Dominique Francon: Ayn Rand’s Profoundly Misunderstood Heroine

Author’s note: This article contains spoilers for and presumes knowledge of The Fountainhead.

I have taught The Fountainhead as a primary text in ethics courses for thirty years, to thousands of students, and I’ve found that many of even the best students misunderstand the motives and actions of one of the book’s main characters—and one of Ayn Rand’s most intriguing creations—Dominique Francon. For example, some are confused regarding her resistance the first time they have sex, unable to discern whether it’s consensual or rape. Some have no idea why—despite her deep love for Roark—she allies with the repulsively evil Ellsworth Toohey to wreck Roark’s career. Some do not understand why she marries Peter Keating and later Gail Wynand. Some think she is crazy. One student never referred to Dominique by name; she just called her “Psycho-Broad.”

Even Toohey, who knows her well and who, at times, can decipher what he terms “the style of a soul,” misunderstands her. “Wasn’t it obvious?” he says. “The woman scorned. As obvious as the fact that Roark had to be the man you’d want. That you’d want him in the most primitive way. And that he’d never know you existed.”¹ Toohey, oblivious to the passionate nights the two lovers spend together, interprets Dominique’s crusade against Roark’s career as the actions of a bitter woman repudiated by the man for whom she lusts. On another occasion, Dominique says to Toohey, “I know what I am. . . . I’m just a bitch.” Toohey responds, “You’re something much worse than a bitch. You’re a saint.”² The truth is that she is neither.

Because she is the story’s heroine and second most important character, we will not fully understand The Fountainhead (arguably one of the greatest novels in literature) if we do not comprehend her character. A number of important questions surround her, none as controversial as the so-called rape scene. After all, she works diligently to lure Howard Roark into her bedroom, but then strenuously resists once she has him there; and she calls it “rape” several times afterward. Yet, she is deeply, profoundly in love with Roark. Did she fall in love with a brute who raped her? Is their first sexual encounter literally a rape?

Ayn Rand provides abundant clues, which, when pieced together, reveal exactly who and what Dominique Francon is. Let us start with a refresher on the basics of her character.

Dominique is the daughter of Guy Francon and his deceased wife, from whom she has inherited a good deal of money. Francon is the most prestigious and commercially successful architect in the country, but he is an unoriginal designer—an unprincipled phony who schmoozes glibly and gives clients what they have been taught to desire: imposing structures in the Classical style.

When we meet Dominique, she has recently graduated from college. She writes a column, “Your House,” for the New York Banner, a pandering popular scandal sheet owned by the wealthy but unprincipled entrepreneur Gail Wynand. Rand describes her through the eyes of Peter Keating, who is employed by and copies her father. Keating, even more than his boss, is an aggressive social climber who seeks commercial success not via talent and work ethic but by charm, good looks, social graces, and manipulativeness. His first impression of Dominique is this:

Her slender body seemed out of all scale in relation to a normal human body; its lines were so long, so fragile, so exaggerated that she looked like a stylized drawing of a woman and made the correct proportions of a normal being appear heavy and awkward beside her. . . . She had gray eyes that were not ovals, but two long, rectangular cuts edged by parallel lines of lashes; she had a face of cold serenity and an exquisitely vicious mouth.³

Her conversational style is laced with a barbed wit that comes out even more fiercely in her column. For example, Keating tells her that Gail Wynand—her boss—must be an interesting person. She responds, “Undoubtedly. When I’m in a mood for something decadent I’ll probably meet him.”⁴ Keating asks if she knows Toohey, who society universally regards as a moral paragon. She says, “Oh Ellsworth Toohey. . . . He’s wonderful. He’s a man I always enjoy talking to. He’s such a perfect blackguard.”⁵ When Keating proposes to her, she answers, “Peter, if I ever want to punish myself for something terrible, if I ever want to punish myself disgustingly—I’ll marry you.”⁶

To appreciate the cutting quality of her writing, observe the style of her praise for Roark’s brilliant Enright House. She writes:

