Rape is a Felony, Stanford White
The issue of consent in Ragtime is one of relatively little importance. Doctorow has plenty of other far greater issues he's chosen to tackle, but I think the idea of consent deserves a few minutes of consideration. From the get-go, consent basically didn't exist in Ragtime . Of course, we know that consent didn't exist in the 1900s, so this is a historically accurate fact of the time period, which we see play out in several couples. Father and Mother don't seem to have a lot of chemistry in the first place, which is already worrying. But E.L. Doctorow's description of their sex life lacks a certain energy: "When the entire house was asleep he came to her room in the darkness. He was solemn and attentive as befitted the occasion. Mother shut her eyes and held her hands over her ears" (11-12). Mother clearly isn't into what they're doing, which doesn't make the act consensual at all. But she resigns herself to having sex with Father, beli...