In describing
Coalhouses’s Model T, Doctorow repeatedly mentions the custom pantasote top.
When we first
meet Coalhouse the narrator mentions the top: “His car shone. The brightwork
gleamed. There was a glass windshield and a custom pantasote top” (155). When
his car is vandalized by the firemen “the custom pantasote top was slashed to
ribbons” (180). When Conklin repairs the car, the end result is “a shining
black Model T Ford with a custom pantasote roof” (295). We talked about how the
car is a symbol of wealth and status and so the mention of the custom top (a fancy addition) at the end of so
many descriptions of the car reminds us of that.
But what actually
is a pantasote top? When the car is being repaired “The Pantasote Company delivered
a top” so from the book we know that it’s a brand name top (295). I also
googled pantasote and it appears to be both the name of a company and the name
of the particular material the company used to make car tops.
My google
search turned up surprisingly few results though. There was no Wikipedia page
or even any website about the company (which just goes to show how much
research Doctorow did). The only thing I could find were ads. Here’s a
pantasote top ad from 1918, prints of which are for sale on Amazon:
As far as I
can tell, the picture shows a group of white people on vacation. The language
of the ad (“Quality, the finest”) claims that pantasote tops are a luxury. The brand
pantasote seems to represent an elite lifestyle. So while the name-dropping of
Model T could just be a nod to Ford as a character, Doctorow’s use of the brand
pantasote confers class.
Yet this use
seems somewhat antithetical to the attitude Doctorow has to capitalism. He depicts
the textile owners, Ford, and Morgan negatively and from Emma Goldman we get
vibes of a negative attitude to the capitalist system as a whole. But at the
same time Doctorow is respecting a corporate name as a symbol of status and
using it in a positive way to describe a member of a marginalized group gaining
status.
I think the conflicting
symbolism of the pantasote top is emblematic of the way Doctorow can depict the
conflicting associations of anything. Coalhouse both stands up for his rights
and murders people. Mother is a member of the bourgeois elite and slowly
breaking the confines of her gender. Evelyn Nesbit is both interested in a
family completely outside her social sphere and class and completely ignorant
of the reality of that family’s life. In real life things are often both
positive and negative and Doctorow’s masterful depiction of such conflict is
part of what makes Ragtime such an interesting
book.
Here’s the
link to the amazon page selling the advertisement prints: https://www.amazon.com/1918-Pantasote-Company-Material-Print/dp/B00I0EJ1FS
Really nice catch you made here. I remember reading about the pantasote top but I never bothered to look into exactly what it was. Your reasoning about why the narrator mentions the top many times I think make sense. I also think it reiterates the value of the Model T, Coalhouse's sense of pride and status that after wrecked causes his life to take a drastic turn.
ReplyDeleteI really like this post! To me, it seems that Doctorow is really just trying to point out all the hypocrisy that exists in our society. Yes, some people have good intentions in their minds. However, at the same time, those same people are willing to go to extreme ends to achieve their goals. It brings up the question of whether the ends can justify the means.
ReplyDeleteAwesome post. It's cool to see what a pantasote top is actually like. It's conflicting because as Mr. Mitchell says, Goldman is gold, what she says is almost always right in the book. So when she hates capitalism, so we do. She hates the internalized class system, but at the same time the reader respects Coalhouse more because of his class status. So Doctorow presents things in a lot of different ways. Cool, thought-provoking post.
ReplyDeleteI think while there is certainly the possibility of class being a factor of this, my interpretation was somewhat different. I saw it more as them replacing the car exactly as it was before, and this adds detail that supports that. I saw it as a nod that they were getting everything perfectly similar to his past car. However, at this point I did not equate Pantasote with class, so this is also a reasonable inference. Well written.
ReplyDeleteWe know Coalhouse is a prideful dude, who tries hard to be classy even when confronted by racism. I always considered the pantasote top a sort of one-up on regular rich people: it's an assembly line, ordinary car, but he got a pantasote top which puts him above even other Ford owners (already a luxury). The capitalist symbolism is there but I think the important part is Coalhouse showing his wealth and pride in his car.
ReplyDeleteHonestly I didn't even think twice about the pantasote top so I think it is pretty cool how you did research outside of class on this. Nice post!
ReplyDeleteHonestly I hadn't thought about the duality of the situations you mentioned. I sort of took my side on how the situation was and didn't really dwell on the positive side of the negative or the negative side of the positive. The pantasote top is certainly not one of those details I noticed either when it came to those comparisons.
ReplyDelete