INTRODUCTION: LITERATURE AS POLITICAL TRACTS?

With the title of his satirical book on the libertarian movement, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (1971), writer and 1974 New York gubernatorial candidate of the Free Libertarian Party, Jerome Tuccille, remarked on a common rite of initiation to right-wing politics in the United States, both in his time and today. It is indeed true that the novels of Ayn Rand (1905–82) have introduced many Americans to libertarian ideas for the first time. Mockingly, Tuccille observes the effect of Rand's work on libertarian initiates:

The popularity of Rand's books has hardly waned, even though her best-known novel, Atlas Shrugged,Footnote ² was first published more than half a century ago, in 1957, and her breakthrough novel, The Fountainhead,Footnote ³ dates back to 1943. According to a survey by the Library of Congress in 1991, American readers described Atlas Shrugged as the book that had most influenced their lives, second only to the Bible.Footnote ⁴ Seven years later, a survey by Modern Library, a division of Random House publishing, ranked all four novels by Rand in the Top 10 of their “100 Best Novels.”Footnote ⁵ Although both surveys are, for methodological reasons, to be taken with a grain of salt, they reflect the lasting impact of Rand's oeuvre; in 2009 alone, Atlas Shrugged sold more than 500,000 copies,Footnote ⁶ and the first two movies in a series of three have been released in recent years.Footnote ⁷ This enduring success is not least of all due to a general rise in the popularity of libertarian ideas in the United States, which gained an increased following in the wake of the Tea Party movement. Ayn Rand's work has thus remained, as historian Jennifer Burns put it, “the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right.”Footnote ⁸

In spite of Ayn Rand's indisputable impact, neither author nor oeuvre have received much attention from scholars in literary criticism, philosophy, or political science, with the exception of recent biographiesFootnote ⁹ and treatises by either openly hostile authorsFootnote ¹⁰ or by adherents of Objectivism,Footnote ¹¹ the philosophy developed by Rand herself. From early on, writing about Rand has been, as William F. O'Neill observed, “a treacherous undertaking.”Footnote ¹² This is particularly true in writing about Rand as a novelist. She is hardly ever considered as a writer, even though she owed her fame to the fiction she wrote. Instead, her novels are repeatedly dismissed as lacking literary quality, as thinly veiled political pamphlets with stereotyped protagonists who parrot the author's political beliefs, serving more as political messengers than as actual characters. Critics judged her début novel to be “slavishly warped to the dictates of propaganda,”Footnote ¹³ and Atlas Shrugged was dismissed as “a demonstrative act”Footnote ¹⁴ and as not “in any literary sense a serious novel.”Footnote ¹⁵ Discussing Rand and social theorist Harriet Martineau (1802–76), Max E. Fletcher even suggested that the fiction written by both authors was “primarily sugar coatings for tracts,Footnote ¹⁶ and the two of them merely “purpose writers … with identical missions: to convert their reading publics to a firm belief in the principles of a self-regulating market system (what we now call capitalism).”Footnote ¹⁷

Like most critics who dismiss Ayn Rand as a “purpose writer,” Fletcher does not reflect on the question whether she actually believed literature to have an impact on people's political ideas. Since Rand developed her considerable influence thanks to her fiction and thus reached the iconic status we nowadays attribute to her, this question deserves further exploration. More specifically, if Rand felt that literature could change people's outlook on politics, did she write her novels with the intention to influence them politically?

Ayn Rand offers rare insights into these questions, not only because of her political impact, but because she reflected on the (potentially contradictory) relation between politics and literature in her philosophic essays. Interestingly, most of these essays were written at a time when Rand was already an established writer and would not publish another work of fiction. Consequently, this article will first look at the ways Rand reimagined readers, how she depicted literature's transformative effect – or lack thereof – in her own fiction. It will then turn to her theoretical writings, which likewise can be seen as a second phase in her discussion of literature's role in politics and spheres beyond. Finally, the article will demonstrate that Rand held positions that prevented her from becoming anything but a “purpose writer,” as Fletcher sees it, but that she was, at the same time, aware of the unpredictability of the reader response.

