Culture Clash and Change in Doctorow's Ragtime

Introduction: Doctorow and the Age of Change

Individuals have always struggled to accept change, and it takes considerable time for people to adapt. For regions of a country — or even whole nations — change may take decades or possibly centuries.

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow can certainly relate to this. Born in 1931 and aptly named after Edgar Allan Poe, Doctorow lived through tumultuous transformations and witnessed America converging from a nation of exclusive races and entrenched racism into one that styled itself the "melting pot," where all races merged into an idealized America — and then, in turn, separated itself into distinctive racial categories under Affirmative Action. No stranger to cultural upheaval (Baker, 11), Doctorow describes the impact of these changes in his novel Ragtime, published in 1975. An irreverent tale of change and racism that features various famous people in absurd situations, Ragtime became one of the 100 best novels in American literature (Harter & Thompson, 11–15).

Doctorow's novel tells the story of three families living during the earlier part of the twentieth century. The first family consists of a father, a mother, and their young son. The storyline shifts to a reference to the real-life story of Evelyn Nesbit, whose husband shot his lover. Throughout this second story, Doctorow introduces additional characters using names drawn from real historical figures. Several distinct narratives unfold within this single novel, culminating in the assassination of an archduke and the eventual uniting of the families.

In Ragtime, Doctorow examines the culture clash at the beginning of the twentieth century, when an entrenched old culture found itself exposed to radically new ideas.

Doctorow uses various techniques to illustrate the momentous change sweeping the New World, including symbolism, descriptions of behavior, and the significance of names.

Symbolism and Behavior as Markers of Change

Symbolism appears, for instance, in the figure of Father, a manufacturer of "accoutrements of patriotism" such as flags and fireworks, who is unable to cope with the changes overtaking early twentieth-century America. His wife is more flexible — she befriends the abandoned black child and his family and ultimately marries the Jewish man Tatteh — while Father suffers under the weight of change and cannot adapt (Harpham, 36).

The theme of change is further brought to life through vivid descriptions of behavior. Father is deeply disturbed by Mother's evolving demeanor:

"She was in some way not as vigorously modest as she'd been. She took his gaze. She came to bed with her hair unbraided. Her hand one night brushed down his chest and came to rest below his nightshirt. He decided that God had punishments in store so devious there was no sense trying to anticipate what they were. With a groan he turned to her and found her ready. Her hand pulling his face to hers did not feel his tears." (Doctorow, 72)

Father becomes disenfranchised and alienated from his family because of his inability to accept change. Mother, on the other hand, thrives in his absence and revels in her new freedom. Her growing engagement with work and her responsibilities toward Sarah and her child expand her sense of self, and she emerges as the novel's progressive figure when she marries a Jewish man at a time when such intermarriage was still relatively uncommon.

The clash between old and new is also dramatized by Father's departure on a ship pointedly named The Roosevelt — another charged signifier. The promise of the future is heralded by the shipload of immigrants seeking the Land of Opportunity: "Thousands of male heads in derbies. Thousands of female heads covered with shawls. It was a rag ship with a million dark eyes staring at him. Father, a normally resolute person, suddenly foundered in his soul. A weird despair seized him." (Doctorow, 39)

Doctorow implies that this vision subconsciously carries Father's dread of the future. The silhouettes of the immigrants function as another symbolic register, their changing form suggesting the mutability of identity and social order that Father cannot accept.

The juxtaposition of dramatic difference between past and present is a technique Doctorow employs frequently to convey the scale of change (Parks, 108). One compelling example appears in the early pages of the novel, where Doctorow captures the shifting social landscape with striking economy:

Juxtaposition of Past and Present

"Women were stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants." (Doctorow, 72)

Shortly afterward, following Stanford White's murder, the same narrative voice reports:

"Evelyn fainted. She had been a well-known artist's model at the age of fifteen. Her underclothes were white. Her husband habitually whipped her. She happened once to meet Emma Goldman, the revolutionary. Goldman lashed her with her tongue. Apparently there were Negroes. There were immigrants." (ibid.)

The family's way of life is irrevocably changing, and this mood of a shifting population is something Doctorow ensures both Father and the reader are made to feel. The technique works by first presenting a sealed, homogeneous world and then puncturing it with the very presences it claimed to exclude.

This same clash is made visceral when Father returns home from his expedition — having just condescended to the Eskimos about their supposed primitiveness — to find Mother cradling a black child and his son demonstrating a bomb he has constructed. Few contrasts could more sharply bring home to Father the disparate changes confronting him. The author renders these collisions through the deliberate pairing of extreme old and extreme new.

Conclusion

Ragtime is a novel that deals with change and some people's inability to deal with it. The author addresses this idea through techniques such as irony, signifiers of name and behavior, juxtaposition of dramatic difference between past and future, historicism — including the reduction of celebrities to their common humanity — and other metaphors that point to the shiftiness of time.