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Chapter 10
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ragtime, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The American Dream
Replication and Transformation
Freedom, Human Dignity, and Justice
The Cult of Celebrity
Women’s Roles
Social Inequities
Summary
Analysis
In the early spring of 1909, William Howard Taft is inaugurated. Taft is a corpulent man in the style of the late 19th century, when carrying around a bit of fat was a mark of success. But that changes in the early 20th century. Evelyn’s first lover, Stanford White, was “fashionably burly.” Her husband Thaw is smaller but nevertheless doughy. And her newest lover, Mother’s Younger Brother, is lean and muscular. In the wake of Tateh’s disappearance, Evelyn begins paying the rent on his hovel, where she and Younger Brother meet and have sex in the narrow brass bed.
Casting Taft’s inauguration as a watershed cultural moment is tongue-in-cheek humor on the part of the book. As more or less hand-picked successor of Teddy Roosevelt, Taft represents a continuation rather than a disruption of the status quo. The real shift will occur when, much to the Republican Party’s surprise, Woodrow Wilson defeats incumbent Taft in the 1912 election. Thus, it’s more humor (and a mark of Evelyn’s shallowness) for the book to trace the passage of time here through the waistlines of the era’s sexiest men.
Themes
When Evelyn isn’t with Younger Brother or fruitlessly searching the Lower East Side for her lost friends, she attends Thaw’s trial. Photographs of her arriving at the courthouse and drawings of her on the stand (cameras aren’t allowed in the courtroom) fill the papers, turning her into America’s first “sex goddess” and setting an important model for the kind of celebrity that businessmen involved in the newfangled moving pictures will cultivate for their starlets. This, as Goldman and other labor organizers quickly realize, makes her a potent tool in the hands of the elite, because a working man looking at her picture and daydreaming of having the wealth necessary to woo a woman like Evelyn is easily distracted from the cause of his own justice.
Evelyn’s celebrity continues to bring attention to her husband and his trial, and it isn’t long before sharp-minded businessmen realize that they can capitalize on this vision of celebrity for their own financial gain—and for the control of others. Evelyn’s beauty and sex appeal become a liability, if not for her personally than for causes from which she could benefit—female empowerment (undermined by the invention of the movie star sex goddess) and a more equitable distribution of wealth (her father’s death early in her life means she experienced poverty, too).
Themes
One day as Evelyn watches Thaw at trial, she realizes how much she misses White, whose demands as a lover nevertheless pale in comparison to the domineering Thaw. She tries to understand what went wrong. In a letter, Goldman warns her not to “overestimate [her] role” in Thaw and White’s antagonistic relationship.
As Evelyn’s social capital and power wane, she begins to long for the idyllic days of her past when Stanford White took care of her. Goldman sees Evelyn for what she is in this situation: a pawn in the power struggle between two wealthy men. But Evelyn either cannot or will not accept that vision.
Themes
The jury in Thaw’s first trial can’t reach a verdict. At the conclusion of the second trial, he’s sentenced to the Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Evelyn tries to negotiate for one million dollars in the divorce, but her mother-in-law’s private detectives introduce evidence about her affair with Mother’s Younger Brother, and she only gets $25,000. The paltry sum reminds her of a warning delivered by Goldman that Evelyn, daughter of a middle-class family, would have to content herself with what the wealthy think she deserves. She fritters the money from her testimony and her divorce away on anonymous contributions to political causes, but this doesn’t make her feel better. She becomes depressed.
Although imprisonment isn’t an ideal verdict, Thaw nevertheless gets off lightly for a cold-blooded, premeditated murder conducted in full view of hundreds of witnesses. It’s clear that he and his family are accustomed to buying the privileges they want or need. It also becomes crushingly clear to Evelyn in the process of her divorce not just that the Thaws have placed an exact monetary value on her service to the family, but that it’s such a small amount. Deprived of her wealth, influence, and notoriety—having failed in her attempt to hold on to the American Dream—Evelyn sinks into obscurity and depression.
Themes
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