, Geraldine, and Bradford, Clare. (2011). Children as Ecocitizens: Ecocriticism and Environmental Texts. In Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford (Eds.), Contemporary Children’s Literature and Film: Engaging with Theory (pp. 109–126). Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. The Iron Man, illus. by George Adamson. London: Faber and Faber, 26 February 1968 ISBN 0571 08247 5Greenaway, Betty (Ed.). (1994). Special Issue: ‘Ecology and the Child’. Children’s Literature Quarterly, 19:4. Ted Hughes firmly believed that the most important way to communicate is through storytelling. People understand and become more engaged when they learn through stories. Visual arts and literature are important vectors of change in the ethical plane and, as such, can be seen as valuable tools of ecological awareness and moral transformation. Literature promotes attitudes and values—especially in the young reader—and can stimulate reflection on the moral consideration of the non-human world and even induce action. In response to drastic climate change, it is necessary today, more than ever, to offer a discourse of hope. One that inspires and allows us to imagine resilience. But how can younger generations persuade older generations and take agency to take steps to repair and protect our environment? Can literature lead to action and become a rationale for change?