I wish that in some future air raid a bomb would blast this house out of existence. . . . So much better than to see it growing old and soot-stained, degraded by the . . . dirty socks, the cocktail shakers and the grapefruit rinds of its inhabitants. There is not a person in New York City who should be allowed to live in this building.⁷

A clue to her character lies in her words to Toohey regarding the same building:

I think the man who designed this should have committed suicide. . . . He should not want to exist. But he will let it be built, so that women will hang out diapers on his terraces, so that men will spit on his stairways and draw dirty pictures on his walls.⁸

Such defacing actions, to her, are tantamount to desecrating Michelangelo’s David. Later, lying in bed with the man she loves, she says, “Do you know that the Enright House is the most beautiful building in New York?” Roark responds, “I know that you know it.”⁹

Ayn Rand here makes clear two related points regarding Dominique: First, she passionately admires the Enright House (and other of Roark’s works); and second, she believes that society is undeserving of Roark’s genius and integrity. Two questions emerge here: What is it about Roark’s buildings (and his person) that she reveres? Why does she deem society unworthy of him and his buildings?

For those puzzled by her heroine’s values and actions, Rand provides valuable insight into Dominique’s character early in the story. Before Dominique ever meets Roark, she pours out her soul to Alvah Scarret, the sappy, sentimental, and utterly conventional chief editor of Wynand’s vulgar New York Banner. She tells him she acquired a statuette of Helios from a museum in Europe. She was in love with it. She then threw it down an air shaft to break on the concrete floor below. Shocked, Scarret asks her why. “So that no one else would ever see it,” she responds.¹⁰

Such behavior is genuinely perplexing (to put it mildly), and my former student and others who think of Dominique as “Psycho-Broad” may be forgiven. Nevertheless, in this same early scene, Rand provides the key to unlock Dominique’s personality. Why does she love the Greek statuette? Why does she admire Roark’s buildings? Why does she revere Roark himself? When she criticizes human beings as they are, Scarret queries, “What do you want? Perfection?” She responds, “—or nothing.”¹¹ Years later, her second husband, Wynand, says to her, “Do you know what you’re actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art. That’s the only field where it can be found—art. But you want it in the flesh. You’re in love with it.”¹²

Scarret and Wynand are correct. Dominique worships only the greatest accomplishments of the human mind—and those who consistently embody the creative principles that achieve them. She reveres Greek sculpture, Roark’s buildings, and his character and person. Extending her character beyond the world of the story, we can say that she might also love the logic of Aristotle, the scientific theories of Newton, the poetry of Shakespeare, the symphonies of Mozart, the novels of Hugo, the biological advances of Darwin, the inventions of Edison, and so forth. She has no emotional response to the halfway, the in between, the not quite. But for the greatest creations of man’s soul—and for the consistently heroic creators—her response is instantaneous, impassioned, blinding, and overwhelming. The thing that is so exquisite about her soul and character, and the deepest reason Roark loves her, is her undiluted, untarnished, inviolable idealism—her reverence for man at his highest and best. It is her only religion.

But she is also a profound pessimist. She holds not a malevolent universe premise—the great works of the human mind show her the world is open to achievement—but a variation on the theme: a malevolent society premise. Human society, to Dominique, is a corrosive, malignant cesspool that glorifies pandering mediocrities, enshrines opprobrious monsters, and relegates towering geniuses to granite quarries and/or the obscurity of social rejection and commercial failure.

Nor does she lack the experience to support this conviction. Her father, Guy Francon, is a smooth-talking phony and a third-rate architect; she knows it and says so in print. But, let us remember, he is the most prestigious and commercially successful architect in the country. She never met Henry Cameron, but she knows enough about architecture to identify him as a brilliantly original thinker in the field—one who was shunned and rejected by society. Keating and Roark are on track to parallel the results of Francon and Cameron, respectively. Keating, an architectural hack and an egregious “kiss-up,” is on the fast track to stunning success; Roark, the genius and moral paragon, is consigned to manual labor in a granite quarry. Further, she subsequently realizes that Steven Mallory, a brilliant young sculptor, is becoming an embittered alcoholic due to society’s repudiation of his masterpieces. By contrast, Wynand sold his soul to pander to the lowest tastes of the masses and received in return great wealth and political influence. Above all, Dominique sees that the cancerous Toohey is lionized as a humanitarian saint by society. She has legitimate reasons for holding a malevolent society view.

