Women and Men
Perhaps the most vibrant aspect of any narrative is its characters. The same is of course true with Ragtime. When discussing said characters in class, we seemed to say they fall into two categorizations, those who are "progressive" and those who are "stuck". In other words, Ragtime as an era depicts a time of change and turmoil and we separated those which embraced or propelled the change, from those who were resistant to it. For example, Younger Brother and Father are perhaps two of the most stark examples of the contrast between the two subsections. I wanted to examine how women and men line up in the two categories, and whether or not we see some patterns emerge. I've compiled a list down below of some of the male and female characters in Ragtime with the category I think they fall into (if any) in parenthesis.
Men:
- Father (stuck)
- Younger Brother (progressive)
- Grandfather (stuck- I think?)
- Tateh (progressive- at least at first, maybe debatable later on)
- Coalhouse (progressive)
- Morgan (stuck- but beyond that, a symbol for the past era as a whole)
- Houdini (perhaps neither?)
Women:
- Mother (progressive)
- Sarah (progressive)
- Evelyn Nesbit (progressive sort of)
- Emma Goldman (progressive)
- Little girl (technically neither because she doesn't express too many views, but I would consider her in the progressive camp based on what she's meant to represent for the reader and her father)
With all this said, I've begun to see a bit of a pattern emerge. The women are rarely (or ever as far as I can tell- please feel free to add or debate on the categorizations in the comments) considered stuck, or even satirized very much as far as I can see. The male characters fall everywhere, with all sorts of motivations and beliefs and drives, and the women also do, but with much less variation.
I wonder if that fact has anything to do with intersectionality and the way Doctorow views societal victim groups. We mentioned in class much earlier Doctorow's unwillingness to satirize Coalhouse and his cause, and perhaps there is similar happening here with women (just to a lesser degree). There could be someone I'm just forgetting but these stories could have played out very differently if we had seen a stuck or actively resilient to progress female character.
Separating the characters by gender and showing what kind of categories they fall into is very interesting! I agree with all of your characterizations for the men – the women at the time were at a turning point, and these characters are much better prepared for the future than some of the men.
ReplyDeleteDoctorow is very careful in who he satirizes. He doesn't really criticize mother, especially compared to father and Morgan, and he certainly has a fondness for his more progressive characters. I agree it might be because he doesn't feel he has the right to comment on their experiences.
Thanks for your blog post!
I think the place of gender in this novel is overlooked a bit so it's good to see you exploring it a bit more in this novel. I think it is interesting how the women are significantly more progressive than the men in the novel. Maybe Doctorow is trying to provide some type of social commentary here, and maybe he is hinting toward a possible women's rights movement in the future in which the men who are not willing to change are left behind. Nice post!
ReplyDeleteI agree that the most important aspect of this novel is the characters. Without the characters and their historical background or lack thereof, we don't have this intricate storyline that Doctorow has created. In this respect, I like how you examine gender as one of the concepts in Ragtime and compare it to this idea of a progressive era. As we saw with Father, those that fail to accept or embrace the oncoming rush of new ideas will be "stuck" in the past and trapped in the present without any place of belonging. We saw flashes of progressive ideas, especially with Emma Goldman, so this could be a possible link to those ideas coming forth in this new era.
ReplyDeleteYeah, gender plays a huge, deliberate role in whether a character is progressive or not. It makes sense that women were more progressive at the time. If anybody represents a traditionalist attitude in Ragtime, it's Evelyn Nesbit. But even she (supposedly) gives money to support various socialist causes and gives up her old lifestyle. On the flip side, I will say that historically there were also women who mobilized and were actively anti-suffrage. Doctorow definitely could have included a "stuck" woman, and yet he chose not to.
ReplyDelete