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. Beautifully poetic and highly figurative, but not particularly compelling. This time there are female protagonists (Lucy and The Iron Woman), and although both are strong, physically and mentally, there are issues. The Iron Woman clearly needs the Iron Man to succeed. Before he arrived to help, she didn’t have a cohesive plan and she needed reining in. The power she finally uses comes from the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon, a creature which was previously beaten and enslaved by the Iron Man (in the first book). She couldn’t have accessed this power without him. Similarly, when all the men are changed into fish, newts and frogs the women flounder uselessly. Ted Hughes would have known that women held the country together during the war when the men were off fighting, so there’s no excuse.

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? 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. El hombre de hierro, illus. by Laura Carlin. Barcelona: Vicens Vives, 2011 ISBN 9788468206219 OCLC 794039831 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.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 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. 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 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. 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.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). 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. 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. 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.

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.Silverman, Doris K. (2016). Medusa: Sexuality, Power, Mastery, and Some Psychoanalytic Observations. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 17(2), 114–125. Le Géant de fer, transl. into French of The Iron Man by Sophie de Vogelas; illus. by Jean Torton; Folio cadet 295. Éditions Gallimard Jeunesse, 1992 ISBN 978-2-07-052686-4