Ragtime

Ragtime explores different aspects of peoples’ identities: racial, gendered, class-driven. In the 1970s, many American literary works dealt with identity, as the country had just experienced the radical 1960s. At the time of Ragtime’s publishing in 1974, “intersectionality” as a proper term of social theory had not yet been established. It wasn’t until 1989, with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” that the term was coined and embraced. (Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” chicagounbound.uchicago.edu, 1989.)

Intersectionality interprets identity as a whole comprised of different intersecting parts, such as race, class, and gender, that informs one’s larger position in society. Even though Ragtime predates the formal incorporation of “intersectionality” into social theory, Doctorow interprets the relationship between identity and society just as Crenshaw did. Doctorow uses this modern social understanding of identity to depict early 20th-century America—an era whose history is typically told through a white, male framework. Ragtime’s depiction of an intersectional history radically challenges the hegemonic understanding of the nation’s past and encourages a more inclusive view of early 20th-century America.

Father represents the hegemony that Doctorow challenges in Ragtime. As a white, upper class man with a rigid, unchanging ideology, Father embodies old, 19th-century America. By the early 20th century, evolving technology, social relationships, and geopolitics challenged this paradigm. Father also reflects white supremacist, capitalist, and imperialist attitudes which have been maintained in the United States to this day. Father can travel the world due to his wealth, which is derived from manufacturing patriotic goods. Through Father, Doctorow links and critiques nationalism, capitalism, and imperialism, communicating the racial, gendered, and class-driven facets of American power and ideology.

Coalhouse Walker, Jr. contrasts with Father. He captures the emerging political attitudes of early 20th-century America, which aim to dismantle the power structure that Father encapsulates. Importantly, Coalhouse and Father share two facets of identity: class and gender. Doctorow constructs Father and Coalhouse with key similarities to emphasize the role that race plays in American society. Whereas Father enjoys a celebrated place in his community, including a close relationship with the New York authorities, Coalhouse is limited because of his Blackness. However, Coalhouse embraces the full spectrum of his identity with pride, knowing that the United States treats Black success with hostility. As the narrative describes: “He was not unaware that in his dress and as the owner of a car he was a provocation to many white people. He had created himself in the teeth of such feelings” (174). Coalhouse’s identity confronts the white supremacist power structure. In juxtaposing Coalhouse and Father, Doctorow depicts an intersectional American history. He interrogates the nation’s past, power structures, and ideology through modern lenses of social theory.