The Fountainhead

In the 20 months of her marriage to Peter Keating, Dominique has acted the part of the perfect society wife for her husband. However, she has deliberately remained completely passive, expressing none of her own opinions or desires. Keating realizes this as they spend a tense evening alone together and tells her that she has practically given up her soul by relinquishing her mind and will. She counters by asking where his own soul is, claiming that he has done the same, just less obviously, by making himself dependent on the opinions of others. Hearing this, Keating grows distraught and likens Dominique to Roark, and in a moment of tenderness, she tells him that she didn’t marry him in order to hurt him. The moment of connection between them is broken when Toohey interrupts with the news that Wynand is willing to meet with Dominique to discuss giving Keating the Stoneridge job. Keating is ecstatic, even though Toohey makes it clear that Wynand will be expecting to sleep with Dominique in exchange for granting Keating the job. Dominique is willing to go along with this plan because she is still seeking to degrade herself. Toohey admits to Dominique that he is only partially happy with the result of her marriage because Dominique still isn’t truly broken, and he wants to see if she can bear being used by Wynand, of all people.

Dominique and Wynand meet, and each is charmed by the other’s honesty and forthrightness. They swap information on Toohey’s manipulations and share an immediate understanding. Wynand is surprised to learn that Dominique used to work for him and never had ambitions to meet him or advance her career. He admits that he was out of the country and was uninvolved with the Stoddard Temple campaign, which was run by his editor, Scarret. Dominique explicitly offers herself to Wynand in exchange for the Stoneridge commission, and she is also honest about her dislike for her husband and his ineptitude. She also makes it clear that she has no desire to sleep with Wynand. He realizes that she wants to degrade herself as much as possible and uses sex to express self-contempt. He offers to give Keating the commission if she agrees to spend two months with him on his yacht, and he also wants to meet Keating in person. The three of them share a meal, during which Wynand horrifies Keating by talking openly about their arrangement.

Having learned the identity of the sculpture’s creator from Dominique, Wynand organizes a private showing of Mallory’s work and buys five pieces, paying far more than the dealer hoped to ask. Before they leave on their cruise, Wynand shows Dominique his private art gallery, which he has hitherto kept completely private and treats as a replacement for the soul he sold to The Banner.

Wynand and Dominique take his ship, which is called I Do. He explains that the ship’s name is his response to all the people who told him “You don’t run things around here” throughout the course of his childhood (3, 4, 461). They talk and learn that they have much in common. They both consider love to be an elevating force rather than a tether to weakness, and neither feels small when confronted with the vastness of nature. After further discussion, Wynand asks Dominique to marry him; he understands that her motivation in her choice of husbands is to degrade herself, and he declares that her current husband is unworthy of that degradation. He confesses that he loves her, although he knows that his sentiments are irrelevant and he will agree to marry her regardless of her reasons. For an instant, she considers refusing, but then she remembers the role of The Banner in the Stoddard Temple scandal and agrees. Wynand refuses to sleep with her because he wants them to wait until after they are married.

Dominique and Wynand return early from their cruise, and Wynand offers Keating the contract for Stoneridge and an additional check for $250,000 in exchange for Keating’s consent to divorce Dominique. Keating agrees and drinks heavily to forget his conflicted emotions. He visits Toohey to confess and gives him a $10,000 check for charity. Toohey is furious about the divorce, but he reassures Keating that it doesn’t really matter. Later, Toohey confers with Scarret about their shared opposition of a match between Dominique and Wynand, both of whom they consider dangerous. Toohey also pressures Scarret to promote his choice of drama critic in the newspaper. Scarret tries to dissuade Wynand from marrying Dominique and then tries to suggest that they rehabilitate her reputation by spinning this love story in The Banner. Wynand rejects the ideas and forbids any of his staff from ever mentioning Dominique in any of his papers.

