"Poke Your Finger into the Soft Round Dough": The Absent Father and Political Reform in Edith Nesbit's The Railway Children

Abstract

����� ��� Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children (1906) stands fi rmly in the fi eld of subversive political children’s books, continuing in what Juliet Dusinberre calls in Alice to the Lighthouse: Children’s Books and Radical Experiments in Art “The irreverent tradition in children’s literature” (69). Using the genre’s simplistic and straightforward surface as a shield against censorship and criticism, Nesbit is engaging in political criticism and promoting social change. At the heart of Nesbit’s novel is her own brand of political ideology. Although infl uenced by her activities in the Fabian Society, Nesbit’s ideology offers a distinct and original position, especially concerning women’s issues—a position that has baffl ed her critics for years. In The Railway Children Nesbit, whose “soul was against the government all the time” (Wells 515), explores the common social phenomenon of the absence of the father from the home as a metaphor for the absence of patriarchic hierarchy in England. In doing so, she highlights all that stands in the way of much-needed social and political change. 1 In other words, she presents the absent father as an opportunity that opens new possibilities for an alternate social arrangement. Nesbit questions the three patriarchal institutions of empire, nation, and the family by removing the symbolic head of each in one fell swoop. Father’s absence allows for change and exposes often undetected obstacles to reform. According to Nesbit’s Fabianism, as long as men and women continue to think and behave according to conventional social and gender codes, they will not be able to create a new socialist society. In The Railway Children Nesbit deconstructs contemporary defi nitions of masculinity and femininity, disentangling them in order to expose their weaknesses and inadequacies in the progress of reform. Nesbit requires radical reform to produce not only a just, social democracy but also a society that is gender-blind, with equal opportunities for men and women of all classes.