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.