Human greatness has no chance in such a society, she believes. The Stoddard Temple debacle is Dominique’s worst nightmare come to shimmering fruition. Roark designs a masterpiece, a breathtaking Temple of the Human Spirit; society, in a frenzied crusade orchestrated adroitly by Toohey, shuns it, repudiates it, and destroys it. She tells her lover:

Do you see what I was saving you from when I took commissions away from you? . . . To give them no right to do this to you. . . . No right to live in a building of yours. . . . No right to touch you . . . not in any way.¹³

This is the disaster she had long feared. She was certain that Roark—and she—were heading toward exactly this kind of cataclysm. In emotional agony, she testifies at the trial for the plaintiff, stating:

The Stoddard Temple must be destroyed. Not to save men from it, but to save it from men. . . . Let us destroy, but don’t let us pretend that we are committing an act of virtue. Let us say that we are moles and we object to mountain peaks.¹⁴

She marries Keating and later Wynand for reasons that we will explore—but her love for Roark is undying. After marrying Keating, she tells the man she loves,

When I think of what you are, I can’t accept any reality except a world of your kind. . . . That does not exist. And I can’t live a life torn between that which exists—and you. . . . The contrast is too great, Roark, you won’t win, they’ll destroy you.¹⁵

Several years later, before marrying Wynand, she pleads with Roark, “I can’t bear to see what they’re doing to you, what they’re going to do. . . . You can’t go on like that for long. . . . You’re moving to some terrible kind of disaster. It can’t end any other way. Give it up.”¹⁶

For much of the novel, Dominique is a tortured soul, tormented by a profound inner conflict between her imperishable idealism and a deep-seated conviction that a debased society will inexorably crush the towering genius she so fervently hero-worships. This explains her anti-Roark alliance with the maleficent Toohey and her feverish attempts to lure prospective clients away from Roark and to the servile Keating.

Toohey is a Marxist intellectual, seeking to impose a communist dictatorship in America, a totalitarian state in which he will be policy adviser behind the throne.¹⁷ Roark is an innovative thinker, an individualist in Toohey’s own field, a man who will speak his mind, who will neither conform nor obey. Toohey, to achieve his nightmarish aims, must wreck Roark’s career and that of any independent thinker.

But Dominique, as we’ve seen, seeks to protect Roark from society, from the drawn-out agonizing death it imposed on Henry Cameron. For her, Roark’s career must be terminated quickly and relatively painlessly, not slowly and agonizingly; above all, it must be ended by her hand, the hand of one who both understands and loves him, rather than by a wantonly vicious society that neither comprehends nor cares. For Toohey, this is spiritual murder; for Dominique, it is mercy killing. But they agree: Roark’s career must be quashed.

Numerous facts about Dominique explain Roark’s deep and abiding love for her. Observe their extraordinary depth of emotional intimacy. For example, immediately after marrying Keating, she comes to Roark’s room: “They stood silently before each other for a moment, and she thought that the most beautiful words were those which were not needed.”¹⁸ Even more telling, she comes to him after Hopton Stoddard announces his lawsuit. The Temple, she realizes, will be torn down and restructured—a grievous desecration. She is devastated but says nothing. Roark only needs to look at her. “‘You’re wrong,’ he said. They could always speak like this to each other, continuing a conversation they had not begun. His voice was gentle. ‘I don’t feel that.’”¹⁹ Or again: Dominique is on her way to Reno to divorce Keating before marrying Wynand. She gets off the train in Clayton, Ohio, where Roark is building a department store. She has not seen him for several years. She walks to the construction site and finds him. Roark takes her across the street where they sit.

