The Development of Lisa's Political Rebellion -- Part 12

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11
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As Lisa Houseman continues to read The Fountainhead, her initial infatuation with the character Dominique Francon is shaken. Lisa comes to recognize that fortunate, glamorous Dominique is disturbed and obnoxious.

Peter Keating is encouraged by his own mother and by Dominique's father to court Dominique. Although Peter admires Dominique's beauty and glamour, he foresees that his marriage to Dominique would be miserable. Peter decides that he should marry Katie Halsey after all.

Lisa agrees with Peter's critical judgment about Dominique. Lisa agrees that he should marry Katie.

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Lisa tries, however, to understand Dominique -- to analyze Dominique's personality disorder.

In the novel, there is a part where Dominique is assigned by her newspaper, The Banner, to write a series of articles about a slummy neighborhood of New York City. To collect information, Dominique lives in an apartment there for two weeks. The newspaper expects her to write an article condemning the landlords, and she does collect much critical information about them. However, she also collects much critical information about the neighborhood's residents. In a public speech summarizing her intended series of articles, she says:

The family on the first floor rear do not bother to pay their rent, and the children cannot go to school for lack of clothes. The father has a charge account at a local speak-easy. He is in good health and has a good job.

The couple on the second floor have just purchased a radio for $69.95 cash

In the fourth floor front, the father of the family has not done a whole day's work in his life, and does not intend to. There are nine children, supported by the local parish. There is a tenth one on its way.

By criticizing poor people publicly, Dominique sabotages her career at the newspaper, which had intended to promote her to manage a department that would report about "women's welfare". The newspaper cancels the publication of her articles about the slummy neighborhood. Dominique is not bothered by the cancellation or about her ruined career prospects.

To explain her nonchalance, Dominique declares that her only desire is to exercise freedom. In particular, she wants to be able to say whatever she thinks. She wants "to ask nothing, to expect nothing, to depend on nothing"-- so that she always can spout her own, actual opinions.

Furthermore, her major opinion is that mankind is despicable.

There's nothing but housewives haggling at pushcarts, drooling brats who write dirty words on the sidewalks, and drunken debutantes. ....

Have you ever looked at them [people] when they are enjoying themselves? That's when you see the truth. Look at those who spend the money they've slaved for -- at amusement parks and side shows.

Look at those who are rich and have the whole world open to them. Look at what they pick out for enjoyment. Watch them in the smarter speak-easies.

That's your mankind in general. I don't want to touch it.

Dominique is contemptuous of everybody and of everything. She tells how she stole a beautiful statue of a naked man out of a European museum and brought it to her apartment in a New York skyscraper. There she threw it down an air shaft in order to break it into smithereens. She destroyed the beautiful statue "so that no one else would ever see it."

Dominique's father is dismayed when he learns that she is sabotaging her own journalist career -- and more generally, her entire life.

He asked himself whether he actually hated his daughter. ....

In an awkward, unthinking way, he wanted to help her, not knowing, not wanting to know what she had to be helped against.

Dominique's father hopes that Peter, the architecture company's intelligent, capable, rising star might be able to charm her. Peter does court her for a while, but recognizes that he never will be able to fix her attitude.

Furthermore, Dominique tells Peter that she is sexually frigid. She never has experienced any physical sexual activity and does not think she ever would enjoy doing so. That conversation ends his courtship of her.

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Lisa appreciates Dominique's desire to be free to speak her own mind. However, she recognizes also that Dominique is self-destructive and anti-social. Dominique's freely expressed opinions are not doing any good for herself or for anybody else. Dominique's social criticisms are not constructive.

Dominique could not enjoy anything in her life.

Lisa wonders what she herself is supposed to think about this character Dominique. Is Dominique supposed to be a role model -- a good example of an "individualist"?

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Continued in Part 13

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