27 pages • 54 minutes read
Ted HughesThe Iron Giant
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Authorial Context: Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes was an English poet and author who lived during the 20th century and whose life was shaped by the social, political, and philosophical shifts of the era. He is best known for his children’s stories and poetry, and he was given the title of Poet Laureate in 1984. Hughes’s poetry frequently used imagery and symbolism from nature to communicate broader truths about human beings or his own life. His prose incorporated this same stylistic theme, particularly in terms of his children’s literature, like The Iron Man. Ted Hughes spent most of his life dedicated to his craft and died just before the turn of the 21st century.
Hughes explained that The Iron Man was meant to resemble the form and plotline of an ancient myth, in which a mysterious and powerful being appears on Earth and rises to the challenge of saving humanity from some dire threat. He wrote The Iron Man in the years following the death of his wife, Sylvia Plath. Plath (The Bell Jar, “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus”) was a talented poet and author in her own right. Controversy remains over the underlying causes of her death by suicide in 1963. It is known that Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath had a tumultuous relationship, and she died the year after their separation. The Ted Hughes Society states that The Iron Man was an exercise in healing in the wake of Sylvia Plath’s death and a symbol of Ted Hughes’s own process of healing during those years. It is also widely believed that Hughes wrote the book to help his children cope with the death of their mother.
Historical Context: The Cold War Era
The Iron Man was written and published during the Cold War era, a decades-long period of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. These two world powers adhered to two competing political ideologies—the United States and its allies (the Western Bloc) championed capitalism, while the Soviet Union and its allies (the Eastern Bloc) were communist. While these two groups fought side-by-side during World War II against the fascist forces of Nazi Germany, their diametrically opposed worldviews came to a head in the post-war era, and geopolitical tensions began to escalate in 1947.
Alongside proxy wars that took place in the so-called “third world”—the terms “first world,” referring to the Western Bloc, the “second world,” referring to the Eastern Block, and “third world,” referring to neutral or unaligned countries, emerged during this period of conflict—the Cold War was characterized by technological advancement and accompanying anxieties. Most famously, the US and USSR were engaged in a nuclear arms race, building stockpiles of nuclear weapons. This led to widespread fears of atomic warfare, which threatened the planet and humanity. While humanity’s fear of the Iron Man in this novel represents broad anxieties about technological development, the thread to Australia later in the book can be read as a metaphor for the threat of nuclear war. Ted Hughes also draws on the space race between the USSR and the United States, during which the countries competed to send the first astronauts into space and to the moon. The USSR succeeded in sending the first satellite into orbit, Sputnik, and Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin was the first person in space. However, the United States beat the Soviets to the moon, with the first moon landing occurring in 1969. The star spirit’s origins in space reflect cultural speculations of what could be “out there” and the nature of the universe itself.
