The Iron Woman: 1

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Cixous, Helene. (1976, Summer). The Laugh of the Medusa. Keith Cohen & Paula Cohen (Trans.). Signs, 1(4): 875–893. 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.

Conserving the new materialist understanding of the nonhuman (biotic and abiotic) as already part of the human in the world’s becoming, posthuman ecocriticism seeks to maintain a sustainable ecological critique of the material interaction of bodies and natures in a highly technologized world and their conceptualizations in literary and cultural texts (Oppermann, 2016, p. 30). 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. 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.

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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. Despite its problematic and idealistic ending, The Iron Woman puts forward many of Hughes’s own social and political concerns and can be read as a potential healer of broken bonds between humanity and nature and, especially in the present environmental crisis, as a wake-up call, where children act as agents of change. Hughes, Ted. (1992). ‘Introduction’ in Your World. London: HarperCollins. Also published in The Observer Magazine (29 November 1992), 30–39. 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). 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.

Young female protagonists, such as Lucy, are often read as being counterparts to real-life heroines. In the words of Ingrid E. Castro, “Constructions of YA fantasy protagonists, who are usually strong, motivated, young, and female, increasingly overlap with real-life media images of powerful girls” ( 2021, p. 202). Literature provides a safe space for exploring female identities and imagining the future. Today there is a long list of female ecowarriors in YA fiction who might inspire young women: from Walt Disney’s Pocahontas, or Princess Leia, to Tenar in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea to the likes of Lucy, or more recent heroines such as Katniss Everdeen, the young female protagonist of Suzanne Collins’s trilology The Hunger Games (2008–2010), or Samantha Steadman in Joanne MacGregor’s Eco-warriors series (2011–2016). There has recently been a rise in environmental texts that “thematize contemporary ecological issues [and] reflect shifting global agendas and predict future possibilities” (Massey and Bradford, 2011, p. 109) and, especially since the 2000s, a growing trend in dystopian fiction for young adults. Titles such as Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now (2004), Scott Westerfield’s Uglies series (2005–2007), Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries 2015 (2009), Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series (2008-2010), Veronica Roth’s Divergent (2011) or more recently The Grace Year (2019) by Kim Liggett, envision a world damaged by global warming together with post-apocalyptic scenarios of catastrophic events linked to climate change and ecological destruction. However, given their bleak scenarios, what allure do such grim narratives have for young (and not so young) adults? 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). Curry, Alice. (2013). Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Bright, Bonnie. (2010). Facing Medusa: Alchemical Transformation through the Power of Surrender. Accessed January 2, 2017, from http://www.depthinsights.com/pdfs/Facing_Medusa_Alchemical_Surrender-BBright-052010.pdf.

LoveReading4Kids Says

Hughes really doesn't soften the ecological message intended for his young readership; the fantastical scenes have a very real, matter-of-factness about them. Even the surreal humour of the factory workers and ignorant townspeople, transforming into all varieties of fish and pond life, asks the horrific question of 'is it too late? Have we gone too far?'. Despite the positive ending to the book, those questions will be the resounding sentiments to its readers. Gifford, Terry. (2008). Rivers and Water Quality in the Work of Brian Clarke and Ted Hughes. Concentric, 34(1), 75–91.

Tresca, Don. (n.d.). Maternal Ambition and the Quiet Righteous Malice of Motherhood: An Examination of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Medusa’. MuseMedusa. Accessed January 8, 2017, from http://musemedusa.com/dossier_1/tresca/. The Iron Woman shows Lucy a fiery tunnel cut into the river revealing its various inhabitants writhing, contorting and crying in pain; Otters, Kingfishers, Frogs, all presenting their unique wounds from a polluted environment. Most important of all, at the end of this hellish parade, a baby "simply crying - the wailing, desperate cry of a human baby when it cries as if the world has ended". urn:lcp:isbn_9780803717961:epub:214102b5-f279-47f6-bd71-1b1b8ed5db37 Extramarc University of Toronto Foldoutcount 0 Identifier isbn_9780803717961 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9m33zc2h Isbn 0803717962 Although it was published in 1993, Hughes had already begun writing The Iron Womanin the mid-1980s, at the same time as he was writing Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being,which was finally completed and published in 1992.Although the two books apparently have little in common, Hughes’ children’s writing allowed him to write without the restraints of his adult’s writing and as Neil Roberts has suggested “Despite being made of iron, the Woman is perhaps Hughes’s most direct representation of the Goddess” ( A Literary Life, 2006: 177). Whilst the healing quest in his adult work is essential but unrealizable, since redemption can never be obtained, The Iron Woman can be read as a mythical personification of the “Goddess”. In this sense she was for Hughes probably the most complete healing myth that he ever created, and enacts how the balance between nature and humankind, inner and outer worlds are finally achieved so that the reconciliation between culture and nature can take place.

About Ted Hughes

Castro, Ingrid E. (Ed.). (2021). Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds. Lanham, Lexington Books: Rowman & Littlefield. 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.