The Iron Woman: 1

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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.

Castro, Ingrid E. (Ed.). (2021). Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds. Lanham, Lexington Books: Rowman & Littlefield. 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.Another direct allusion to Carson’s seminal work can be seen at the beginning of Hughes’s narrative in the figure of the birdwatcher who discovers that the bittern, an endangered species, and her eggs, whose hatch he had spent all day waiting for, are stone dead, uncannily recalling the premise behind Carson’s Silent Spring. Carson had been prompted by a letter from her friend Olga Owens, a newspaper reporter, who had written in 1958 telling her how pesticides were wiping out the birds. Not only did Carson’s book demonstrate the effects of DDT on the whole food chain but she revealed how “the earth’s vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the earth” (Carson, 1962, p. 64) laying the foundations for a more holistic view of Nature. Long before the term ‘ecocriticism’ existed, Footnote 1 Carson embodied the movement through her writing, endorsing the notion that, as humans, not only can we alter nature, but that the key to change, and mending the damage we have caused, lies also in our hands. Gifford, Terry. (2008). Rivers and Water Quality in the Work of Brian Clarke and Ted Hughes. Concentric, 34(1), 75–91. Silverman, Doris K. (2016). Medusa: Sexuality, Power, Mastery, and Some Psychoanalytic Observations. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 17(2), 114–125. 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. Rahn, Suzanne. (1995). Special issue: ‘Green Worlds: Nature and Ecology’. The Lion and the Unicorn, 19(1995), 149–170.

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/. 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 Nikolajeva, Maria. (2016). Recent Trends in Children’s Literature Research: Return to the Body. International Research in Children’s Literature, 9(2), 132–145. urn:oclc:863542439 Republisher_date 20120517214318 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20120516215950 Scanner scribe7.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition)Following this, The Iron Woman can be read as a redemptive story, written for a society that has cut itself off from being part of the larger web of life. By exposing the effects of toxic chemicals from a waste factory, the Iron Woman vows to destroy those who have poisoned the river and marshlands, and all the creature that live there. 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). 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 Basu, Balaka, Broad, Katherine R., and Hintz, Carrie (Eds.). (2013). Contemporary Dystopian. Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. NY: Routledge.