She thought that they had not greeted each other and that it was right. This was not a reunion but just one moment out of something that had never been interrupted. She thought how strange it would be if she ever said “Hello” to him; one did not greet oneself each morning.²⁰

Their spiritual bonding initiates the moment they meet. Recall that Guy Francon owns a granite quarry and a summer home in Connecticut. He is, in effect, local aristocracy. His beautiful, socially graceful daughter is the chatelaine of the town. She spends a summer at her father’s house. Roark, his revolutionary designs rejected by society, is compelled to close his office and work as a laborer in the quarry. On a hot day, Dominique visits the quarry. The men are below ground level, doing backbreaking labor in the unspeakable heat. She sees a man with orange hair.

She saw his mouth and the silent contempt in the shape of his mouth . . . the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity. She knew it was the most beautiful face she would ever see, because it was the abstraction of strength made visible.²¹

She can’t stop thinking of him. She sits at her dressing table, noting the exquisitely fragile, expensive glass, thinking of his sweat-stained body, his dust-streaked clothes, and his hands.

She stressed the contrast because it degraded her. . . . She [still a virgin] thought of the many distinguished men she had refused. She thought of the quarry worker. She thought of being broken—not by a man she admired, but by a man she loathed. She let her head fall down on her arm; the thought left her weak with pleasure.²²

She conceives various stratagems to lure him to her bedroom. She flaunts her name and her beauty. He notices her hands trembling in his presence. She scratches a marble fireplace in her home and asks Roark to replace it with a new slab. She must wait for the new piece of marble to be delivered and set, and she does so feverishly. The marble arrives, and she sends to the quarry for Roark to set it. He sends another worker instead, and Dominique goes ballistic. Days later, on horseback, she lashes him across the face with a branch and rides off.

People often communicate with each other without words—and these actions of Dominique’s, especially the violence of whipping him with a branch, states loud and clear, “I want you in the strongest possible way, and you, you bastard, you keep me waiting!”

Three days later, he still has not come to her. It is very late; she sits at her dressing table and thinks she will “try” to sleep; she takes relief from the cool liquid perfume she presses to her temples. The French windows of her bedroom are open. Roark enters in his dirty, sweaty work clothes. Dominique resists with all her strength—but silently. The caretaker and his wife live nearby, but she does not scream. “She felt the hatred and his hands; his hands moving over her body, the hands that broke granite.”²³ She fights but he overpowers her. He penetrates her, she screams once, and then she lays still.

It was an act that could be performed in tenderness, as a seal of love, or in contempt, as a symbol of humiliation and conquest. . . . He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love but as defilement. And this made her lie still and submit. One gesture of tenderness from him—and she would have remained cold, untouched by the thing done to her body. But the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted. . . . and she bit his lips and she knew what he had wanted her to know.²⁴

Dominique wants to take a bath. She runs the water—but she realizes that she will not bathe. “She knew that she wanted to keep the feeling of his body . . . knowing also what such a desire implied.”²⁵ She yearns to see him again, reflecting “that she had found pleasure in the thing which had happened, that he had known it, and more: that he had known it before he came to her and that he would not have come but for that knowledge.”²⁶

For Roark, too, this is special. He finds himself thinking of her. His life has, until now, been one of monochromatic zealotry; building in his revolutionary style is his career, his passion, and his sole religion. But now, architecture will perennially share space in his soul with Dominique Francon. He reflects: “They had been united in an understanding beyond the violence. . . . The unrepeatable exultation was in knowing that they both understood this.”²⁷

This is powerful material that needs to be carefully examined. Before addressing the “rape” question, an important point that is too easily overlooked must be identified. Dominique meets Roark at the lowest ebb of his career: He is a nameless worker in a quarry, working alongside ex-cons. He is below ground level performing tortuous work in brutal heat. The symbolism is unmistakable: Roark is in Hell. Further, she is upper class; he is a low-born laborer. And yet, none of this matters. Immediately, at first sight, Dominique recognizes that his face reflected “the abstraction of strength made visible.” Now, there are many ruggedly powerful men at the quarry whose “hands break granite.” What she sees in him is more than the strength of virile masculinity—she sees, above all, in his eyes and in his face, moral strength.

