Houdini's Escape of Every Day Life

Harry Houdini is an escape artist, yet he cannot fully escape the sadness caused by his mother’s death. In Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow emphasizes Houdini’s desire to contact his mother after death and discusses Houdini’s newer tricks. Doctorow paints the scene of Houdini suspended upside down in a straitjacket and chains. The author is aware of Houdini’s thoughts when Houdini is being lifted above the thousands of people gathered to watch; “Houdini had lately been feeling better about himself. His grief for his mother, his fears of losing his audience, his suspicions that his life was unimportant and his achievements laughable – all the weight of daily concern seemed easier to bear. He attributed this to his new pursuit, the unmasking of spirit fraud wherever he found it. Driven by his feeling for his sainted mother…” (Doctorow, 315). Houdini’s tricks began to reflect his emotions and helped to liberate him from his life of uncertainty. This theme of freedom is prevalent throughout the novel as Coalhouse searches for freedom along with Younger Brother, Evelyn Nesbit and Emma Goldman, Mother, Harry K. Thaw who is stuck in prison and Tateh who seeks freedom from his life of poverty. 

After his mother’s death, Houdini attempted to talk to her, showing his true belief in magic. According to a New York Times article published in 2010; “In 1922, in Atlantic City, Houdini joined the author Arthur Conan Doyle in a séance led by his wife, Jean Conan Doyle, who tried to contact Houdini’s mother. In a trance, she scrawled pages of writing, Houdini later said, a letter “purported to have been dictated by my sainted mother.” Here, Houdini refers to his mother as sainted, the same word that Doctorow uses to describe her. This shows the authors attention to diction and allows the reader to trust Doctorow. This careful attention to detail gives E.L’s novel Ragtime credibility. The New York Times article also refers to Houdini’s magic as liberating, especially for the influx of Jewish immigrants like Tateh, to the United States in the early 1900s; “The effect was extraordinary. Houdini was publicly proclaiming the possibility of liberation. Wasn’t this, as the exhibition points out, the immigrant’s fantasy as well? It must have been thrilling to watch an enactment of such transcendence, and not just of social obstacles, of course, but of spiritual ones. Even death is overcome by Houdini’s powers.” Houdini achieved extraordinary things, which influenced people in America to strive for liberation and instilled hope. Houdini was in fact Jewish and was an example of the American Dream. He freed himself from the negative connotation that came with being an immigrant and extinguished poverty from his life. The New York Times article later discusses Houdini’s deliberate choice of location for his performances. He often performed the hanging straitjacket tricks in front of windows of ‘metropolitan newspapers’ that captured these events. In the novel Houdini is hanging close to a building in Times Square and even talks to a man in a nearby window. This aspect of his later performances is proven to be true. Houdini gave the American people something great to believe in, and his magic tricks helped him to escape from the problems in his everyday life. Doctorow incorporates Houdini as a way of addressing the overall yearning for mental and physical freedom and ties this theme into the novel through the numerous characters in Ragtime. 




By Brooke DeWitt

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