Rich and Poor

In these early pages of Doctorow's Ragtime, I was most stricken with the dichotomous attitudes of the poor and the rich on things such as culture, art, and entertainment. Perhaps this first scene this truly come up is when Houdini is escaping from the cell across from Thaw. After he has escaped and is dressing, he is mirrored but in the inverse by Thaw as his strips himself an a article of clothing at a time. He then begins to thrust his hips and contort his face in an extremely vulgar and primitive manner, perhaps to show his...disgust with Houdini and his so-called "art?" I am not sure, as it has not been clearly explained at this point. However, there is more to this scene as Houdini further shows his feelings on the matter by comparing this situation to one he has experienced previously in the presence of the upper class. First they had debased by appealing to his greed, and then sealed the deal by showing there true feelings of him by placing him with the circus and the freaks. However, I still do not see where this schism comes from. Certainly these feelings don't exist today, or maybe they do and I simply don't now about it. I am really confused about this point and this moment of the book.

The next instance occurs during Freud's visit to the States. While that whole chapter is laden with imagery of arrogance and disappointment, the thing that really got me was when he mentioned how American's were gobbling up all the European art and architecture with no discrimination and somehow this reflected on their cultural development as a whole. So in this scenario the whole of America is shown to be of the lower class, while Europeans are not. Hopefully Freud returns in this novel, because as of now he and his motivations have not been explained to really any effect at all. Docotorow is really keeping the deeper meanings of this novel tight to his chest, because everything is really confused and unexplained at this point.