The Iron Woman

Product Information

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? 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. In 1999, Warner Bros. released an animated film using the novel as a basis, titled The Iron Giant, directed by Brad Bird and co-produced by Pete Townshend. Le Géant de fer, transl. into French of The Iron Man by Sophie de Vogelas; illus. by Philippe Munch; Folio cadet 52. Éditions Gallimard Jeunesse, 1984 ISBN 978-2-07-031052-4

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. Greenaway, Betty (Ed.). (1994). Special Issue: ‘Ecology and the Child’. Children’s Literature Quarterly, 19:4. Most characteristic verse of this English writer for children without sentimentality emphasizes the cunning and savagery of animal life in harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines. This book (at least to me) shows all the beauty and talent that the late Ted Hughes had at his disposal. Years before the environmental disasters become headline news (although to be honest if you start looking there have been people warning of it for years if not decades) and presents us with a answer.Dobrin, Sidney I., and Kidd, Kenneth B. (Eds.). (2004). Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 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. Written as an intervention on behalf of water quality and public health, The Iron Woman has a much stronger and more active environmental agenda than The Iron Man and can be read as a redemptive story for a society that has cut itself off from ‘being human’ and from being part of the larger web of life. By raising awareness and engaging directly with our ecological crisis both novels can be read as eco-fables or healing myths which can challenge us to alter our perceptions from anthropocentric to biocentric.

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. Haraway, Donna. (1985). Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review, 15(2), 65–107.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? The Iron Man, illus. by George Adamson: “English language textbook with Japanese annotations” by Yuuichi Hashimoto. Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1980

Cixous, Helene. (1976, Summer). The Laugh of the Medusa. Keith Cohen & Paula Cohen (Trans.). Signs, 1(4): 875–893. The first North American edition was also published in 1968, by Harper & Row with illustrations by Robert Nadler. Its main title was changed to The Iron Giant, and internal mentions of the metal man changed to iron giant, to avoid confusion with the Marvel Comics character Iron Man. American editions have continued the practice, as Iron Man has become a multimedia franchise.

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. 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.

In August 2019, an updated illustrated version was released in the UK with new illustrations from artist Chris Mould. Buell, Lawrence. (1995). The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau. Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.British poet Ted Hughes with full name Edward James Hughes served as poet laureate from 1984 to 1998; people note his work for its symbolism, passion, and dark natural imagery. Curry, Alice. (2013). Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. While concern over the human impact on the environment has existed for decades, there is now a call for a new sense of urgency which demands a shift to transform the understanding of our place in and our impact on the physical world, as well as of the relationships we share with other life forms that cohabit the earth. Such concerns may seem less pressing at times like the present when the most devastating virus to date in modern history is transforming the society in which we live. Living in the middle of a pandemic has left us with a disturbing sense of unreality. Books that used to read like science fiction have lately become uncomfortably real. While fiction allows us a way to escape reality, it can also provide us with a window through which to confront our fears and even contribute towards change. However, the present crisis is part of a much broader problem, one deeply connected to our dysfunctional relation with nature. 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. 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 Donor