Jailed
In Ragtime, Doctorow's implements ways of imprisoning each of his characters. These imprisonments don't have to be physical imprisonment but also emotionally and socially.
Almost every character has a prison of their own but I'm going to only talk about a few of them that looked interesting to me.
One of them is Houdini's prison. It's kind of ironic that his career is made feats of escaping the inescapable prisons. He is imprisoned by his emotions when his mother died. He was obsessed with communicating with his dead mother. For someone who likes progression, he was stuck in place. He even dressed as his mother when trying to establish contact with the afterlife. I also felt like Houdini was imprisoned by society. I think society didn't accept Houdini as a member because he was a performer. An example is when he was publicly shamed in the hospital while visiting a hospitalized man. Because of this, he was afraid to perform when he was invited to perform for the upper-class people. I don't think he really ever escape this prison of his and I think his character just devolves.
The other is Mother's prison. She was imprisoned by her societal expectations. Her character development progress was stunted by her expectation just to be a simple mother/wife to the family. It felt as if she thought she was weak and feeble without her husband and therefore she shouldn't pursue anything more than being a housewife (I think this is called house-wife syndrome or something and a lot of women from the old days suffer from it. They would abandon all their passion just to be a wife/mother). When Father left, She had to pick up additional responsibilities and when she did that, she started to break out of her prison. She started to thought about what she wants and made progress; One great example is how she started to know what she wanted in her sex life and that Father is failing her needs.
I think it's interesting to look at how most characters had their own little prisons and how they successfully/unsuccessfully escape their prison.
I like the trend you notice with the theme of escaping. Each of the characters have their own issues that they have to deal with. This can also be seen with Morgan and his search for his vision about Egyptian reincarnation. I think that it's interesting that Doctorow has Houdini as a character as he literally escapes from prisons and tough situations. We've seen that Doctorow likes to hide hints like this in plain sight, so I wouldn't be surprised if this was intentional.
ReplyDeleteI really like the Houdini example of imprisonment. I totally agree, he struggles throughout the book to escape from his emotions and societal expectations. Coming to America as an immigrant, I think he spends a lot of his life trying to escape from that part of his identity as well, shown in how he changed his name. I love the irony that Doctorow imposes by making the escape artist the one who ends up feeling the most trapped.
ReplyDeleteIf the book is about escape, then Emma Goldmen to me is like some kind of benevolent warden, preaching about escape from the stifling confines of society to Evelyn. Her general radical attitude shows that shes already escaped from what's binding her.
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