AYN RAND ON POLITICS AND LITERATURE IN HER FICTION

Novelist and one-time member of Ayn Rand's inner circle, Kay Nolte Smith, once observed that “an awful lot of people have been turned on to libertarian politics by Atlas Shrugged,” yet that “none of the people in it read novels.”Footnote ¹⁸ At a first glance, Rand's fiction seems to suggest that literature cannot shape the minds of heroic characters. The protagonists that Rand portrays positively are neither writers nor avid readers, but creative and innovative businesspeople. These characters include a financier (in her 1933 play Night of January 16th),Footnote ¹⁹ an architect (in The Fountainhead), and the head of a railway company as well as an engineer (in Atlas Shrugged). Characters who have not yet found powerful vocations are usually impeded by the constraints of the reigning regime, as in the case of Kira Argounova in Rand's début novel We the Living (1936).Footnote ²⁰ Kira wants to become an engineer, but has to leave university since the newly established Soviet government denies higher education to the children of the bourgeoisie. Similarly, the narrator–protagonist of the novella Anthem (1937)Footnote ²¹ is a lowly street sweeper because the ruling totalitarian regime assigns each citizen a position to be held for life, whether he or she thirsts for further education or not. For reasons such as these, literature is not a major concern for Rand's central characters.

At the same time, the effect of fiction on its readers and the public role of writers are recurring themes, particularly with regard to literature as an indicator of a society's political culture and values. In The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Rand explores how literature reflects on the collective and mirrors political conditions, as well as how it shapes art. In both novels, writers are members of the cast of antagonists who are constantly working to obstruct the success of Rand's creator–protagonists, exemplifying the decline of all that is truly good and heroic. In The Fountainhead, it is the writer Lois Cook who profits from critic Ellsworth Toohey's disdain for accessible art and literature. Toohey recommends Cook's work to Peter Keating, an untalented but ambitious architect and antihero of Rand's tale, who takes a very special joy in reading Cook's Clouds and Shrouds. The novel does not influence Keating's political thinking or open his eyes to anything new – far from it. Indeed,

Keating's lack of insight seems to be intended by Cook, who reacts to his compliments dismissively, stating that it “is so commonplace … to be understood by everybody” (244). In this spirit, Cook writes a novel titled The Gallant Gallstone, whose merits are regularly touted by Ellsworth Toohey. When the owner of the newspaper that prints Toohey's column asks another employee about the nature of the book, the latter answers with a laugh, “Oh, just a lot of drivel … It's all about a gallstone that thinks that it's an independent entity, a sort of a rugged individualist of the gall bladder … and then the man takes a big dose of castor oil.” Although the book's core idea is not clear to this employee, he has been told that it is “all supposed to prove that there's no such thing as free will” (409).

The portrayal of Lois Cook and her oeuvre, as well as that of her fellow authors united in the “Council of American Writers” (311) amounts to a critique of modernist literature and poetry. Rand thus targets the literature of her time that found critical acclaim, in spite of its use of narrative techniques that challenge readers with stylistic innovations or nontraditional plot structures, as exemplified by other members of the council in The Fountainhead. In a sense, she tries to open the reader's eyes to see the actual quality of the emperor's new clothes, and make him or her realize that something is not necessarily artistic just because everyone calls it art. There is, for instance, a youth “who had written a thousand-page novel without a single letter o” or “a man with a beard, who was sophisticated and proved it by using every unprintable four-letter word in every ten pages of his manuscript” (ibid.).

Presumptuous, vain, and utterly nonsensical – this is The Fountainhead's verdict regarding the literature of its time which was later echoed in Rand's writing course developed for members of her inner circle.Footnote ²² As outlined in The Art of Fiction (2000), Rand justifies her distaste for James Joyce by his usage of “words from different languages,” and by the fact that he “makes up some words of his own, and calls that literature” (11). She reserves most of her spite, however, for a writer she describes very much in the way that Peter Keating thinks of Lois Cook's work. Gertrude Stein is to Rand the “best-known example of a nonobjective writer”

