Posted on 03/14/2009 7:43:42 AM PDT by Publius
I absolutely loved this book when I read it 30 years ago.
It was formative in shaping my political attitudes.
This time through it fills me with dread..The parallels to what is happening in real time are far too vivid.
“If I had to fancy an insight on Rand’s sexual philosophy, I would probably say that she might have been a tad repressed and would have had loved to have a passionate relationship with a man.”
She did, she was married to Frank, and then she seduced and “forced” her young assistant Nathan into her bed where they had a torrent affair while Frank drank away his sorrows.
I believe Ayn’s sexual perversion was very tied to her decision not to become a mother. She knew all along that she was sent to the planet to be a writer and would not have time for babies. So her sexual life was just sex.
Take procreation out of a marriage relationship (And friends of Franks said that they thought he would have loved to have been a father), and all you have is sex. So Roark raping Dominique in the Fountainhead as their first sexual encounter, and Dagny moving up the so called chain of command to John Galt in Atlas is supposed to be somehow evidence of her aspiring to greatness.
It is the false and deadly side to the philosophy of Objectivism, and one of the reasons why people of faith have a difficult time reading Rand.
It is a shame that she put her own sexual immorality into the books, but not surprising giving the fact that she was an atheist and not interested in sexual morality, just objective morality. The fact that she can divorce the two is a fatal flaw in my opinion, not just for Ayn the writer, but for those who accept her at face value without realizing the true devastation to family life that results when a partner decides to move up the sexual ladder to the new wife or the new husband (or lover).
I can’t say that I blame Hank Rearden for his choice to have an affair with Dagny, given his parasitic wife Lillian, and her attempt to destroy him. One of the laugh out loud moments in the book comes when Lillian admits to James Taggart that she will be truly broke financially when Hank cuts her off. I see her as the epitome of all of the elites in our society when it finally dawns on them that Obama Economics will be the end of financial prosperity for everyone, not just the so called capitalistic rich.
Let’s hope Atlas Readers will take the sexual immorality of Rands characters as symbolic and hope that those who are pursuing true happiness will look to find it in a loving relationship with a husband or wife and children, something she never really explored in her fiction, supposedly because she was not a mother.
I do love this paragraph from Atlas which describes the children of one of Galts Gulch’s citizens. I have tried to raise my own five children with a similar sense of freedom:
P 784:
The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley - two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it.
They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world - a look of fear, half secretive, half sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of a being int he process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred.
The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger’s ability to recognize it, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence.
They represent my particular career, Miss Tagart, said the young mother in answer to her comment, wrapping a loaf of fresh bread and smiling at her across the counter. They’re the profession I’ve chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can’t practice successfully in the outer world.....
I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child’s brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he’s unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart? Yet the cause is so simple. The cause is that here, in Galt’s Gulch, there’s no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational.”
I don’t think Ayn was repressed sexually, so much as she was not able to explore the full range of her sexual powers which come to full fruition with pregnancy and orgasmic birth. Which, by the way, most women have never experienced in our culture because of an extreme dependence on doctors and midwives to deliver the children.
My guess is that if Ayn had been more open to motherhood, it would have toned down the sex scenes in the books, and she would have been able to apply Objectivism to childbirth, as some of us have done, and she would have been at the forefront of the unassisted childbirth movement.
Jenny Hatch
Let’s see... In her postcoital bliss, Dagny “saw a bruise above her elbow, with dark beads that had been blood.”
With physical results like these, “brutally” works just fine. This is beyond “wildly” and “passionately.”
Stick to “brutally,” Publius. It’s accurate.
That was me. I noted the exception to myself at the time, and maybe attribute it to different position of that company in the story (already closed by the time we find it, ongoing involvement in the story due to the motor, etc.) Or, one might surmise that it was just the result of a general rule of Rand’s (that the greatness of companies springs from the genius of the top man), and not a completely absolute rule.
A torrent affair? That's not one of those golden rainbow deals is it? Yuk.
ML/NJ
I didn’t say “don’t use it”. Just said I hated it. It’s still a free country, for now, use it while you can.
Perhaps I am the only one who doesn't "look for hidden meanings" behind every paragraph while reading a book. Dagny and Hank had a true passion for each other, which they "released" during their love making.
"Sexual immortality"....that just about describes a majority of people breathing at this very moment. If you did not wait to have sex until you were married, that would be your "sexually immoral". Sorry, can't be the judge and jury on that one.
I guess I missed the boat on the importance of Dagny liking her hair pulled, compared to the government raping every producer to feed the moochers.
Guess my head is in the gutter.
I don't get stuck on it. Only one of my suggested topics related to Hank and Dagny's physical passion. I'm waiting for the rest of the crew to start looking at what our world will look like when Atlas shrugs.
Billthedrill's commentary is particularly important in that regard. It won't be pretty.
I too think that is far more important than whether or not Dagny likes her hair pulled or if Hank enjoys pulling it. But there does seem to be a lot of "sex talk"....3. Dagny likes to be taken brutally, and she goads Hank into some fairly rough sex.
I don't get that impression at all. I'm just wondering what kind of minds jump to that conclusion.
Because Publius keeps bringing it up!
And last week, he expressed surprise that nobody really wanted to discuss the sex. So when you come right down to it, we AREN’T stuck on the sex.
Nevertheless, Publius has me laughing out loud at his descriptions of it. Earth moving, ocean boiling ... Go to the mattress indeed! Or last week, “physical congress” from Billthedrill (gotta love that name in this context). This is hilarious stuff.
