To counter these factors, we need a deep and comprehensive restructuring of culture that rethinks and reworks human locations and relations to nature all the way down (Plumwood, 2002, p. As Val Plumwood claims, this “ecological mess” that we have made is:įruit of a human and reason-centred culture that is at least a couple of millennia old, whose contrived blindness to ecological relationships is the fundamental condition underlying our destructive and insensitive technology and behaviour.

Western culture is predominantly an uncaring anthropocentric society, one which considers humankind as being superior to nature and one that is guided by the assumption that it is only in relation to humans that anything else has value. However, the present crisis is part of a much broader problem, one deeply connected to our dysfunctional relation with nature. While fiction allows us a way to escape reality, it can also provide us with a window through which to confront our fears and even contribute towards change. Books that used to read like science fiction have lately become uncomfortably real. Living in the middle of a pandemic has left us with a disturbing sense of unreality. Such concerns may seem less pressing at times like the present when the most devastating virus to date in modern history is transforming the society in which we live. While concern over the human impact on the environment has existed for decades, there is now a call for a new sense of urgency which demands a shift to transform the understanding of our place in and our impact on the physical world, as well as of the relationships we share with other life forms that cohabit the earth. 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.

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. 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.

The iron man ted hughes full film