Rand's characters have to keep looking for meaningful literature. While the reader of The Fountainhead has to struggle with Cook's stylistic extravaganza, Atlas Shrugged finds fault with the literary elite's disdain for popular literature. They sneer at commercially successful, plot-driven stories, but their own allegedly superior writing fails to attract readers. A case in point is discovered by Rand's heroine, Dagny Taggard. As she is wandering through the streets of a nameless American city in a time of economic decline, she reaches the windows of a bookstore where she spots a stack of a particular novel, The Vulture Is Molting. It is advertised as the “novel of our century,” providing the reader with a “penetrating study of a businessman's greed” (68). It reveals, as the advertisement promises, “man's depravity” (ibid.). Its author, Balph Eubank, feels that the

And the essence of life? “Defeat and suffering” (ibid.).

Not surprisingly, Eubank sneers at what some might deem central elements of fiction: “Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature” (129). Like Cook's Gallant Gallstone (The Fountainhead 409), Eubank is commercially unsuccessful; he “was described as the literary leader of the age, but had never written a book that sold more than three thousand copies” (Atlas Shrugged 128). It is probably this lack of success that leads him to promote a law “limiting the sale of any book to ten thousand copies” (129). He decries best sellers as “trash,” implying that the common reader is unable to recognize true art or great literature, and is therefore in need of a guiding hand. A commercially successful book is always despised and envied by the self-declared elites, Rand seems to suggest, as they neither contribute anything of value, nor are able to render their work understandable to all, and therefore cannot succeed in a free market. The distinction between high and low art only protects those who have nothing of substance to offer, is thus apparently her verdict.Footnote ²³

Given their choices and their sociocultural milieus, Rand's protagonists hardly ever turn to literature for inspiration or insight. The only positively presented character who is strongly influenced by literature, Vesta Dunning, was cut out of Rand's final draft of The Fountainhead.Footnote ²⁴ A second strong female character in earlier drafts, the young actress embodies a different feminine ideal than that of Roark's lover-to-be, Dominique Francon. Roark runs into Vesta in his apartment, where she is rehearsing the play that she feels most passionately about – Friedrich Schiller's Joan of Arc or The Maid of Orleans (1801),Footnote ²⁵ a romantic tragedy inspired by the life of the French saint and national heroine Joan of Arc. It is the one role that Vesta hopes to play some day, yet in pursuing success she has had to forsake her ideals. She falters in her ambition to focus on attaining this one, ideal role. Instead, she longs to be liked, particularly by Roark, who, as a result of this desire, loses his respect for her.

Had Rand kept Vesta in the final draft of The Fountainhead, she would have offered us one of her rare ambiguous characters,Footnote ²⁶ a character representing, as Rand might say, neither an ideal creator nor a parasitic moocher. This ambiguity is apparent in Vesta's choice her of dream role. Although Rand was known to have regarded Schiller as one of the greatest playwrights,Footnote ²⁷The Maid of Orleans celebrates ideas Rand probably would not have approved of. While the passage recited by Vesta carries a message of strength, certainty, and idealism,Footnote ²⁸ the play in its entirety follows a logic rejected by Rand. Pursuant to the ethics of Kant – Rand's most hated philosopher, whom she frequently attacked in her nonfictionFootnote ²⁹ – the play depicts Joan of Arc as torn between her divine calling and her love for a man. As an atheist, Rand would have struggled with the premises of the plot, and she would not have been able to accept Joan of Arc's self-sacrifice as a catharsis. In this light, the naming of the character after the Roman goddess of the home and hearth might be a hint that the young actress does not have an unambiguously heroic character owing to her “mystic” streak, as Rand might have denounced her had she not been her own creation.

In some instances, Rand does recognize that literature is an individual endeavor, just like the history of the novel is tied to the idea of individuality,Footnote ³⁰ and reading a private act; separate from societal contexts, these private acts can turn into subversive ones. Accordingly, the novel We the Living begins with the family of a former textile producer, the Argounovs, riding the train back from the Crimean peninsula to St. Petersburg. When they had left the city it was still called Petrograd; when they returned, it was about to become Leningrad, and had created new rules for citizens. Under these new rules, the formerly wealthy would have to submit to a societal order that intended to punish them for their heritage and their success. Fearful of this regime change, the Argounovs try to conceal their identity from their fellow travelers on the train. Their education and taste would betray their background, which is why the mother of the Argounov family has to hide the book she is reading: “She was careful not to let her fellow travelers observe that her book was French” (We the Living 21).

