Dominique Francon loves Roark yet struggles to destroy him. Why And Essay

Dominique Francon loves Roark yet struggles to destroy him. Why And how does this conflict connect to the novel's theme and meaning - Essay Example olumn seriously, and instead uses it to mock the institution that she writes for, the architects she writes about, and even the readers who read her work and actually take what she writes seriously. We might even go so far as to say that she mocks herself when she makes a mockery of her column which is a parody of what a real newspaper column should be. While she despises people such as Ellsworth Toohey and Peter Keating, she sees them socially and heaps praises on them through her writing and even marries Peter Keating at one point in the novel. The greatest contradiction that we find in Dominique Francon is her apparent love for Howard Roark and her continuous attempts to discredit and destroy him as an architect, which is to say that she seeks to destroy him as a man. But it cannot be doubted that she loves Howard Roark – from the moment they met, she became compelled to have him in her thoughts all the time. Also from the moment they met, her very existence became a struggle against wanting to go to him and knowing that she must wait for him to come to her. After leaving the countryside (and the quarry), Dominique felt that â€Å"she was not free any longer. Each step through the streets hurt her now. She was tied to him - as he was tied to every part of the city.† (Rand, 1943) However, after (officially) meeting him at a formal party and finding out that he was the architect Howard Roark, she used her column to sway the public’s sympathy away from Roark’s buildings, by seeming to take a disparaging attitude against his buildings, most notably against the Enright house. Within that contradiction is another contradiction, in the sense that Dominique chooses to disparage Roark’s work by subtly praising it, by saying that it makes all other buildings look terrible because of because of the contrast between Roark’s buildings’ marked greatness and understated dignity and everything else in the city – an act that goes unnoticed by most readers and is