This point is driven home when she meets him again soon after at a party thrown by Kiki Holcolmbe, socialite wife of architect Ralston Holcolmbe. “And Dominique realized that what she saw in his face, what made it the face of a god to her, was not seen by others; that it could leave them indifferent.”²⁸ Lacking any explicit knowledge of Roark’s genius or character, meeting him at the lowest point of his life, when he is surrounded by ex-cons—and might himself be one—she nevertheless implicitly recognizes, in the first instant of laying eyes on him, that he is an extraordinary man, that his character matches his physical strength, and that he is, indeed, godlike. Realizing this, she gives herself, in that instant, body and soul to this man—and does so for the rest of her life. This is what makes Dominique Francon an exquisite human being, the second-most exquisite in the novel, and this is the deepest reason for Roark’s undying love for her.

Given her fervent desire to make love to him, why, then, does she resist? There are two reasons. First, she wants “freedom.” By this, she means to have no emotional ties to a world she believes is inimical to her values. At this point, she does not have a hint of his genius, but she senses—accurately—the strength of his character.

Roark, even as a low-born worker, is the only kind of man she could love. Such a man has no chance in this society; for her, it will be agony to watch her lover ground to dust by a society unforgiving of integrity. At the quarry she does not know his name. When he leaves for New York to build the Enright House, she is both desperate to see him again and relieved that he is gone. She fights the desperation: “She would break it—or it would break her. If it did, she would ask for his name.”²⁹

But the second and main reason she resists is that she wants to be sexually conquered by an overpowering masculinity. Roark and Dominique make love in Connecticut in the exact way that Dominique yearns to. They make love entirely on her terms. She offers Roark a stark alternative: physically dominate me—or we will not make love. One touch of tenderness from you dissolves my passion. But if you overpower me with your hands that break granite, I will experience “rapture.” Hers is an exquisitely feminine response to a masterfully masculine man.

Rape is a heinous crime that violates not only a victim’s right to her own body, but also to her own choice and judgment, that is, to her own mind. It involves forcing sex on an unwilling victim. It does not include the act of a man sexually conquering a woman desperate to be sexually conquered by him, the man she loves and in the form she desires. This is certainly true in this case, where Rand makes clear (e.g., the quotes above) that both lovers know this.

Why, then, on several occasions, does Dominique call it “rape”? Before answering this, note that this is a distinct issue from the question of whether or not this was rape. Rape is a specific (brutal) action. An act of lovemaking in which a woman eagerly participates is not transmuted to “rape” on her subsequent say-so. In short, the act is objective, not subjective.

The first time Dominique calls this incident rape occurs shortly afterward. She receives a letter from Scarret telling her that her return to the office will be treated like “the homecoming of an Empress.” She reflects:

if they knew . . . those people . . . that old life and the awed reverence before her person . . . I’ve been raped . . . I’ve been raped by some red-headed hoodlum from a stone quarry . . . I, Dominique Francon. . . . Through the fierce sense of humiliation, the words gave her the same kind of pleasure she had felt in his arms.³⁰

Notice the language she employs when musing on her sexual pleasure: “the act of a master taking shameful and contemptuous possession of her” gave her rapture. “[T]hat was the degradation she had wanted;” the words denoting her “fierce humiliation” gave her pleasure similar to what she had experienced in Roark’s arms. She, a refined, upper-class society girl, is ravished by an overpowering “hoodlum”—defiled by him—and she takes intense pleasure in her “degradation.” She is not just conquered by an indomitable masculinity, but more, she is taken violently by a rough-hewn, low-born worker from a quarry. This explosive combination provides for Dominique an unforgettable sexual experience. The locals bow to her, the chatelaine of the region. “She wanted to scream it [her sexual encounter] to the hearing of all.”³¹

