The Iron Woman

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Greenaway, Betty (Ed.). (1994). Special Issue: ‘Ecology and the Child’. Children’s Literature Quarterly, 19:4. 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. 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

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. The Iron Man, illus. by Laura Carlin. London: Walker Books in collaboration with Faber and Faber, 2010 ISBN 978-1-4063-2957-5Children’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). Gifford, Terry. (1995). Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 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.

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. 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).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. 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.