Societal Transformation In Ragtime By E. L. Doctorow

Since the beginning of this country’s brief narrative, citizens of this nation have endured considerable societal transformation. At the beginning of the twentieth century and throughout the start of the First World War when the events in “Ragtime” transpired, the United States endured one of these great shifts. In the novel, “Ragtime” by E.L. Doctorow, the author constructed and personified characters like Father, Tateh, and Coalhouse Walker in order to explore both the negative and positive effects of evolution on each sector present in a diverse American society.
During the time period shortly after the Gilded Age when a great adjustment to culture occurred, a sizeable portion of the population resisted the diversification these modifications
When the immigrant family is first introduced, Tateh had just lost his wife and refused to allow a similar fate to meet his daughter. Due to the trauma of losing his wife, Tateh continued rejecting change until “…he disappeared into the crowd,” while with Evelyn Nesbit and even more dramatically after he makes an agreement with the Franklin Novelty Company, and he is reintroduced on the South Jersey Shore as Baron Ashkenazy (55). Although Tateh was initially opposed to change because of his past traumas and fear of the unknown, ultimately, he, as an immigrant, achieved legitimacy and even admiration from the perspective of those more adaptable sectors of society. Mother thought “…the persons who interested her were invariably foreigners,” and she noticed that the immigrants “…seemed to beam more life than her countrymen” (254). As the twentieth century continued on, Italian and Eastern European immigrants progressed in establishing themselves in their new surroundings as more Americans accepted the benefits shouldered by the