Reading The Iron Woman in Times of Crisis as a Tale of Hope

Abstract

What role does literature for children and young adults have in the present environmental crisis and in the context of climate change? To answer this question, I propose to analyse Ted Hughes’s narrative The Iron Woman (1993) which, despite being written almost thirty years ago as a sequel to The Iron Man (1968), reads as both a story of hope and a wake-up call in our current crisis where children act as agents of change. Drawing on Lucy, the female protagonist, and the Iron Woman as symbols of hope, I will look at the impact that Rachel Carson’s seminal work Silent Spring (1962) had for Hughes and place his environmentalism in the context of more recent ecocritical theory, using ecofeminism as a critical framework to analyse the novel. By raising awareness and engaging directly with our environmental crisis, The Iron Woman puts forward Hughes’s own social and political concerns and could be read as a potential healer of broken bonds between humanity and nature, not only as a discourse of hope, but perhaps also as a way to contribute towards much-needed change.