I Don't Like The Ending.

Father dies, Coalhouse Walker dies, Young Brother dies. Emma Goldman is deported. Mother and Baron Ashkenazy get married and move to California. And a bunch of other stuff happens. Yay! The End.

For a book that spent the first 300 pages inventing all these fictional but totally historical characters as well as historical but definitely fictional characters and making them run into each other and say and do lots of Crazy Sh*t, the ending just felt way too abrupt and almost lacking on Doctorow's part. Granted, he might be trying to make a point about the flow of history at the end and I wouldn't know since I don't really get what he's doing for most of the book anyways, it just felt like all of this interesting build up was for nothing and Doctorow got bored of writing and so he killed half his characters and made the rest of them get out of New York. I get that this isn't just a work of fiction and that he's also trying to depict how history plays out through his novel but it just felt way too abrupt and out of place considering how the first 39 or so chapters were written. The writing style was fine, just felt very out of place and gave an abrupt ending to such a massive buildup. 

As a chapter by itself though, I think that Doctorow's depiction of how history and time move on is really interesting, especially since he wrote this book about the early 1900s in the late 1900s and we're reading it in the 21st century. In the moment, like for people living during the 1910s, the sinking of the Lusitania or the assassination of the Archduke and his wife may not have felt like it was the end of one era and everything that was "in" yesterday has to go today. Doctorow talks about how the era of Ragtime, presumably referencing not just the historical period of Ragtime but also his conveniently titled book Ragtime, had run out (336). While I don't really like this interpretation of history as something that can be cleanly divided into eras and that one day, the present era just ends and a new one begins and it's all good (since everyone from the past either dies or moves away!), I do think it reflects the fact that upcoming and developing conflicts do have an impact in making the events of the past seem almost "small" - the looming war in Europe obviously makes Father and the Peary Expedition's quest to locate the North Pole seem almost lofty. So while this chapter felt extremely awkward when put at the end of so much buildup, I do get many of the points Doctorow's trying to make about the flow and significance of history. Or maybe not. 

Mother

    From what we've read so far in this novel, Mother is one of the character that fascinates me the most. While everything about her character on the surface seems 'bland' and stereotypical, it's her development in the past few chapters that steers her away from the norms expected of her and brings her character to life.

    Mother is described as being your typical early 20th century white upper-middle class woman - she takes care of her husband and other members of her family while managing her household and has an extremely sheltered view of what is going on the world outside their home in New Rochelle. Her character's name is literally just 'Mother', Doctorow's way of portraying her not as an individual character but someone who represents many women like her at the time. Doctorow makes the sheltered worldview of the family clear in the first few pages of the novel - "There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants." (4) As we discussed in class, it's not that there were no African Americans and immigrants in the US in 1902 (or whenever this takes place). However, living the lifestyle in the society that the family exists in means that even if they interacted with African Americans or immigrants, they probably didn't fully register them as people, resulting in Father's especially bigoted worldview as seen on the Peary expedition. 

    However, when Father leaves for the expedition and leaves Mother and Younger Brother in charge of the family business, Mother starts to evolve into a multi-dimensional character for the first time. Younger Brother is off doing weird crap I'd rather not talk about, and Mother starts to have her own awakening and some longing for a purpose in life. She awakes to her internal discontent of living this almost subservient lifestyle and having to conform to what is expected of her by society and more importantly, Father. He notices this transformation when he comes back to New Rochelle - "He looked in Mother's eyes to detect there his justice. He found instead a woman curious and alerted to his new being ... She was in some way not as vigorously modest as she'd been. She took his gaze. She came to bed with her hair unbraided." (111) Father notices a change in Mother's behavior, namely that she's not nearly as modest as she had been before and as we see more clearly once Coalhouse Walker and Sarah enter into the family's lives, she starts voicing her opinions and is not afraid to shoot down what she sees as Father's stiff and 'backward' worldviews. 

    What prompts Mother's transformation? While it's hard to tell considering how much Doctorow moves around through the novel through the countless number of "fictional characters" and "historical figures", what really stood out to me is the fact that Mother basically has taken over Father's business. He leaves her and Younger Brother in charge but she becomes so adept at the affairs of running his enterprise that even he's "astounded" - "As for the business during Father's absence, it seemed to have got on well. Mother could now speak crisply of matters such as unit cost, inventory and advertising. She had assumed executive responsibilities ... Everything she had done stood up under his examination. He was astounded." (112) What comes after this made me dig even deeper - "On Mother's bedside table was a volume entitled The Ladies' Battle by Molly Elliot Seawell. He found also a pamphlet on the subject of family limitation and the author was Emma Goldman, the anarchist revolutionary." (112) Mother had started reading literature on the issue of women's rights - of course, The Ladies' Battle is an anti-suffragist text about how women are not informed enough to vote. However, one can see Mother becoming more aware about the world around her - before Father left, she probably would have subscribed to the worldview that he told her to without questioning the basis of those ideas. Mother's evolution is indicative of the broader story of first-wave feminism which was occurring at the same time. 

    Mother's character is a lens through which we can examine the broader story of women, especially well off white women in this part of the 20th century. She does not have a name, unlike Sarah or Emma Goldman, and Doctorow uses her to show us a different perspective through which views on race and gender evolve over time.