Everyone should buy a copy of “Essays on The Fountainhead.” In it, there is a chapter by Andrew Bernstein on the “rape” scene. Bernstein argues that it in fact was not rape. Kendall mentions Dominique herself thinking “I was raped.” But at this point in the novel Dominique is still a very confused and conflicted character. How well can we trust Dominiques’s evaluation of some event, especially when it conflicts drastically with her own actions? Bernstein has some good answers. It’s a fascinating article in an excellent anthology, well worth the money.
What value would Rand have derived from continuing to remain married to O’Connor? She was the primary breadwinner. She apparently saw Branden as her intellectual equal and believed that her sexual response would be greater with Branden.
The context changes if she saw Branden’s potentialstatus and had not reached conclusion on it.
I think the question is not what value Rand would have derived from a continued marriage. It is what value would O’Connor have derived from it. The decision to continue marriage would fundamentally have fallen to O’Connor, in response to Rand’s proposed action.
Again, this is purely speculation, but since you’re having trouble seeing ANY possible path forward in this senario, I need show you just one regardless of whether it was the actual one or not.
Everyone should buy a copy of “Essays on The Fountainhead.” In it, there is a chapter by Andrew Bernstein on the “rape” scene. Bernstein argues that it in fact was not rape. Kendall mentions Dominique herself thinking “I was raped.” But at this point in the novel Dominique is still a very confused and conflicted character. How well can we trust Dominiques’s evaluation of some event, especially when it conflicts drastically with her own actions? Bernstein has some good answers. It’s a fascinating article in an excellent anthology, well worth the money.
I agree with everyone who claims it was not rape. And I also found some evidence in her journalswhere she explicitly confirms the character’s state of mind.
My only point to inspector was that if there is confusion, it might have helped her case if she had somehow made the issue more explicit in the work itself. As it is, everything about the scene is implied obliquely through dialogue, and the subtlety of the context is lost on most people.
I find that it does at well, but if there is confusion, Rand began it because Dominique refers to the episode, after the fact, as a rape.
Dominique was not being honest and/or correct in that statement. I was under the impression, however, that you on the other hand were looking to be honest and correct.
So once again I think it is inappropriate to not use scare quotes. And what would best help her case would be if people who know it wasn’t rape stopped referring to it as rape.
So once again I think it is inappropriate to not use scare quotes. And what would best help her case would be if people who know it wasn’t rape stopped referring to it as rape.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll take it under consideration.
I have to wonder why Frank and Barbara would agree to it the way they did. I cannot see why anyone would do that and I wonder about anyone that would agree.
Old thread but interesting topic. My own thoughts on it are that their spouses loved Ayn and Nathaniel, and like many spouses who stay when their spouses cheat, dealt with it. I also believe that Ayn mentally abused her husband, and Nathaniel was thinking with his little head instead of the big one on his shoulders.
I always wonder what in objectivism missed the potential dangerous consequences. There was financial and emotional consequences. People never saw both Rand and Branden the same way after it all came out.
Regarding the virtue of honesty, even being honest with oneself has caveats, as in going into shock (repression as a way of lying to oneself). Most people don’t know how they really feel or what they really want. Some can’t admit they want something because fear of disappointment or maybe shame. Honest as an all encompassing directive does not solve the problem.
Like the “movements” Scientology and Mormonism, in Randism - Objectivism the founding leader had affairs with many younger members of the devotees. The older founder leader seduced younger members and took them from their partners. There was a huge power imbalance. And Nate would have been kicked out of the movement that also employed him, if he rejected her. He was sleeping with his boss. Now that’s known as sexual harassment and ME TOO.
No one knows if Rand had multiple unnamed affairs. She would have reacted exactly the same way if Branden had broke up with her prior to seeing another woman. If he had honestly said lets be friends. She wanted to ruin him and fire him for leaving her. Even if he had reconciled with his wife should would have excommunicated him and ruined him. Turns out he had a very successful happy life, and she died of lung cancer, alone.
Their affair should have been a one night stand. The victim in all of this was O’Connor and Nates poor wife.
None of this episode reflects well on any of the parties involved, regardless of which account one thinks true. If romantic love, in the Objectivist sense means an intellectual, emotional and physical response to one’s highest value and there should be no basis for any sort of conflict around love and sex, nor any reason to fake or maintain a secondary relationship. Consequently, when dealing with an established marriage, there should be either fidelity or divorce. Anything else is, at some level, an attempt to fake reality and that will (and did) have predictable results. If Rand believed Branden to be her highest value (and vice versa), they should have ended their respective marriages and married one another. There was no basis or need for asking the consent of their spouses to the affair because there was no value to be gained by anyone by remaining in unsatisfying marriages or by concealing the facts of the relationship. The contrast between the way all of this played out and the way Rand handled the Dagny-Galt-D’Anconia -Rearden relationship(s) in her fiction is striking. If the latter had elements of implausibiilty, it had least had the virtues of honesty and intellectual consistency.