What does this mean? The relationship with Roark is the first and greatest passion of her life, which, prior to this, was lived generally among pretentious mediocrities who bestowed upon her empty, meaningless veneration. Earlier, she told Keating that she has been kissed many times, but never responded. She says, “It must be an interesting experience to sleep with a man. I’ve wanted to want it.” She concludes that she is an “utterly frigid woman.”³²

Now she has found meaning in the arms of a man unafraid to be a man, undaunted by the prospect of imposing his will on an “empress” who requires it of him. She wants to scream it to all, to throw back in their faces their empty lives and empty respect, to tell them that being “degraded” by a lowly worker has vastly more meaning for her than all of their valueless words and awe-inspired glances.

But above all, Dominique has never experienced her femininity or sexuality in anything approximating this blindingly powerful form. This is a sexual awakening for her—and it is a priceless gift from Roark. Yes, she wants to express her contempt for conventional values by screaming “rape” to the ovine populace—but first and foremost the desire expresses a celebration—and properly so.

But she does not scream “rape” to anybody; nor does the chatelaine even whisper it. The reason is simple: She wants Roark not in prison but in her bed.

The second time she calls it “rape” is after Wynand gives in to the strikers’ demands and denounces Roark in print as an “unprincipled and anti-social type of man.” She tells Wynand—her husband—how her relationship with Roark began. “I met him when he was working in a granite quarry. Why not? You’ll put him in a chain gang. . . . He didn’t ask my consent. He raped me. . . . Want to use it? Want to run it in the Banner?”³³

Roark did not ask consent of the woman desperately eager for him to overpower her? Given how strongly she desired Roark to sexually conquer her, this claim might be considered risible. But in this context, it has meaning. She screams at Wynand in effect, “Gail, you publisher of a lurid, filthy tabloid that now smears Roark—you want to smear him as a rapist also? Go ahead.” Bitterly, she hurls this fabrication at Wynand in deliberate attempt to wound him by painting a vivid picture, however false, of the man he worships raping the woman he loves.

It is clear that she delights in fantasizing of her first sexual encounter with Roark as “rape.” It is a metaphor in her mind for being sexually dominated by him. But if she genuinely believed Roark raped her, why hurl it at Wynand or yearn to scream it to the townspeople? There would be no resolution forthcoming there. It is Roark whom she would confront with this bitter truth. But, in fact, he is the one person to whom she has no desire to speak of it. The reason is clear: He knows, as does she, the actual nature of their lovemaking in Connecticut. Nobody else does.

Deeper, do innocent victims usually fall in love with vicious criminals who rape them? In all other areas of his life, Roark is a moral paragon. Do men of such unbending integrity force sex on an unwilling victim? None of this makes sense. If it were rape, the characterizations of the story’s two main players—and the profound intimacy they shared—would collapse. The deeply moving love story that follows would be inexplicable.

One more scene relates to Dominique’s fantasy of rape. Just before she almost kills herself helping Roark dynamite Cortlandt Homes, she thinks about women preparing themselves for their first night of lovemaking. “I never dressed for my first night—I had no first night—only something ripped off me and the taste of quarry dust in my teeth.”³⁴ In truth, she did dress for her first night: Making clear repeatedly to Roark that she wanted him “like a cat on a fence,” leaving open the French windows to her bedroom, dressing in a flimsy nightgown, refusing to scream for the caretaker and his wife, she did indeed dress for the “rapture” she craved.³⁵ Dominique is too honest to believe that her fantasy of rape is literally true. But she delights in this metaphor for being sexually broken by her lover whose hands break granite.

A further interesting question about her is: Why does she require Roark to overpower her on their first night—but never again? This is an intriguing question, and to answer it we must bear in mind the full context of their relationship; this includes the intriguing fact that, at the end of their lovemaking, Dominique “bit his lips and she knew what he had wanted her to know.”³⁶

What does this mean? Until now, we have been on strong evidential footing in the claims made here. But now, we must speculate, although certainly based on textual evidence.

