History and Mythology in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime

In E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, history is intensified through both hyper-sexualised and hyper-violent embellishments [1]. This essay will demonstrate how Doctorow’s fictionalisation of historical figures replicates problematic, sensationalist portrayals of women within media at the time of the novel’s publication in 1975. Furthermore, Ragtime evokes Second Wave Feminist theories relating to the ‘Male Gaze’, although this is only achieved through the perpetuation of the same degrading mythologies this rhetoric challenged [2].

The presentation of Evelyn Nesbit within the novel defines her principally in terms of sexual magnetism. This can be seen through the idolatrous description of her portrait in Younger Brother’s room:

In his room pinned to the wall was a newspaper drawing by Charles Dana Gibson… Her downcast eye was embellished with a fallen ringlet that threw her brow in shadow. Her nose was delicately upturned. Her mouth was slightly pouted. Her long neck curved like a bird taking wing [3].

By deriving Nesbit’s likeness from an illustration, Doctorow expresses her mythological status within the latter half of the American Progressive era. For context, portraits of ‘Gibson girls… delineated the American ideal of femininity at the turn of the century’ [4]. The prose’s structure echoes this sentiment with Nesbit’s characterisation resembling the blazon poetic mode through careful deconstruction and praise of the subject’s features. Nesbit’s idolisation is compounded through the repetition of the ‘Her’ pronoun. In one sense this is a refrain demonstrative of both the narrator and Younger Brother’s infatuation to the extent that the language becomes fixated. However, there is also the suggestion of a dichotomy between Evelyn Nesbit the person, and the ‘her’ construction broadcasted by media outlets as the embodiment of archetypal standards of femininity. This is reflected further through Doctorow’s overly indulgent depiction of her rape at the hands of Stanford White: ‘The champagne was drugged. When she woke up the following morning the effulgence of White’s manhood lay over her thighs like a baker’s glaze’ [5]. The simile portrays Nesbit as a delicacy subject to the appetites of powerful men such as White. In addition, the imagery Doctorow employs facetiously minimises the barbarity of this incident, as described by Nesbit during the 1907 trial of Harry. K. Thaw: ‘When I came to myself I was greatly frightened and I started to scream. [Evelyn described seeing blood on her thigh and realizing that she had had sex.] [6]’ Furthermore, the brevity of Doctorow’s account fails to adequately demonstrate the brutality of White’s actions. By portraying this assault in a more glamorous light, Doctorow re-enforces the mythologised portrayal of Nesbit as a sexual commodity subject to the desires of violent, entitled men. This imagining reflects emerging Feminist theories within the 1970s relating to the ‘Male Gaze’ and the scopophilic, sexualisation of women within media [7].

Moreover, the portrayal of Evelyn Nesbit effectively deconstructs the mythologised image of Thaw championed by his lawyers when on trial for the murder of White. This construction is evidenced in the coining of ‘Dementia Americana’ by Thaw’s lawyer, Delphin Delmas, as:

the species of insanity that makes every American man believe his home to be sacred… which makes him believe the honour of his wife is sacred… which makes him believe that whosoever invades his home, that whosoever stains the virtue of his threshold, has violated the highest of human laws [8].

The imagery of territorial invasion frames Thaw’s shooting of White as an embodiment of hyper-masculine ideals of honour. From this emerges the mythological image of Thaw as a heroic, courageous figure driven to violence as a means of protecting his wife. However, Doctorow significantly undermines this presentation through harrowing descriptions of Thaw’s abusive treatment of Nesbit during their stay at the Schloss Katzenstein in Austria:

Their first night in the Schloss he pulled off her robe, threw her across the bed and applied a dog whip to her buttocks and the back of her thighs. Her shrieks echoed down the corridors and stone stairwells [9].

The Gothic imagery of screams echoing down the passages of an Austrian castle ascribes a villainous characterisation to Thaw that juxtaposes with the heroism his lawyers attempted to convey. In dismantling this mythology, Doctorow emphasises the monstrosity of a figure historically reported to have abused hundreds of men and women in a similarly sadistic manner [10].

However, in attempting to dismantle one mythology, Doctorow’s embellishments of historical fact paradoxically construct new mythologies relating to the figures he portrays. This can be seen in the hyper-violent imagery ascribed to the same instance of domestic violence previously discussed: ‘In the morning Harry returned to her room, this time with a razor strop. She was bedridden for weeks’ [11]. By omitting explicit detail, Doctorow allows for the period between ‘strop’ and ‘She’ to carry with it the weight of grotesque mutilation without needing to be described. For all the subtlety Doctorow employs in their implementation, the descriptions are hyperbolic adaptations of the affidavit written by Nesbit against Thaw in 1903:

He took the rawhide whip and belaboured me unmercifully… He left me in a frightful condition. My fingers were numb, and it was nearly three weeks before I sufficiently recovered to get out of my bed and walk’ [12].

An already horrific incident of domestic violence is amplified within Ragtime to reflect the sensationalised presentation of the Thaw trials by the media. However, Doctorow’s commentary on history does not absolve him from a sensationalised portrayal of real events. Ultimately, the accounts provided fail to accurately depict the traumatic history of Evelyn Nesbit to the detriment of the novel’s historicist style.

