Relationships in Ragtime
On page 35 of Ragtime, Doctorow introduces Freud with the passage,
“Of course Freud's immediate reception in America was not auspicious. A few professional alienists understood his importance, but to most of the public he appeared as some kind of German sexologist, an exponent of free love who used big words to talk about dirty things. At least a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his revenge and see his ideas begin to destroy sex in America forever.”
When I first read this, I assumed that Freud would become an important character in the story—perhaps he would analyze the characters’ relationships for the readers’ convenience. Instead, Emma Goldman—probably the last person I would expect to find doling out relationship advice to socialites and their jilted ex-lovers—steps in to fill this role. She makes explicit the cynicism towards traditional monogamy that is hinted at throughout the text.
When Stanford White is killed by Harry Thaw in fit of a jealous rage—an obvious consequence of Evelyn forcing herself into a marriage that could never truly make her happy—she finds herself wrapped up in a scandalous trial, desperate to escape the horrific fallout of the love triangle. Doctorow writes, “The press followed her every move. She tried to live quietly in a small residential hotel. She tried not to think how Stanford White looked with his face shot away (22).” Goldman later emphasizes the destruction wreaked by Evelyn’s union to Thaw in her speech to the Socialist Artists' Alliance of the Lower East Side, stating “There sits among us this evening one of the most brilliant women in America, a woman forced by this capitalist society to find her genius in the exercise of sexual attraction--and she has done that, comrades, to an extent that a Pierpont Morgan and a John D. Rockefeller could envy (Doctorow 54).” This conveys the idea that Evelyn has become powerful through marriage—but at what cost? Coming from an anarchist, a comparison to Pierpont Morgan can hardly be complimentary.
When Evelyn leaves Mother’s Younger Brother for a ragtime dancer, Goldman offers him her most brutal condemnation of traditional monogamy yet, telling him,
“You think you are special, losing your lover. It happens every day. Suppose she consented to live with you after all. You're a bourgeois, you would want to marry her. You would destroy each other inside of a year. You would see her begin to turn old and bored under your very eyes. You would sit across the dinner table from each other in bondage, in terrible bondage to what you thought was love. The both of you. Believe me you are better off this way (Doctorow 171-172).”
She makes it clear that Evelyn spurning him actually spared him. In a way, this proves true. His heartache is nothing compared to the price Sarah pays for her marriage: her life. When she approaches the vice president and begs him to bring justice to Coalhouse, hoping that the obstacle in the way of their wedding will be eliminated, she is killed. Although Goldman does not opine on this tragedy (or, at least, she hasn’t yet), Doctorow still manages to sneak in some analysis. In a particularly obvious example of foreshadowing, Mother’s Younger Brother says of Sarah, “She had no guile and could act only in total and helpless response to what she felt. If she loved she acted in love, if she was betrayed she was destroyed. These were the shining and dangerous facts of the life of an innocent (Doctorow 188).” The word “dangerous” makes especially clear the sentiment Doctorow is trying to convey: that attaching herself to another was a fatal mistake.
Doctorow, E. L. (2007). Ragtime. Random House.
Goldman's views on marriage are definitely out there, and I wonder what she would say about the modern institution of marriage. It's definitely far different from what she would have seen in the early 1900s, some problems have been minimized and other's have arisen. Women are clearly more free now by far, but even so would she still think that marriage is something people are subjected to?
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point about the brief cameo by Sigmund Freud in the novel. On one hand, this sequence is there in order to insert Freud's famous Old World verdict on the American Experiment--"a great mistake" (a widely quoted line). But it also gives us some perspective on just how radical Emma Goldman's free-love anarchism would have been in this social and cultural context (her views are still pretty "out there" today, as Stefania notes^^). If the general public is reported to be suspicious of Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis (which not only acknowledged the existence of sexuality, which most Americans in Doctorow's view would rather not talk about at all, and we see this repression in Father and Mother's interactions), viewing him as some kind of freaky "free love" guy, then what are the chances of Goldman's much more radical critique of marriage as a form of prostitution and economic subjugation of women gaining traction? Freud can't stay in America--he's eager to get home and never wants to return--and, in the end, neither can Goldman.
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