Class Levels in Ragtime

In Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow there’s been an ongoing discussion of how class affects the character’s lives in the novel. We are immediately introduced to a fictional middle-class white family that lives in a three-story house with a generic, happy life. They are oblivious to the poverty and social strife that’s happening around them saying there were no black people and no immigrants (4). A couple chapters later we’re introduced to an immigrant family that is clearly living a lower-class life. The narrator describes, “they sewed from the time they got up to the time they went to bed” (15), showing that the family must work all day to make ends meet and yet still struggles. Doctorow places these two families next to each other to show these very different classes are living amongst each other in the city at the same time.
Harry Houdini also has struggled with class being an immigrant who does escape tricks. A problem that Houdini has that we discussed in class is that – despite the status he’s gained and money he’s made – his escape art skills aren’t respected by the upper class as a real form of entertainment. This is demonstrated in Henry K. Thaw (a very rich man) undressing and mocking Houdini as dresses after he escapes from the jail, which leaves Harry Houdini pretty shaken.

Tateh is a socialist and when walking with his family “he looked at the palaces and his heart was outraged” because he hates the uneven distribution of wealth (15). A perfect example of the kind of wealth that Tateh hates is J.P. Morgan who is so rich he surpasses everyone else in the world. Morgan is described in the most lavish clothes while everyone else scatters around him like birds. Morgan is at the top of the top and his main problem is that he would forget he was human if not for his chronic skin disease on his nose that reminds him he is growing older, richer, and still has his humanity. Doctorow seems to be mocking Morgan’s lack of problems and his over-the-top, extravagant life but also gives us some insight into the loneliness he might feel.


Doctorow lays out a picture of the different levels of wealth that exist in New York through the different characters. As they interact we see the overlapping of some of them, like Houdini being rich but not respected or Evelyn being rich but pretending to be poor. Mother and Father are shown that there is poverty around them by Sarah and her baby that move into the attic. Do you guys see other ways that class plays a role in the plot or changes the characters?

Comments

  1. SophiaFebruary 7, 2018 at 9:18 PM

    It seemed to me like Doctorow plays with the concept of class a bit. He clearly places characters in different classes, but has them meet and interact in unexpected ways to defy our expectations about what being in a certain class means. We meet two parallel families who are in very different situations, but end up becoming a single family. We are shown that Evelyn Nesbit and Emma Goldman might not be so different after all. This all illustrates the postmodernist point that we are not inherently one way or another, but are all constructions, shaped by society around us and the narratives we subscribe to.

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  2. KatFebruary 8, 2018 at 1:59 PM

    This is a great post! In Ragtime Doctorow spends a lot of time describing class and how it affects certain characters like, as you mentioned, Tateh's poverty and Morgan's extreme wealth. But after Doctorow does this he blurs the lines between class; Tateh begins to pose as a baron and then eventually marries Mother, a middle class women. The class mixing that happens a lot in Ragtime makes it seem like Doctorow is also treating social classes ironically, and maybe even critiquing them.

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  3. RaineFebruary 8, 2018 at 7:24 PM

    Doctorow seems to place people in classes simply to break those class divisions. Evelyn's perception of her own class interests me. On the surface, she seems to want to effortlessly switch between the upper and lower classes (though obviously she goes to a good amount of effort to do so). However, as readers we get this sense that she is actually moving down in class, such as in the scenes where Doctorow talks about her divorce settlement and her class being dependent on men. Sorry that went off on a tangent a bit, but I definitely agree that Doctorow is playing with and criticizing the concept of social class.

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