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Chapter 2
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
The immigrants whom Father sees on the boat come from Italy and Eastern Europe. Those who make it through the gauntlet of immigration officials at Ellis Island disperse into the city’s tenements. They are reviled as thieves, rapists, drunkards, murderers. Many die, and those that live face a hardscrabble existence. Mameh, Tateh, and Little Girl live in one room. Mameh and the Little Girl sew pants for a living. When the authorities force Little Girl to go to school instead, the family can’t make ends meet. Mameh begins accepting extra money from her employer for having sex with him.
As the immigrant and the expedition boats cross paths, the book elegantly pivots to another family who are called by their relationships—the immigrant trio of Tateh, Mameh, and Little Girl. It thus asks readers to take this family’s experiences as representative of immigrants generally. And, in marked contrast to the comfortable, predictable lives of Little Boy’s family, the immigrant family experiences squalor and instability. Mameh is doubly victimized, first as an underpaid immigrant laborer and then as a woman vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
Themes
One day, Mameh, Tateh, and Little Girl take the streetcar uptown to gawk at the mansions of the wealthy. It’s around this time that journalist and reformer Jacob Riis begins documenting the squalid and dangerous conditions in the tenements. One day, Riis goes to the New York docks, hoping to talk to Stanford White about the topic. But White is too busy overseeing the unloading of shipments of fine European goods to discuss improved sanitation. And soon afterward, he’s murdered by Thaw. That month a vicious heatwave grips the city. People in the slums die of dehydration and heat exhaustion.
The book makes a stark contrast between the lives of the wealthiest and poorest New Yorkers, drawing attention to the wealth disparities that existed in the early years of the 20th century, which helped to inform the era’s reformers. Stanford White’s disinterest in talking to Riis suggests the difficulty of achieving change—especially through polite conversation.
Themes
