How Emma Goldman changed Evelyn Nesbit
E.L. Doctorow incorporates both historical and fictional characters in his book Ragtime. One of the two historical figures that he describes in Ragtime is Evelyn Nesbit and Emma Goldman. Emma is known to basically say everything that she believes. When she meets Evelyn, she tells her the truth, and that makes Evelyn rethink her life. Evelyn's transformation didn’t really stick, though. In Ragtime, Doctorow uses Emma to describe Evelyn’s change. He describes Evelyn before Emma and Evelyn after Emma Before Evelyn met Emma, she was a completely different person. She was much more sheltered and dependent on others. Her dependency can be shown when she first meets Tateh and the little girl. From the first minute, Evelyn feels an instant connection to them. By inserting herself into Tateh and the little girl's life, Evelyn is escaping what is going on in her life with the Harry Thaw trial. Doctorow describes Evelyn attaching herself to Tateh and his daughter as “She was insane with the desire to become one of them” (Doctorow 49). This quote shows how she sort of inserted herself into their lives and how she felt really close to Tateh and his daughter. After Evelyn meets Emma, she completely changes. Evelyn becomes more understanding of her life and decides to shift away from being in the spotlight. Doctorow describes her as having "No joy" (Doctorow 88). This shows that she doesn’t feel like she needs to be in the spotlight anymore, and it doesn’t really make her happy. Doctorow uses these two characters to show character growth. By using Emma Goldman, Doctorow was able to show a change in Evelyn Nesbit. Emma helped Evelyn grow and realize that she needs to rethink what she is doing in her life. That she actually doesn’t really like to be in the spotlight. Without Emma, I don’t think that she could’ve realized that on her own.
This is some really neat introspection! Personally, I feel like I never completely picked up on Evelyn's dependency and her dislike of the spotlight, but reading this was enlightening.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, Emma's main role in the story seems to be to foment change in other characters, as seen later on with Mother's Younger Brother. It's a real shame that she didn't talk to Coalhouase, because I think they would have interesting interactions, and we could potentially have questionable influence Emma Goldman putting him in touch with fellow radicals.
Follow-up after publishing my own blog. If you copy-paste your text somewhere that ignores formatting like a word-counting tool (I used https://wordcounter.net/) and then copy it from that tool and re-paste to the blog drafting interface, then it will be formatted correctly instead of trying to preserve the formatting from Google Docs/Word/etc and stuffing the whole paragraph onto one line as a result.
ReplyDeleteI take your point about how Evelyn is "changed" by her encounter with Emma Goldman: given how powerfully persuasive Goldman is, it's easy to imagine that anyone would be transformed by a one-on-one conversation with her. And I agree that we see a kind of neediness or dependency in her obsessive cosplay period, where she assumes this alter-ego as a Lower East Side denizen and insinuates herself into Tateh's life. But I would argue that this sudden impulse to take a divergent path, quite literally, and visit the poor area of the city instead of going back to her fancy hotel (which is a kind of prison for her) represents the first glimmer of something more to Evelyn's character. Doctorow depicts her as already having an inclination to explore her society, to reach out for something other than this role she's found herself in, and this forms something like the groundwork for Emma's consciousness-raising: Evelyn is already disenchanted with the high-society world of sexual exploitation she's been victimized by, and she follows a wayward instinct to look for something "more"--and this is precisely when Emma steps in to validate her impulses and to give her some analytical foundation for her criticism of how she's been treated by the men in her life.
ReplyDeleteHi Antje! I never thought about the idea of Emma as a character to depict Evelyn's change. That is a really interesting point. I do wonder if Tateh's and his daughter's eventually success says anything about Eveyln's time with them. How morally correct was it, even if it is mostly just a form of escapism? Great post!
ReplyDeleteGreat post, Antje! I agree with what you said about Emma Goldman's influence on Evelyn, which I think says something about how Doctorow uses Emma throughout the novel. Her role throughout the story stays largely the same by staying true to herself and beliefs, and influences those around her rather than being the one who is influenced. This sets her apart from other characters like Younger Brother, Evelyn Nesbit, and Coalhouse Walker whose story arcs depend on them being influenced by people or events in there lives. This goes along with how Doctorow seems to almost look up to Emma Goldman, and she seems to be more than just a character or historical figure in the book.
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