I have no idea why Rand’s heroines like it violent. (Do you like that word better than “brutal”?) There certainly is room for passion in these relationships as we see when Rearden asks Dagny to get the bracelet.
Honestly? This reading of Atlas Shrugged, I find myself skimming over the sex parts. I just don’t find them that realistic or interesting. I’d much rather read descriptions of them by Publius or Billthedrill.
And no, NGZ, your head isn’t in the gutter if you’re focusing on the rape by the government of the producers. I agree that is much more important than whether Dagny likes having her hair pulled.
Meanwhile, I haven’t written a single word on my favorite character in the book, Cherryl Brooks, who was introduced in this chapter.
I don't like either! Personally, I don't think I'm cut out for this "book club" stuff. I see the point of the story and I stick to it. The rest I see as "filler", unless it pertains to the facts (which Dagny and Hank's sex life have nothing to do with).
Why couldn't Dagny and Hank see each other as the last ones standing (they have no idea what happened to the other producers, though Dagny has her idea). They become a tad passionate with each other, makes sense to me.
I just don't put too much thought into the "brutal" or "sexual tendencies" Rand may or may not have had. I think it distracts from the point.
Like I said, I don't think I'm made for these book club things. I didn't know that until now. This was my first one.
Rand’s moral flaws as a person do not in any way diminish her skills as an observer of reality. I find her glorification of sexual promiscuity sad, and it is inescapable to contemporary observers that the widespread barnyard behavior by the populace has reaped disastrous results by any measure. She pretties it up some, but is it really different?
That said, this chapter lays out in stark grimness the results of everything that is playing out in our own time. It is not necessarily causative nor predictive, but it certainly rings true as an accurate portrayal of the human condition. I find reading AS much like reading the Minor Prophets of the Old Testament: it is tomorrow’s headlines before they are written. Starnesville is the result of the most prevalent social dynamic of the past 3/4 century, namely the abolition of responsibility. With an absence of responsibility comes a void in accountability, and a commensurate debasement of the culture, economy, polity, and education. Whenever I see a talking head decrying “finger pointing” I know immediately that they were guilty of causing whatever problem is being discussed. The coming passages about the destruction of the 20th Century Motor Works is both hilarious and heartbreaking, and the words of the guilty are indistinguishable from the real-life poltroons of today.
The comments about the minarchist government of Colorado lead me to reflect on the ultimate result of any governmental system expanding beyond the true purpose of governance to protect the citizenry from lawlessness and invasion, and nothing more. As soon as government starts doing “what is good for us” (as we vote ourselves benefits from the public treasury) the game is over. We do not know how much time is left on the clock, nor do we necessarily know the final score. But we do know who the winner is : Team Tyranny.
The closing glimpse of Starnesville also provides a portrait of what rural America could become once the power grid is diverted to more (politically) important, population centers. I have a cabin in about the remotest part of Virginia, and I fully expect the locals to lose their electricity when or if the cities become even more energy starved given the burgeoning Obamunism and its irreducible results of shortage. Without increasing our production capacity foe electricity, how do we avoid this outcome? Hence, like John Galt I am constructing my own power source there. Unlike John Galt, mine is based on reality (micro hydro power) rather than fantasy (the static generator).
A quick browse around the preparedness sites and blogs like survivalblog.com suggests a sizable component of our citizenry sees widespread Starnesville-ism in the future.
When I first read AS over thirty years ago I was awestruck by the heroic nature of the protagonists and amused by the cartoonish antagonists. Now I see the heroes as the cartoons, and their enemies on the nightly news in the guise of Obamunist lap dogs in the media and government.
Now there's a sobering thought. That's something I didn't factor into the equation. I wasn't quite sure what had killed Starnesville's power and had people cooking over stone fireplaces. Power rationing? That's worrisome.
Please write about her! I took a shot at it with my little essay on the movies of the Thirties, but I'm waiting for other folks to weigh in.
(And I'll leave off the sex. I promise.)
OK, I’m going to try this again. I just don’t get everything in the town going to “rack and ruin”. The big employer left and so they are back to feudal days? Why does it compute that only the big industrialists can make everything rosy? People lost jobs during the depression, but they were still able to live lives without turning feudal. In the old west people took care of themselves without turning slovenly and letting their children become wild. Even now, with all the similarities, people are pushing back, making plans for when things will go badly. They aren’t just sitting around waiting for the next thing to happen to them. Well, at least, not all of us. Am I just tilting at windmills here? Is there no one but big industrialists that can make things happen? I know that isn’t her story here, but in discussing what it will be like when Atlas shrugs it should be considered.
Even the first images are disturbing. The road had been partially dismantled, possibly sold.
We appear to be in an early phase of the whole Mad Max thing. The feudal lord has not yet established himself, but the town has folded up and died. In his contribution for this week, Billthedrill posted a link to a Russian town that died much the way Starnesvlle did.
There are former industrial towns in Pennsylvania that died. People moved away, and those who remained ended up delivering pizzas instead of working at the local steel mill.
Your comment about the Depression is on the mark. Society in that era was more cohesive, and people looked out for each other. The image of Starnesville is one of people who have been so deadened by calamity that they are incapable of responding.
Thank you for introducing me to that word. I actually had to look it up. I'll be using it in the future.
About the brutal, passionate sex.....I think Rand distills mans behavior down to his basic instincts; whether that be logic, reason, sex, faith, survival, etc. So the sex scenes, for me, are all about taking it to the core. There is ample exaggeration throughout the book, to make her points.
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