Doctorow also constructs anachronistic mythologies through the blending of Nesbit and Emma Goldman with themes of sexual liberation more reminiscent of the 1960s and 70s. This is expressed through the transformation of Goldman’s maternal care into homoerotic intimacy. An initial, maternal characterisation is ascribed during the unpleasant application of an unnamed astringent:

Evelyn lay down on her stomach and Goldman applied the liquid where the marks of the stays had reddened the flesh… Evelyn was squirming and her flesh cringing with each application. She buried her face in the pillow to smother her cries. I know, I know Goldman said. But you will thank me [13].

The combination of Evelyn’s puerile squirming alongside the tender re-assurances of ‘I know, I know’ establishes a familial, pedagogical dynamic between the two women. However, this initial presentation becomes charged with sexual intimacy as the scene persists: ‘Evelyn put her own hands on her breasts and her palms rotated the nipples. Her hands swam down along her flanks… the younger woman began to ripple on the bed like a wave on the sea’ [14]. The nautical imagery employed with a simile and the verb ‘swam’ presents a representation of overwhelming sexual pleasure associated with the disorientation and powerlessness of being cast out to sea. In presenting a transformation from the maternal into the erotic, Doctorow reflects 1970s Feminist rhetoric drawing a distinction between sex from the act of child-rearing [15]. In this way, history is manipulated and fictionalised to reflect contemporaneous tensions relating to gender and sexuality at the time of the novel’s publication in 1975.

A criticism of John Lukacs is how the fictionalised historical figures Doctorow presents are, just like Tateh’s artwork, ‘paper figures, almost wholly one-dimensional ones’ [16]. Lukacs views this as detrimental to Ragtime, although I would argue that one of the novel’s strengths lies in the depiction of Nesbit attempting to break free from her mythologised one-dimensionality. This is suggested during the same encounter with Goldman previously discussed and the transformative awakening Nesbit experiences. The homoerotic proclivities of Nesbit within this scene demonstrate an attempted liberation from a one-dimensional mythology defining her solely through an ability to satisfy the desires of male onlookers. However, Doctorow expresses Nesbit’s inability to transcend this mythologisation through the perverted intrusion of Younger Brother: ‘Mother’s Younger Brother fell into the room… great filamented spurts of jism that traced the air like bullets and then settled slowly over Evelyn in her bed like falling ticker tape’ [17]. The impersonal naming ‘Mother’s Younger Brother’ heavily implies a reading of the character as a metaphor for the collective demographic of younger, American, middle-class men. Just as the simile emphasises the invasive nature of this sexual assault through the employment of military imagery. The scene metaphorically demonstrates a compromising of women more generally through their unwarranted sexualisation by this same demographic. Nesbit’s one-dimensionality is interesting precisely because it demonstrates a failure to extricate eroticism from her mythological portrayal. Under the male gaze, Doctorow indicates how women like Nesbit cannot be defined except in relation to the sexual desires of men.

The conclusion of Nesbit’s involvement in the narrative cements her hyper-sexualised characterisation. In commenting on the consequences of her involvement in the Thaw trial, the narrator remarks on how ‘Evelyn’ provided ‘the inspiration for the concept of the movie star system and the model for every sex goddess from Theda Bara to Marilyn Monroe’ [18]. Historically Theda Bara was at the height of her fame in the 1910s in contrast to the later popularity of Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s and 60s [19], [20]. The temporal range between these figures, therefore, reflects the continuation of sex-centric mythologies throughout recent history. However, the pathos evoked alongside this rhetoric outlines its detrimental nature within society:

She had no joy. She looked into the mirror and saw the unmistakable lineaments of womanhood coming into her girlish face. Her long graceful neck seemed to her like an ungainly stalk upon which was perched a sad-eyed ridiculous head of a whore past her prime [21].

The derogatory language of ‘whore’ juxtaposes the glamorous portrayal of Nesbit derived from Younger Brother’s poster. More specifically, the earlier simile comparing her neck to a graceful bird is inverted into an ‘ungainly stalk’. This effectively contrasts the enduring mythology of Nesbit’s beauty with a pessimistic portrayal of sexual magnetism declining over time. The scathing assessment of her features is, therefore, demonstrative of the damaging influence of glorifying unrealistic, unmaintainable standards of femininity. In this way, Doctorow’s portrayal of Nesbit parallels the rhetoric of Second Wave Feminism condemning hyper-sexualised depictions of women within media [22].

Ultimately, Doctorow’s fictionalisation of Evelyn Nesbit, Harry. K. Thaw and Emma Goldman re-iterate constructed mythologies framed by exploitative, hyper-sexualised media. However, in conveying the detrimental presence of the male gaze within wider society, Doctorow’s accounts directly replicate these same problematic portrayals. In this sense, the treatment of history within Ragtime is oxymoronic. At once undermining while simultaneously perpetuating degrading mythological constructs to demonstrate wider societal gender inequalities in America and beyond.