Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [69]
It is while laboring in the quarry that he meets—and notoriously “rapes”—the tall, slender, elegant heiress Dominique Francon. Dominique is the daughter of Peter Keating’s now-partner Guy Francon and of a mother who was very rich and left Dominique a fortune. She happens to be spending a quiet summer at her father’s Connecticut estate, although she usually lives and works in the city as a home-decorating columnist for the New York Banner. When she first glimpses Roark, at work, he wears a thin cotton shirt that clings damply to his chest, his shirtsleeves are rolled at the elbows, and a strand of hair falls into his face: He is Cyrus with an orange cap of hair. She instantly understands that he is the ideal man, not only for herself but abstractly, absolutely. Against the considerable force of her concentrated determination to care for no one, she becomes consumed with love for him.
Sex permeates The Fountainhead. In various scenes, Roark’s construction blowtorch becomes a flame he holds on a leash, shuddering with violence; Dominique sees skyscrapers as molten fire that thrusts and shoots through the earth’s crust to freedom and release. And sadomasochism permeates the sex. The most celebrated scene in the novel is the so-called rape scene. Having once seen Roark, Dominique fights to keep herself from going back to the quarry to peep at him while he hacks and drills in the blistering sun. She goes anyway, and he becomes aware that she is watching him. The first time he looks at her she experiences his contemptuous gaze as a slap in the face. She feels a “convulsion of anger, of protest, of resistance—and of pleasure.” She doesn’t yet know who the orange-haired young worker is, but she already hates him, this dusty, lowly creature who is performing a convict’s labor, yet he is the only man she has ever lusted after. Later, she returns on horseback with a whip and intercepts him as he walks to his boardinghouse. When he mockingly signals that he understands why the proud Miss Francon has followed him there, she whips him across the face and gallops away. This is a wonderful silent-film-era melodramatic set piece, except that Dominique’s attraction to Roark and his to her have a deeper—a philosophical—meaning. He is “a first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover,” as Rand says of him late in the novel. And it is through him that Dominique will find her own real, passionate, active self, a somewhat second-handed strategy that is somehow all right for the novel’s heroine though not for the novel’s men.
Roark’s slashed face is the only invitation he needs. What follows is sexual assault—or consensual sadism and masochism, depending on how you look at it. Rand thought of the sex as consensual and, indeed, provoked by Dominique. Late at night, Roark lets himself into the heroine’s expensively scented bedroom through a terrace window. He stands in his dirty work clothes, hands on hips, legs astride, and lets her look at him. She crouches in terror beside her dressing table. He is laughing. He picks her up and throws her on the bed. Although she is in her mid-twenties, she is a virgin. She fights “like an animal,” Rand informs us. As she fights, she thinks that if he were less detached, less cruel, she would not want him. But he is even colder and crueler than she thought. He ravishes her “as an act of scorn,” the author writes in a famous passage. “The act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted.” After waiting for so many years for Leo Kovalensky—and possibly O’Connor