The Iron Woman: 1

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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). Hughes’s poetry has won acclaim by readers and critics and been placed in a long tradition of the great English poets, but Hughes was much more than a poet and writer. Throughout his career he was deeply engaged with environmental issues such as water pollution, climate change and species extinction, and his sense of environmental responsibility can be seen through his own local call to action. It was after witnessing the decline in trout and salmon in the Devon rivers of the Taw and the Torridge during the mid-1980s that the poet supported and led several campaigns concerned with the water quality in rivers. His action on behalf of the welfare of local flora and fauna can also be seen through the numerous letters he wrote to national newspapers on the decline of otters, river pollution and the exploitation of fishing areas to raise environmental awareness. 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. 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. Living in the middle of a pandemic has left us with a disturbing sense of unreality. Books that used to read like science fiction have lately become uncomfortably real. 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. However, the present crisis is part of a much broader problem, one deeply connected to our dysfunctional relation with nature.

Written as an intervention on behalf of water quality and public health, The Iron Woman has a much stronger and more active environmental agenda than The Iron Man and can be read as a redemptive story for a society that has cut itself off from ‘being human’ and from being part of the larger web of life. By raising awareness and engaging directly with our ecological crisis both novels can be read as eco-fables or healing myths which can challenge us to alter our perceptions from anthropocentric to biocentric. 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). Taylor, Diana. (1997). Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War”. Durham and London: Duke UP.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.

Hughes, Ted. (1992). ‘Introduction’ in Your World. London: HarperCollins. Also published in The Observer Magazine (29 November 1992), 30–39. 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.”Basu, Balaka, Broad, Katherine R., and Hintz, Carrie (Eds.). (2013). Contemporary Dystopian. Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. NY: Routledge.