To my mind, much of the subsequent debate - all of it passionate - engendered by this episode stems from the unnecessary need to see Rand herself as flawless in order to defend Objectivism. The merits of her ideas are perfectly adequate to stand on their own and any areas where there are shortcomings or errors, either in theory or practice, can and should be confronted honestly.
I was reading through The Virtue of Selfishness, and I decided to look up Nathaniel Branden to learn some more about him after reading his articles. To my surprise, I learned that he and Rand had an longstanding affair while they were both married to other people. I was shocked to learn this, and even more surprised to learn that Rand terminated her friendship with Branden when she learned that he was with another women (after divorcing his wife and ending his relationship with Rand) against her wishes.
Ayn Rand’s husband was Frank O’Connor, an actor and painter she married on April 15, 1929 and stayed married to until his death in 1979. The affair was with Nathaniel Branden, 25 years her junior, and “adultery” understates what happened: Rand told O’Connor and Branden told his wife Barbara in 1954, and both spouses agreed, reluctantly, before the relationship became sexual in January 1955.
The timeline:
1929: Rand marries Frank O’Connor.
1950: Rand meets Nathan Blumenthal, later Nathaniel Branden, then a 19-year-old fan.
1953: Branden marries Barbara Weidman. Rand and O’Connor stand up at the wedding.
1954: Rand and Branden disclose the relationship to both spouses and ask permission.
1955 to 1958: the sexual relationship runs, then lapses.
1968: Rand learns Branden concealed a relationship with Patrecia Scott. She ends all association and publishes “To Whom It May Concern” in The Objectivist, issue dated May 1968.
1979, 1982: O’Connor dies, then Rand.
On the hypocrisy charge in the first post: the 1968 break was not over Branden loving another woman. It was over years of lying about it while still presenting himself to Rand as her romantic partner. Her stated grounds in “To Whom It May Concern” were his departure from Objectivist principles, his financial dealings, and “deliberate deception.” She did not disclose the romantic relationship in that article. That she kept it secret in public while breaking with him over deception is the strongest form of the criticism, and it is a fair one. It is also a different criticism from the one that opened this thread.
Provenance matters here more than on any other Rand topic. The affair is documented in Barbara Branden’s The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986) and Nathaniel Branden’s Judgment Day (1989, revised as My Years with Ayn Rand, 1999). James Valliant’s The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics (2005) disputes the Brandens and quotes Rand’s 1968 journals. Anne Heller and Jennifer Burns, both 2009, were the first outside biographers working from the archives. The dates and the disclosure above are not in dispute. Motive, and what Frank O’Connor actually felt, are. Anyone presenting those as settled is selling you a side.
I had met Nathaniel in my younger days; he was my therapist. I did not know him super well, but it seemed to me that he was a man caught up in something overwhelming. I would also say that about Rand, but she was older and wiser, with a flawed view of how people can and should deal with emotional upheaval. Any Family and marriage counselor knows that the way Rearden accepted how Dagny “dumped” him does not happen unless one is very out of touch with their feelings. And she was faced with a tsunami of emotions that had its effect. She was dumped, and she reacted like any of us … mortals.
Branden could have been more honest, and she could have been also. Would the Objectivist movement continue with everyone being honest? Would she have stated factually that the new woman was younger and more attractive? Much more satisfying in bed? Should he have agreed in public? Let us get honest. Neither of them could get honest, nor should they have.
This is a normal way breakups happen. We can’t think of Objectivists as immune to the devastation that can result from being dumped. Objectivism will not make you Immune to being human.
Polyamorous relationships are a massive hassle and usually destructive, in this instance to Rand’s reputation. I think it’s silly that anyone who didn’t know her personally feels strongly about Ayn Rand’s personal life. Most people are kinda shallow though, so of course some scorned wife’s gossip column got a movie adaptation. Why wouldn’t it lol
You can hardly blame Branden for having an affair with Rand, especially when he had permission from the spouses. What an opportunity to achieve sexual ecstasy with your intellectual heroine! I can only imagine what it felt like to orgasm inside her, but it must have been worth being expelled from the movement. Of course it would have been better if she wore her hair long, I think.
Yeah I don’t keep up my bad. I did try to listen to your podcast a couple times but honestly I think you need a third mic or something. Lot of dead air and takes forever to get to the point of topics. That’s honestly about on par with New Ideal though, to be fair. I also think less focus on your outrage at an elderly Jewish man’s internet usage would be more substantive.
