After the Escape

A theme of escape is prominent throughout Ragtime. Characters might physically escape fantastic prisons (Houdini), use subterfuge to escape their identities (Nesbit), or even escape their families for various reasons, on various impulses (Father and Mother’s Younger Brother). Even if characters aren’t conscious of getting away from something, they end up entering alternate worlds, to borrow a postmodernist idea. In these worlds, their identities become malleable, and the rules of real life often fail to apply.

But what happens when these characters reenter the “normal world” of their existence? How do these forays into alternate universes change the characters and the worlds they occupy? When the characters try to go back, can they? Or have their experiences irreversibly changed something?

In terms of long-term escapes from a public persona, Evelyn Nesbit comes to mind first. Her world is in a great deal of flux when she escapes her identity, becoming just another poor (step-)mother on the streets. She’s the center of the original tabloid sex scandal, which means she has the chance to either gain or lose a huge amount of money and status. Instead of behaving as it seems the tabloids expect her to (string of affairs!) she takes the Little Girl in the Pinafore under her wing. Yet the end of her escape is as bumpy as Freud’s first airplane landing. She is outed as Evelyn Nesbit, sex symbol, to Tateh and the Little Girl, and is given a too-small alimony payment because evidence of her affairs is uncovered. Her escape into the streets of the Lower East Side has basically led to the money crisis she finds herself in. Her periodic absences from the public eye suggest infidelity, and it’s only through meeting Emma Goldman that she ends up meeting (ugh) Mother’s Younger Brother. Evelyn’s escape into pretend-poverty will cause very real, permanent changes to her life in the real world.

Father escapes through Peary’s expedition to the Arctic. The expedition itself is hard for him on many levels, but the return is the real challenge. He comes home to his family and discovers that they have deviated from the suburban ideal. Mother is reading feminist/anarchist books by famed feminist/anarchist author Emma Goldman. There’s a black woman and her child living in their house. A black man will soon start to come over, and he will quietly refuse to act like a servant or a member of an inferior class. Mother’s Younger Brother is devastated because of the end of his relationship with Evelyn, and he throws himself into work – a stark contrast to the directionless wanderer of before. But Father himself has deviated from the suburban ideal as well. He is gaunt, preoccupied. He has committed adultery. He feels out of touch. He cannot fill out his old clothing. The nearest analogy his family can find is that perhaps he is ill. But he’s suffering mentally, not physically. He can’t rejoin the world he left because it doesn’t exist anymore.

Houdini is the most obvious escape artist in the book, as that’s literally his job. But rather than focusing on his on-stage, performed escapes, I’d like to look at the broader arc of his escape to Europe, and his subsequent coming-back-down-to-earth return to America after his mother’s death. Houdini also cannot enter the same world he left, as his America is now defined by profound grief and loss. He expends massive time and effort on the impossible: not letting himself be fooled by faux-necromancers, he seeks a way to truly communicate with the dead. He throws himself into all of his work, including escapes, with an intensity meant to distract him from his grief; they’re also a form of almost-suicide, as many of them practically invite death. He’s thrown into complete personal and professional chaos because of his mother. After Houdini returns to America from the skies of Europe, he cannot seamlessly reenter his life, not because of something changing in his own mind, but because of events happening in the “real world” while he was gone. Yet he still blames his escape for his grief, with the idea that his mother had a message for him that she couldn’t deliver because he was out of the country.

Each of these characters escapes briefly from the everyday world which they normally inhabit. And for each of them (except perhaps Father), the escape itself is enjoyable, both in its own right and because it grants them time off from life, like a vacation. They enter alternate worlds and try on new identities. Yet world-switching doesn’t work that easily: there’s always some sort of catch, some problem that arises with reentry into the real world. The problem always happens because of or is magnified by the escape. Evelyn’s escape and the ensuing tabloid speculation are used to accuse her of sexual promiscuity. Father’s escape mentally changes him and isolates him from his family, like they’re passing him by. Houdini’s escape deprives him of closure with his mother. These character’s evasions of the real world are temporary, nothing else. And the consequences await them, strangely magnified, when they return.