In Ragtime, Peary's journey to the pole is fictionalized with Father being our eyes and ears into that adventure. Here is one of the canonical events of American exploration, right up there with Lewis and Clark and the Moon landing. Doctorow is writing in the early 1970s, a very patriotic time because of the bicentennial, though with the Vietnam War still fresh in the American Conscience, triumphs like these, battles against nature not man were less divisive things to wave the flag over. Yet Doctorow makes this triumph of American will and spirit into a scene from Apocalypse Now only older and colder. I admit I don't really know what happened on the expedition, and that I'm not wholly discounting Doctorow's version, but I do think it's important that we recognize that Doctorow is trying to do something here beyond tell the story of the expedition.
This is really a story about Father, Doctorow could have chosen to set the chapter framed from Peary or even Henson's point of view, but instead it stays with Father. This is to accomplish his goal of showing the 20th century man. We've seen Tateh representing the immigrant man, we've seen Mother's Younger Brother as a Septimus Warren Smith-esque young man, but Father is the missing piece of manhood, the distinctly American part (so much so that he owns a patriotic supplies shop). Father is our more stereotypical image of the American turn of the century man in his moral views and appearance. In this chapter though, we see the Teddy Roosevelt image being shown as just a front. Father isn't a Rough Rider, as Peary explains to him "This was from no lack of heart...but from the tendency of his extremities to freeze easily" (79). His reason for being there is laughable, his society donated enough money so Father got to come along, as essentially a dressed up tourist.
The short talk between Henson and Father over who will go with Peary to the Pole is also telling. Father admits to himself that Henson has a right to that honor probably more so than anyone else. He relates his skill in building shelter and driving the dogs. Yet he resents him for his confident nature, compounded by the fact that he is African-American. He never says this as such, though it seems clear to me because in the same sentence that Father tells us of his resentment over "Henson's presumption" that he challenged "the Negro" over why he thought it would be him (77). We knew Henson was African-American already so this isn't telling us something we didn't know, only something that clearly matters to Father. Father's racism also carries over to the Eskimos, more so actually. He treats them not as people but as animals. They're used as unnamed assistants, indeed the Eskimos were always going accompany Peary to the Pole yet he still said he was going to do it alone. Then there's Father watching two Eskimos have sex in the same way someone might at a zoo of two caged animals. Later, when Father tells of his relations with an Eskimo woman he refers to her as "the stinking fish" (111). This fills in our picture of the American man as Doctorow shows him--racist and fake.
Your comments about Father's subtly racist attitude toward Henson are revealing: as a "tourist," Father still expects a certain white privilege to apply even at these far reaches of the earth. He's *paid* to "discover" the Pole, and he wants to be in the picture. Set aside the fact that Henson has fully *earned* it--there's still something not quite right about such a man getting the "glory." We might even see this chapter as setting the groundwork for the racially inflected surprise waiting for Father back in New Rochelle--the first moment where he feels his earlier status as a patriarchal white man start to slip. Once he's back home, he's consumed with the idea that the world has been moving on without him--as if he's been "displaced" by that boatload of immigrants that so disturbed him on the voyage out.
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