Does Roark prefer to make love by overpowering Dominique? Not that we know of—there is no evidence to support this claim. This is a requirement she imposed. Certainly, for all the rest of their lovemaking in the story, there is no mention of it. Indeed, the second time they make love, Dominique gives herself to Roark “in a surrender more violent than her struggle had been.”³⁷

Now, consenting adults have differing ideas on how they want to make love, and some people prefer rough sex. But it is generally true, certainly in modern Western society, that when a man is in love with a woman, he wants tenderness in their lovemaking as much as she does; he wants her to be welcoming to his advances, sweet in her kisses, and gentle in her caresses; he wants to feel loved by her as much as she does by him.

Notice that for thousands of years, male poets, songwriters, and singers have celebrated the tenderness of sweet lovemaking. They didn’t sing, “She said ‘no’—so I ripped off her bra, threw her down, and forced myself on her.” That’s not the sensuous love poetry of Catullus, the Sonnets of Shakespeare, the beautiful ode to romantic love dramatized in Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, the tender wooing of Elizabeth Barrett by Robert Browning, the romantic songs of Cole Porter, the Gershwin brothers, the crooning voice of Nat King Cole, and hundreds of other examples. Notice that men, as well as women, call it “making love,” not “breaking a woman’s will and forcing her to yield to overpowering masculinity.” The evidence throughout The Fountainhead combined with our general knowledge of masculinity, femininity, and romantic relationships points unequivocally to the conclusion that overpowering Dominique is not Roark’s preferred way to make love.

So, when Dominique bites his lips, what is it she now knows that he had wanted her to know? The answer logically congruent with the evidence is this: You mean so much to me that I will make love to you in any form you want—and if you insist on being overpowered, if you stipulate zero tenderness, if taking you this way will bring you to rapture, then so be it. I am your man.

Let us recall what Roark reflects after the event: “had she meant less to him, he would not have taken her as he did.” Roark’s attitude is: Is this what you crave, my love? Then you shall have it. Roark also reflects in that same sequence: “had he meant less to her, she would not have fought so desperately.”³⁸ The exquisite sensitivity that helps make Roark a consummate artist contributes to the depth of intimacy these two share from their first moment; he understands what Dominique yearns for, and he makes sure that this woman—the love of his life—receives exactly what she wants. That when he finally comes to her, he does so dressed in sweat-stained and dust-streaked work clothes is a perfect completion of Dominique’s desires. Years later, Wynand says to her, “love is exception-making. If you were in love, you’d want to be broken . . . dominated . . . because that’s the impossible . . . for you in your relations with people.”³⁹ Wynand, who knows nothing of the actual relationship between Roark and Dominique, does not realize how right he is.

Roark proves to her, in action, that he will do whatever it takes to win her, woo her, overpower her defenses, override her fears, and assuage her anxiety, at least temporarily, of being tied to the world. Dominique knows now that this man who is the embodiment of strength, this man whom she already hero-worships, is her man, and that he is as tied to her as she is to him. Notice that when she later walks the streets of New York looking for one nameless worker in the bustling metropolis of millions, she is tormented by thoughts that she must share him with all of mankind’s corrupt dolts who care not a fig for this man of unbending integrity. It never crosses her mind for an instant that perhaps he does not want to see her, that maybe it was just a one-night stand for him, that perhaps, for him, it is not a life-changing passion but merely a casual affair.⁴⁰ She knows he loves her, because he has proven to her that he will do whatever it takes to win her. And she is right. And she requires no further proof.

We must stop referring to their initial sex as a “rape” scene, even if in scare quotes; it is misleading. We must refer to it in terms that accurately capture its meaning, not terms that are egregiously mistaken. Fortunately, there is a word that apprehends the scene’s meaning perfectly and that is linguistically close to the term it replaces: It is the “rapture” scene. Alternatively, it is the “hot sex” scene or the “rough sex” scene—but a “rape” scene it is not.

The most important and misunderstood characteristics of Dominique surround the “rapture” scene and her anti-Roark alliance with the nefarious Toohey. These puzzles have been resolved, but two more questions remain: She is in love with integrity and owns the undying love of the man who preeminently embodies it—so why does she marry two men who, in differing forms, have betrayed it? And why does she call the man she loves exclusively by his last name until very near the end of the story?

