Children’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). 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? 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.

Bright, Bonnie. (2010). Facing Medusa: Alchemical Transformation through the Power of Surrender. Accessed January 2, 2017, from http://www.depthinsights.com/pdfs/Facing_Medusa_Alchemical_Surrender-BBright-052010.pdf. Hughes was well informed about river pollution, as can be seen when in 1981 he formed the Torridge Action Group and acted in the cause of public health with local authorities over the Bideford Sewage system, which emptied its effluent directly into the river, causing severe pollution. When the group called for a public enquiry to clean up the river, he spoke on their behalf and wrote a reasoned campaign statement which, in turn, expanded into a national research and monitoring organisation concerned with water quality in the nation’s rivers (Gifford, 2008). Hughes was also an active campaigner for a hygienic water supply in Southwest England, and after sitting on the committee for the National Rivers Authority, he set up the Westcountry Rivers Trust in 1993.These creatures were obviously not aliens quarantined on another planet. Cell by watery cell they were extensions of ourselves, our early warning system, physically our own extremities. The Letters Editor asked me to cut out all the gruesome, close-up stuff about the disintegrating tumour-crammed body bags of the otters. I insisted, this was the whole point of my letter. He then refused to publish it […] And when I asked him why, he told me: ‘We simply can’t put that sort of thing in front of our readers at breakfast’ (Hughes, 1992, p. 34). Set in 1937 during the so-called “Roosevelt recession,” tight times compel Mary Alice, a Chicago girl, to move in with her grandmother, who lives in a tiny Illinois town so behind the times that it doesn’t “even have a picture show.” Massey, Geraldine, and Bradford, Clare. (2011). Children as Ecocitizens: Ecocriticism and Environmental Texts. In Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford (Eds.), Contemporary Children’s Literature and Film: Engaging with Theory (pp. 109–126). Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. 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.

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 Gifford, Terry. (2008). Rivers and Water Quality in the Work of Brian Clarke and Ted Hughes. Concentric, 34(1), 75–91. 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.Yes we have fantasy in full flight both in how it dealt with and how it is concluded but for me that is not the point. The point here is that something that does not have a voice is given one and from there the real power comes. Ironically this could be applied to a lot of things today - where currently there is no way of them to tell their story and share their pain - what would come if of it if suddenly they were able to do so.

What is perhaps more relevant, in line with Carson, is that Hughes uses The Iron Woman to explore how environmental issues are social issues. This political discourse which would now be recognised by ecocritics as environmental justice—the concern for both environment and human’s dependency upon it—can also be read in the novel. As Zoe Jacques points out, “Both children’s fiction and posthumanism, then, might be said to have the unique potential to offer a forward-focused agenda that unites the possibilities of fantasy with demonstrable real-world change” (Jacques, 2015, p. 206). Taylor, Diana. (1997). Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War”. Durham and London: Duke UP. 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. Young, Rebecca. (2018). Confronting Climate Crises Through Education: Reading Our Way Forward. Lanham, Lexington Books: Rowman & Littlefield.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. By promoting environmental values such as an ethics of care, reciprocal respect and empathy and by unifying humans, nature and technology, The Iron Woman successfully puts forward Hughes’s own social and political concerns and reads as a potential healer of broken bonds between humanity and nature offering a redemptive sense of hope.