Undetermined temperature take: Ragtime doesn’t get enough credit for portraying mental illness with the care that it does (given the time that it was written)
i just saw a post of yours from a couple months ago… could you please talk more about your ragtime younger brother hard of hearing headcanon please please
YES!!!! Sorry for the delay—I’ve been on the road for the last few days. I have seen that post gaining more traction, though, and am very excited for any and all fans of this loser freak to talk to me.
Book spoilers and rambling under cut:
I started thinking about this headcanon before I finished the book. Turns out, in his last chapter where he spends a year in Mexico, he actually does canonically go deaf! So I guess this is more “what if he started to lose his hearing before/during the story?”
(I should also probably mention that I’m writing a fic right now about Younger Brother in which he is hard of hearing, so most of this will be about how I’m writing him in that.)
It’s implied in the musical, and shown very explicitly in the book, that Younger Brother’s work with explosives is very hands-on. Going out to blow stuff up in the factory testing grounds is kind of his first response when things go wrong for him. So it would totally make sense if he lost some hearing because of that. Though also as I’m writing this I’m imagining a very cruel alternate possibility where Father saw a hard of hearing person and went “hey! you’d be less of a liability than these other people in my explosives plant!” and only later found YB to be a natural with it.
So, he’s hard of hearing. What does he do now? I’ve researched what would have been available for him, and, it turns out, the turn of the century was a great time for hearing aids! With the carbon microphone coming onto the market, there was an explosion of patents designed to help the deaf and hard of hearing. There were massive models you’d keep at home on a table, tiny ones you’d hook over the top of your ear, and, my personal favorite, the portable Acousticon.
Most of the machinery was in the belt pack, which wired out to a microphone on the lapel and a reciever earpiece.
The ads are also fun, though these came a bit later.
There’s also a lot of possible symbolism. I am disabled, and I know that disability as symbolic is really easy to do wrong, but I think it 100% can work. This is a great example. Younger Brother already has speaking/hearing symbolism in canon, so making his hearing something which he’s more aware of adds some fun depth to that.
Part of it is people’s voices, and why he can or can’t hear them. Mother speaks with almost desperately perfect diction, representing the easy-to-digest life in New Rochelle. It also shows that they have a positive relationship, that she can be politely and subtly accommodating. Father, on the other hand, is only really understandable because of the sheer volume of his voice. It’s not really a great solution, but I guarantee that if you told him you couldn’t understand him he’d just try and talk even louder.
Sarah, though, would probably speak in a whispery mumble from her voice being disused. At least at first. She opens up at the same time that she becomes friends with Younger Brother (another minor plot point from the book that I cherish deeply). And, besides, a lot of her actions speak more loudly than words.
He knows what’s happening in this moment and doesn’t need to hear Sarah to help her. Even if he hasn’t yet come to understand the oppression she faces, this is a moment of basic human empathy.
(I also like that clip because, instead of having Grandfather escort Sarah away like the script says, Younger Brother does at first. I know it’s probably just the audience, but I SWEAR I can hear him telling her “it’s okay”.)
I’m kind of rambling, but my point is that I really like the idea of using him to tell a literal story about learning to be comfortable with a disability and receiving accommodations for it, but which also parallels his canon arc of becoming more aware of the struggles people around him face.
And this is because of intersectionality! Younger Brother, even from the start of the story, feels like a bit of an outsider in New Rochelle. He can play the part, but he doesn’t seem to get the inherent respect other men in the community do. So he tries to find belonging with Coalhouse. He finds camaraderie, but not community. He, as a white person, can never really understand the lives of these Black people. His disability is invisible until he pulls out a symbol of his wealth and privilege to accommodate it. But he can still come to realize that the oppressed can be allies to one another.
I hope any of this made sense, I feel like I’m not articulating my points very well haha. But thank you for giving me a chance to talk about my favorite freak!