She tells Roark why she marries Keating. The Stoddard Temple disaster devastated her. She can’t be in a relationship with Roark and watch society destroy him. Indeed, she can’t live in society on any terms, as the impassioned idealist she is, and witness the destruction of her hero. She will not commit suicide because of her awareness of Roark in the world—and she will pray that he cannot be destroyed. It is her hero worship, her unwavering devotion to human greatness, her sense of life as exaltation that, in this debased society, is the cause of her suffering. How can she anesthetize this quality? By marrying Keating, by being the wife of an obsequious flatterer, by sleeping with him, by hosting cocktail parties for his unctuous associates, by wooing prospective clients to a third-rate architect, by immersing herself in the life of this parasite, she might succeed in degrading her idealism. If she kills off the best within her, if she commits spiritual suicide, she will be internally moribund and pain free. She says to Roark: “they’ll destroy you, but I won’t be there to see it happen. I will have destroyed myself first.” Roark is confident that his lover’s soul is unconquerable and that she is mistaken. He says, “They won’t destroy me, Dominique. And they won’t destroy you. You’ll win, because you’ve chosen the hardest way of fighting for your freedom from the world.”⁴¹

Her plan fails, as Roark predicted. She then hopes that marriage to Wynand might bring the spiritual death she seeks. She marries him that she may become “Mrs. Wynand papers” and live an existence surrounded by lurid stories of ax murderers, of driveling editorials about feeding squirrels in the park, of sappy gossip columns, of grandmas’ recipes, and conventional tributes to mom, God, and apple pie. If this cannot kill off so heroically uplifted a sense of life, nothing can. But Dominique’s spirit is consecrated; it can be neither debased nor degraded. Her plans of self-destruction fail, as Roark knew they would.

The last question about her is why she refers to her lover by his last name throughout the story and elects to be on a first-name basis only at the very end. After all we have said, the answer to this is easy. Calling someone by his last name is impersonal. Being on a first-name basis is a sign of increased closeness. Roark and Dominique share deep emotional intimacy, as has been seen. Nonetheless, for the overwhelming bulk of the story, Dominique is terrified that Roark will be crushed by a depraved society.

But she is an honest observer of events. She sees that Keating fails in his career—and fails because he sold his soul. She sees that Wynand moves toward a terrible disaster and does so because he betrayed the best within him. Above all, she observes that neither Toohey nor anyone else can stop Roark. Her worldview gradually changes; it becomes more benign. She is convinced that only integrity ever has won or ever will win—that triumph belongs to the Howard Roarks of the world, not to the Keatings or the Tooheys. She is now free of debilitating fear and is sanguine regarding her future with the hero she loves. She agrees to help him dynamite Cortlandt Homes, an act that might get him sentenced to prison for many years. “She had not been able to accept the Stoddard trial. . . . Yet, she had agreed to help him in this. . . . She was free and he knew it.”⁴² She is free to deliver the last iota of intimacy that had been missing in their relationship. She leaves Wynand and comes to Roark before the trial. She says, “‘Howard.’ He stood as if he were looking at the sound of his name in the room. He had all he had wanted.”⁴³

Dominique Francon is a profoundly complex character and a brilliant creation of Ayn Rand. Having pieced together clues to her nature, we can now see more clearly who and what she is. Forget her inherited wealth and her upper-class birth; such things are meaningless in this regard. Morally, she is of nobility, fit to be a queen, and it is right and proper that she is the ruler of Howard Roark’s heart.

About Andrew Bernstein

Andrew Bernstein holds a PhD in philosophy from the Graduate School of the City University of New York and taught philosophy for many years at Marist College. He is the author of Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights (2010), Capitalist Solutions (2011), Heroes, Legends, Champions: Why Heroism Matters (2020), and, most recently, Why Johnny Still Can't Read or Write or Understand Math.

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