The Birth of Media Sex Symbols

Celebrities today seem to live through the media. Something about their lifestyles speaks glamour, scandals, and adventure, and incites a certain desire in the minds of the everyday person. Lustrous, argent teeth shining through the front covers of magazines; sleepy, half-closed eyelids gazing enticingly through billboards; svelte, seductive curves beckoning from posters. All are marketing techniques, advertisements for the ideal and unattainable American Dream. Suddenly, it becomes extremely difficult to fathom the idea that these celebrities have ever had normal and personal lives.

In Doctorow’s Ragtime, we see the surfacing of a new age at the dawn of a new century. Evelyn Nesbit’s testimony for the Henry K. Thaw trial happened in 1907. This was a time of technological, political and even artistic innovation; therefore, the media also had to evolve to not only document, but also capture the spirit of change. In Chapter 11, Evelyn is a woman entangled in a scandal in which there was no escape, yet the media portrays her as “the first sex goddess in American History”(84), marketing a new product: fame. This is also the time when celebrities and famous people were detached from their personal lives and in some cases, their humanity. In Chapter 8, in describing Evelyn’s moment of pleasure, Doctorow writes “…the younger woman [Evelyn] began to ripple on the bed like a wave on the sea”(63). This simile comparing Evelyn’s body to a wave takes away her human image and replaces it with a more powerful, ethereal image of the sea. In addition, to emphasize the extent of her fame, she is compared to Theda Bara and Marilyn Monroe, who were the iconic female sex symbols of their respective eras. Furthermore, Evelyn’s claim to fame after the discovery of her beauty in Pittsburgh was her early career as an artist’s model in which Charles Dana Gibson, the famed artist, immortalized her in his pen and ink sketch titled “The Eternal Question” (pictured right), which hangs from Mother’s Younger Brother’s wall, much like the posters of modern celebrities that hang from young men’s walls today. Charles Dana Gibson has also used Evelyn as inspiration for his “Gibson Girl”, the ideal upper class woman that became famous in many of his other works. However, in Doctorow’s novel, we see that she is struggling with her fame, partaking in charity out of guilt, and, having come from a poor lower class background, battling with her own identity crisis. However, she is changing careers from a model to a ragtime dancer; so as the novel unravels, will she continue on her flight to superstardom or will she become the 20^th century’s first fallen starlet?

By Kelvin Chang

Bibliography

· Cardyn, Lisa. "NESBIT, Evelyn Florence." American National Biography. Ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C.

Carnes. Vol. 16. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1999. 293-294. Print. 24 vols

· Doctorow, E. L. Ragtime. 2007 Random House Trade Paperback Edition ed. New York: Random House Inc.,

1975. Print.

· Elzea, Rowland P. "NESBIT, Evelyn Florence." American National Biography. Ed. John A. Garraty and Mark

C. Carnes. Vol. 8. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1999. 930-932. Print. 24 vols.

· Gibson, Charles Dana. The Eternal Question. 1905. Private collection. Evelyn Nesbit. Web. 28 Apr. 2011.

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