Dominique visits Mallory, with whom she has kept in sporadic contact and from whom she learns tidbits about Roark’s life and work. Mallory muses that Roark is the same as he ever was and that through his consistency of character, he has achieved a kind of immortality. On the way to Reno for the divorce, Dominique stops off at the town where Roark is working on a small building and tells him of her impending nuptials. He agrees that Wynand is a worse match than Keating, and she asks him to leave architecture behind to live in obscurity with her, but he says he isn’t cruel enough to agree to a life that they would both regret. They enjoy each other’s company until the next train comes and Dominique leaves.

Toohey relaxes with a group of like-minded friends, including Lois Cook and Gus Webber. Together, they listen to the hitherto-unsuccessful playwright Ike read his latest script. The play is dreadful, but Toohey’s pet drama critic promises to promote it as though it is exceptional to assert his own authority as a critic and deliberately denigrate the value of higher-quality plays. Keating arrives seeking companionship, and the group ceases to express their motivations openly in his presence. In his writing, Toohey changes his stance on Modernist architecture to support the brutalist movements of Germany that enshrine simplistic unattractive structures, hailing them as the new fashion. Keating is disturbed but follows Toohey’s lead in a speech approving of development and change. Unmotivated, he allows his colleagues to do the design work on the Stoneridge project and decides to make his friend Niel Dumont a partner in his firm.

Dominique returns from Reno and tells Wynand that she wants the full spectacle of a public wedding rather than the private ceremony that he would prefer. This request hurts Wynand, as she intended, but he complies. The ceremony is tastelessly lavish and full of reporters, but Wynand retains its integrity by vetoing any mention of Dominique or the marriage in his own papers. Dominique learns of this from Scarret and accepts Wynand’s victory, thanking him and revealing her inability to stay truly indifferent toward him. They sleep together, and Dominique feels the pleasure of their encounter because Wynand doesn’t allow her to retain her attempted effect of passivity. Scarret is upset about the wedding and the many angry letters it elicited from The Banner’s readers. He discusses the matter with Toohey, as well as Toohey’s support for a rival paper called New Frontiers. Toohey pressures Scarret to accept another of Toohey’s followers for an influential position on the staff of The Banner.

Dominique and Wynand spend their two-week honeymoon completely isolated from the world in Wynand’s penthouse. Afterward, Wynand encourages Dominique to remain inside, although he does not expect to enforce his desire to lock her away, and she only starts going out again in defiance of how much she enjoys the seclusion. Wynand refuses to accept any input or comment from Dominique on The Banner, and he continues to prohibit his staff from mentioning her in his papers. One popular columnist disobeys his edict and secretly interviews Dominique behind his back. Rather than printing the resulting article, Wynand fires the journalist. Dominique takes Wynand to see Ike’s play, No Skin off Your Nose, which is absolutely awful but was highly praised in The Banner. She taunts him with the fact that the play is a result of his paper’s influence, and Wynand agrees, admitting that watching the play alongside her hurt him—but that his suffering only affected him to a certain point. Dominique is violently upset to hear him echo Roark’s words and attitude, and she apologizes, having lost the desire to punish him. They agree that the play felt like treason, and despite Wynand’s protests, Dominique feels that she shares in his complicity.

Dominique and Wynand observe the New York skyline from his yacht, and Wynand tells her of his long-standing plans to build a skyscraper called the Wynand Building as a testament to his life. Dominique tries to warn him about Toohey and tells Wynand to fire him, but Wynand refuses because he cannot accept the idea that Toohey is a threat. Dominique apologizes to Wynand for having married him under false pretenses; she wanted to use him to chain herself to the unbearable world, but instead, she now finds herself using him as a defense against it. Wynand reminds her that he was willing to marry her regardless of her reasons for agreeing and asserts that he knows she doesn’t love him because if she did, she would put him through hell. He doesn’t love her in expectation of reciprocity; his love for her is important to him for its own sake: more important than her or her own feelings.