The Iron Woman

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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 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.

L'Uomo di Ferro: Lotta di giganti per la salvezza della terra, transl. into Italian of The Iron Man by Sandra Georgini, illus. by George Adamson. Milan: Biblioteca Universale, Rizzoli, 1977 Gifford, Terry. (1995). Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 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.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. Der Eisenmann, transl. into German of The Iron Man by U.-M. Gutzschhahn, illus. by Jindra Čapek. Frankfurt-am-Main: S. Fischer (Fischer Taschenbuch) 1997 ISBN 3-596-80154-0 Terrified, humans send their armies to destroy the dragon, but it is unharmed by their weapons. When the Iron Man hears of this global threat, he allows himself to be disassembled and transported to Australia where he challenges the creature to a contest of strength. If the Iron Man can withstand the heat of burning petroleum for longer than the creature can withstand the heat of the Sun, the creature must obey the Iron Man's commands forevermore: if the Iron Man melts or is afraid of melting before the space being undergoes or fears pain in the Sun, the creature has permission to devour the whole Earth. 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.

In Confronting Climate Crises Through Education ( 2018) Rebecca L. Young makes a compelling case for how literature and empathetic reading strategies can lead to action and become a rationale for change. Introducing environmental concerns in the classroom literature can be a platform for engaging both children and young adults, thanks to the emotional response created. 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). At times of political and social unrest, contemporary texts like these can offer insight into environmental issues and engage students in debate. As Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad and Carrie Hintz claim, “[YA dystopias] revolve around two contrasting poles: education and escape. The novels simultaneously seek to teach serious lessons about the issues faced by humanity, and to offer readers a pleasurable retreat from their quotidian experience” ( 2013, p. 5). Basu, Balaka, Broad, Katherine R., and Hintz, Carrie (Eds.). (2013). Contemporary Dystopian. Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. NY: Routledge. Gifford, Terry. (2008). Rivers and Water Quality in the Work of Brian Clarke and Ted Hughes. Concentric, 34(1), 75–91.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. The Iron Woman is much lesser known and is much much stranger. The Iron Woman rises from the marshes early on to warn humanity that pollution is killing everything and it must stop. With appearances from Hogarth and the Iron Man this is another story that will have children snorting with laughter but also have them thinking about the environment and how we have caused so much damage to it. A very timely reminder throughout the novel that it is men who have been the main cause of the damage and they bear the brunt of the punishment and learning of the lesson. Dobrin, Sidney I., and Kidd, Kenneth B. (Eds.). (2004). Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. urn:oclc:863542439 Republisher_date 20120517214318 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20120516215950 Scanner scribe7.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition) 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.”

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. Y dyn haearn, transl. into Welsh of The Iron Man by Emily Huws; illus. by Andrew Davidson. Llanrwst: Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2004 ISBN 978-0-86381-936-0 Silverman, Doris K. (2016). Medusa: Sexuality, Power, Mastery, and Some Psychoanalytic Observations. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 17(2), 114–125. 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. Greenaway, Betty (Ed.). (1994). Special Issue: ‘Ecology and the Child’. Children’s Literature Quarterly, 19:4.

About Ted Hughes

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. El Nouhy, Eman. (2017). Redeeming the Medusa: An Archetypal Examination of Ted Hughes. The Iron Woman, Children’s Literature in Education, 50(3), 347–363.

Alter, Charlotte, Haynes, Suyin and Worland, Justin. (2019). TIME 2019 Person of the Year: Greta Thunberg, TIME.com. https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2019-greta-thunberg. Accessed 21 May 2021.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 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 Hughes, Ted. (1992). ‘Introduction’ in Your World. London: HarperCollins. Also published in The Observer Magazine (29 November 1992), 30–39. 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?