Themes of Imprisonment in Ragtime
In E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, he describes several characters as being trapped or imprisoned within society in various ways. He uses that harsh language with a couple of characters, deeply layered with irony. For example, Houdini’s main issue is his inability to achieve true freedom. While ironic because he is a famous escape artist known for being able to get out of anything, he struggles to impress an elite like Harry K. Thaw. In the scene where he escapes into Thaw’s prison, Thaw makes fun of him by undressing while he dresses, deeply disturbing Houdini. He mentions that people who don’t respect his art form always “broke through the pretense of his life and made him feel foolish (chapter 5).” It made it hard for him to recreate the wonder of the tricks he performed to these people, who saw him as kind of a party trick. He also struggled immensely with the death of his mother, becoming somewhat preoccupied with the afterlife, necromancy, and often performing intensely dangerous stunts. Trapped in the fate of his own mind, he “knew what it was to be sealed in the fate of the earth but now felt it was the only place for him (chapter 27).”
Tateh is a Jewish immigrant from Latvia whose view of the American Dream fell apart after he moved to New York. When he is first introduced, he creates silhouette portraits of people in the Lower East Side and has to keep his daughter on a rope to keep her safe. This depiction of him is deeply rooted in the imprisonment of poverty and the crushed American dream around him, which is compared starkly to the life of Evelyn Nesbit. Later in the book, Tateh takes trolleys and trains to Massachusetts to work in warehouses, in hopes of making more money. As he gets there, he realizes this scenario may be worse as the workers begin a strike that goes on for months. He jumps on the back of a train his little girl is being sent on, “clinging there with his head pressed to the bars like a man in prison begging to be set free (chapter 16).” Tateh realizes there is no real escape to this fight. They gained a 15% pay increase but would still have to waste their lives away in the factory. He is perpetually stuck in the working class part of society and is unable to escape, until he reaches Philadelphia and sees all the shoppers and small businesses there. He ends up publishing some of the flipbooks he invented during the strike, showing how he was freed from the working class.
Coalhouse has kind of the opposite storyline. He is a fairly mysterious character, only showing up at the family’s house on specific days. As he begins to court Sarah, he is obliged to stay in town and his car gets damaged by the firemen while driving to New York, who promptly arrest him because the officer had begun to notice “Coalhouse’s style of speech, his dress, and the phenomenon of his owning a car in the first place (chapter 23).” Coalhouse looks into getting a Black lawyer and is unable to find anyone who would be willing to work on the case for him because there are bigger issues they have to deal with. Coalhouse refuses to get married to Sarah until the car problem is fixed, so she goes to the capital to talk to a Republican Vice Presidential candidate about it and ends up dying. Coalhouse disappears but is still trapped by the situation of needing to get his car, so he bombs target areas of New Rochelle over the course of the book. The underlying message of this cause, however, is that “no one ever mess with a colored man for fear he belong to Coalhouse (chapter 32).” After bombing Pierpont Morgan’s Library of precious goods from around the world, he is forced to surrender. When faced with the question of whether he would be able to leave without being found, he says “they would never let me out of here, you know that. And if they did, they would spare no effort to hunt me down (chapter 38).” This shows that he was truly imprisoned pretty much the entire time by society’s opinion of him.
Overall, Ragtime as a book continuously explores the ideas of imprisonment in a variety of ways. These character’s paths show the diverse ways 1910s life was filled with imprisonment and inequality for a majority of the characters from this book. There are many characters who end up imprisoned in some way, and the way society traps individuals is a common background of the way the book is formed.
Coalhouse and Tateh are both excellent examples of "fictional" characters who embody this theme of entrapment and a desire to escape, and both of their efforts to escape reflect larger themes about American upward mobility and self-reinvention. (They are both artist figures who give themselves new names and "create" their public identities, as an effort to escape the circumstances of their birth.) I like the idea that the historical Houdini sort of hovers behind both stories--the original "escape artist" in part finds an audience at this time because people in America were obsessed with ideas about trying to "escape" their circumstances in various ways.
ReplyDeleteBut then Doctorow ends Houdini's story (within the novel) at an awkward and inauspicious moment: he is *in the midst* of an escape performance, still confined, awkwardly swinging on a chain high over a Manhattan street--and a classic New Yorker curses him out from a window. Our final glimpse of Houdini in the novel has a member of his "audience" being decidedly unimpressed by his "art." He ends the book twisting in the wind, suspended in the air, being verbally abused and disrespected. This seems like potentially a satirical commentary of some kind.
Hey Penny! I really enjoyed reading your blog post. Your description of Houdini as trapped in his own mind is really entertaining -- especially given he is an escape artist. I am still conflicted as to whether or not he ever found his freedom. This idea as imprisonment as a threat throughout Ragtime is also something I never really considered before. I'm looking forward to reading your next post!
ReplyDeleteI really liked reading this — the way you laid it out made the idea of imprisonment easy to follow, and you used solid evidence from the book to back up your points about Houdini, Tateh, and Coalhouse. The contrast between their situations came through clearly. One highlight is how you tied Houdini’s personal struggles to the broader theme of entrapment. One suggestion is that you could connect the three characters more directly at the end. For example, pointing out how each type of imprisonment (mental, economic, and racial) reflects a different layer of American society at the time. Great job!
ReplyDeleteHi Penny! This is such an interesting way to view Ragtime, and I think you're definitely right about this theme. I think this makes Houdini's character seem a lot more cohesive within the larger story, and I think he represents this theme very literally. Great Blog!
ReplyDeleteHey Penny! I think you did a really good job showing how the theme of imprisonment shows up for different characters. I liked how you used examples from Houdini, Tateh, and Coalhouse to make it clear, and it really helped show how Doctorow ties them all together. I really loved the irony of Houdini. Great Job!
ReplyDeleteHi Penny!! I really enjoyed reading your blog. I never really thought that Coalhouse was trapped, but I think it's an interesting argument. I think that you chose the best characters to analyze as being trapped. I think that you did an amazing job at analyzing them. Good Job!!
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