Who is Sarah?
We are given few details about the young woman who shows up at the family's house when her baby is discovered in their garden. However, her arrival sets the biggest events of the story in motion. The family sort of adopts her and her baby, which makes Mother more of a prominent and independent character and brings Coalhouse into the narrative. Sarah's death intensifies Coalhouse's feelings of injustice, leading to his vigilantism and eventually to the family going to Atlantic City and meeting Tateh and his daughter.
I believe that Sarah is meant to be more of a plot device than a character in the ways that the others are. While other main characters' growth can be tracked (such as Tateh's beliefs and standing in society), Sarah seems at the whim of the universe more than her own agency. What little we know about her life before meeting the family, including allegedly killing her baby, seem to be the result of the social class she was born into. With Mother's help she learns how to be a mother to her son and through the family's acceptance of Coalhouse and his persistent proposals she gets engaged. Even her death is a result of addressing the Vice President, which she only attempts because Coalhouse wouldn't marry her until his needs were met. Although many of these actions are Sarah's decisions, she does them in reaction to other characters.
While Sarah never seems to find full independence, she is the one who causes the others to find theirs. When she enters the family's lives, Mother finds her identity as a caretaker outside of her immediate family. She even pushes back more against Father, which busts them both out of the complacency of their marriage (for better or worse). Although Coalhouse was already upset about the actions of Willie Conklin and the other firemen, it is Sarah's death that pushes him over the brink and fuels the sense of injustice behind his vigilantism. Sarah's arrival and specific impact on these two characters has a ripple effect on the rest of the story. Although Sarah has a role in everyone else's life, and a role in the world as a lower-class single mother, her perspective and individual actions are not clear enough to carve out an independent identity in the way she allows others to do.
Sarah is more "talked about" than represented directly as a three-dimensional character in this novel: she is the object of Coalhouse's courtship, but even then she remains mostly out of sight, making him "earn it" by staying upstairs as long as possible. We learn that the Little Boy and Mother are especially fascinated with her, and there are accounts of Mother in particular spending lots of time with her, trying on wedding dresses and such--but here she seems like more of a "project" for Mother than a character in her own right. Coalhouse is much more developed, and Sarah really does function mostly as a plot device--as her entry into the story, through the old 19th century trope of an abandoned baby, signals. As Coalhouse's plot progresses, she is solidified as a symbol of his loss, the damage done to him that can't be repaired.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that Sarah is an interesting character insofar as we don't really hear her own thoughts and we mainly see her through the eyes of other characters. She acts as a catalyst for mother, Coalhouse, and even Father as Father's relationship with mother begins to deteriorate after Sarah comes into their lives (though whether or not this falling out was inevitable whether or not Sarah appeared is up for debate). Even her death is used by other characters. Good post
ReplyDeleteThe fact that Sarah is one of the few characters that Doctorow doesn't give us a ridiculously detailed view into is quite telling of how she seems to only exist in Ragtime to drive the plot and the other characters forward, which is kind of sad. It's also an interesting point that Sarah leads others to their independence, something that I hadn't noticed before. Great job finally writing this post that you put off for so long!
ReplyDeleteI think i agree with your idea that Sarah isn't necessarily represented through her own voice throughout her time in the novel. She is always seen from someone else's prospective and we don't really get to see her ideas and into her mind. It makes me wonder how different the book would be if we did actually get to see inside her mind a bit.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Sarah serves as sort of a sympathetic plot device who functionally does not talk. The argument could be made that that serves as a representation of figures like her and their oppression and lack of recognition in society. Coalhouse is hated so much because he is vocal, and does talk, and Sarah is just thrown to the wayside and neglected, voiceless to the larger public. After all, Ragtime does take that perspective consistently.
ReplyDeleteI didn't really think much about Sarah when I read through the story -- your post made me think that perhaps this was on purpose. It makes a lot of sense in hindsight that Sarah really is just more of a plot device used by Doctorow to trigger important events. In that kind of way, Sarah is actually kind of similar to Tateh's wife, who never really shows up but is there because she needs to be. On that note, I just noticed that women of color in particular aren't really mentioned that much in Ragtime. Huh. I wonder if that was deliberate.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really interesting post! You're completely right--alongside all the characters whose perspectives the narrative jumps into, Sarah is pretty much a silent set piece. In this regard, I think it's interesting the way the narrative depicts her morality--despite the untold traumas she's survived, she's described as guileless and innocent, "the kind of moral being who understood nothing but goodness." In this way, she kind of gets lumped into the archetype of the young woman dies because she's too good and pure for this world, another way of flattening her character.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with your analysis of Sarah. Unlike the rest of the cast of Ragtime, we never get the story from Sarah's perspective. And for that matter, nobody else in the novel knows her perspective either. Her motivations for attempting to kill her baby are never explained, and neither is her initial frosty treatment of Coalhouse Walker. However, its interesting because despite my lack of information and time with her, her death was, in my opinion, the most impactful and devastating in Ragtime. Though Doctorow usually keeps a light, matter of fact tone in this story, Sarah's death was still incredibly jarring and saddening, and set the events of the novel's final act into motion. Though Sarah didn't get much development or insight, she was definitely a beloved character to me.
ReplyDeleteA lot of the time, people only see Coalhouse as an example of injustices that were happening at the time towards African American, but Sarah is another example of that. She was put in jail because she was trying to help her husband, and died because of that experience. Unlike Coalhouse, she fit with African Americans standards at the time: She was meek, quiet, naive. Doctorow used her to show that society constantly pushes African Americans down, regardless of how they act compared to society's standards. Thank you for making me think more about Sarah! Great post!
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