Love and Selfishness Theme Analysis

Howard Roark and Dominique Francon feel an immediate connection when they meet because they both recognize and appreciate integrity. However, their relationship is initially flawed because Dominique is deeply affected by the world’s injustices toward Roark, and she must grow as a character to be less concerned about the world before they can be happy together. Whereas Rand holds up Roark and Dominique’s relationship as the ideal, the relationship between Peter Keating (a scheming architect without a moral center) and Catherine Halsey (a social worker who tries to lead a completely selfless life) demonstrates that love cannot work when people lack self-respect and respect for one another. Through these contrasting portrayals of relationships, Rand suggests that love between two people is imperfect unless both of them have a strong sense of self and a core of inner happiness that is immune to the influence of the world. In other words, a successful relationship needs to be based on selfishness, as exemplified by Roark.  

While Roark loves Dominique, he always puts his own happiness over hers. He is never insecure about her feelings for him and as a result is never hurt or bitter, even when she acts against his interests. After they have sex for the first time, Roark feels as much happiness when he thinks of Dominique as he does when he is building—they both call up the same “quality of reaction within him.” Roark is passionately in love with building, so Dominique is clearly very important to him. However, when he gets a new commission, he leaves for the city immediately to begin work on it. While Dominique seems “distant and unimportant” to him at this moment, he is “astonished to know that he still thought of her, even now.” The root of Roark’s happiness is his pride in his work, and Dominique is always secondary to that. As he tells her later, to “say ‘I love you’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.’”

Dominique despises the world, which she sees as small-minded and cruel. She feels Roark’s excellent buildings have no place in it, so she sets about criticizing his work publicly while praising the work of Peter Keating, who she believes is a mediocre architect and a detestable person. Roark finds this amusing because he understands her motivations. When Dominique marries Keating, Roark is hurt, yet tells her he won’t ask her to annul the marriage because she must have the freedom to do as she chooses. He says she “must learn not to be afraid of the world,” and that while she is battling for her freedom from it, he will wait for her. Afterward, he misses her deeply but feels no rancor for her.

Like Roark, Dominique values talent and integrity. But unlike him, she is still hurt by the world’s opinions and influence. It is only when she learns to shrug off the crowd, untouched by its mediocrity and pettiness, that she is free to be truly happy with herself and in her relationship with Roark. Before she meets Roark, Dominique refuses to engage deeply with the world around her. She tells her boss at the newspaper that she is glad that she doesn’t care about her job because if she “found a job, a project, an idea or a person [she] wanted,” she’d have to “depend on the whole world”—and this scares her, because she doesn’t want to have anything to do with “mankind in general.” After being with Roark, she desires him deeply and she doesn’t feel free any longer from the crowds on the street, “[whose] fear mak[es] them ready to pounce upon whatever [is] held sacred by any single one they [meet].” While Roark is completely indifferent to people around him, Dominique is afraid of the power they wield.

Later, Dominique feels angry on Roark’s behalf when his work is met with sneers and she is incredulous that he is not hurt by the world’s reaction to his buildings. She marries her second husband, Gail Wynand, believing him to be even worse than Peter Keating, in an attempt to justify her hatred of the world. When she tells Roark about this, he gestures to the world around them and tells her that the two of them can never be together until she “stop[s] hating all this, stop[s] being afraid of it, learn[s] not to notice it.” Much later, Dominique witnesses Roark blowing up the Cortlandt building because its design was changed without his approval, and in the boldness of this gesture, she suddenly finds her own freedom from the world’s opinions. She realizes that “[the world] own[s] nothing. They’ve never won.” Only by becoming truly selfish and embodying the same self-assured independence as Roark does Dominique become the perfect romantic partner for him.

In contrast to Roark and Dominique’s relationship is the one between Keating and Catherine, which is doomed to fail because neither of these characters has a sense of self. While they initially feel genuine affection for one another, Keating’s love for Catherine loses out to his desire to please the world around him—he ends up marrying Dominique Francon because she is richer and more beautiful. As a result of constantly working to live up to external expectations, Keating is unclear about what he wants. Catherine, on the other hand, tries to love Keating selflessly. Since she believes that it is “evil to be selfish,” she tries “never to demand anything” for herself, even when Keating disappears on her for months at a time. When he runs into her many years after their relationship ended, she tells him she is glad they didn’t get married because marriage is “too selfish and narrow.” While she confesses having felt hurt all those years ago when Keating married Dominique, she adds that “everybody goes through [relationship problems], like measles,” and that her emotions are “just like everybody’s emotions.” Keating feels that she has “no consciousness of her own person”—she has been so selfless that she has no self.

Keating is so focused on external validation that he doesn’t know who he is or what he wants, while Catherine has erased her identity by constantly denying her desires. Since neither of them has a sense of self, they wouldn’t be able to successfully relate to anyone else with any depth or meaningfulness. In contrast, by selfishly focusing on building a strong core of personal happiness that is immune to the world around them, Roark and Dominique are able to find happiness in each other.