Even prior to the Revolution, reading certain books could amount to an act of defiance or mockery of the current regime. Rand's portrayal of Leo Kovalensky, the lover of her heroine, Kira, conveys this, expressing his disdain for the then-ruling Slavophilia of the upper classes by quoting “Oscar Wilde at the prim gatherings of his stern aunt's Ladies' Charity Club” (138). After the revolution, Leo is forced to earn his living as a translator for Gossizdat,Footnote ³¹ the State Publishing House whose publications are approved by the censors.Footnote ³² Rand foreshadows the eventually very harsh criteria applied to the import and selection of foreign literature deemed suitable for translation by having Leo suffer through one foreign novel espousing communism after another.Footnote ³³ Apparently, he is brooding over proletarian novels, a term coined by Michael Gold in 1921, which not only intended to reflect on political ideas, but even served political aims, namely to “bring the worker to class-consciousness, steel him for the coming revolution, prepare him for the role he would play in the next stage of history.”Footnote ³⁴ The plot thus follows simple lines, at least in Rand's reimagination:

Ayn Rand's characters emphasize that the books one chooses to read convey one's political convictions and allegiances. However, can these books go so far as to alter these convictions, effecting changes in one's thinking? The Communist regime, as Rand depicts it, obviously subscribes to the idea of literature's transformative power; otherwise, it would not censor individualistic novels and promote tales acting out Marxist clichés.

In the dystopian world of the novella Anthem, the regime has reshaped language and eliminated singular pronouns; “I” does not exist. In this society, the perversion of language reaches down to the very core of a language's function: to allow the speaker to define his or her identity. In such a world, literary production is unthinkable, especially not by an individual who has been denied any education and been forced to become a street sweeper. Still, Rand makes this street sweeper the narrator of the story. The narrator – ironically named Equality 7-2521 – is aware of the uniqueness of this position:

Equality 7-2521 is only able to relate his own story, reconstructing the events that finally allowed him to assume his individuality and to break out of the confinement of totalitarian order. This is made possible by the books that he finds in an abandoned house, a reminder of earlier times. Reading Greek mythology and finally gaining knowledge, Rand's protagonist finds his voice, and is able to express his identity: “It was when I read the first of the books I found in my house that I saw the word ‘I’” (96).

In her own fiction, Rand emphasizes that literature requires individuality and individualism. Literature can offer the chance to escape gruesome realities, as a clandestinely perused French novel does on a Soviet train, or it can finally give a character his or her own voice. In most cases, however, societies do not encourage the creation of fiction worthy of Rand's heroes, and they produce, at best, novels that can only be considered “mirrors of national character,”Footnote ³⁵ a characteristic that Joseph Blotner attributed to political novels.

LITERATURE AND POLITICS IN AYN RAND'S POLITICAL WRITINGS

In his seminal treatise Political Fiction and the American Self, John Whalen Bridge aptly observed that a novel “does not come with an FDA label listing all its motives, byproducts, and secret ingredients.”Footnote ³⁶ In the case of Rand, some critics wished that her novels indeed came with such an advisory label.Footnote ³⁷ Such a desire confirms their belief in literature's potential to affect a reader's political thinking, and their conviction of Rand's intention to use her fiction as a political tool. Rand has addressed and dismissed both assumptions; as if in response to the demand for an FDA label, she wrote several essays on her motives as a writer and on how she expects readers to respond to her work. Some themes from her fiction recur in her theoretical writings, but she often goes further in formulating her view of literature's impact on politics. Rand's writings provide insight into some of the key questions in the discourses on politics and literature. Albeit indirectly, Rand talks about the relevant audience (i.e. whether original or later audiences define a political novelFootnote ³⁸) and how she reconciles the contradiction between ideology's general and inclusive nature and the novel's particularity.

However, Rand did not try to craft a more wide-ranging and inclusive scholarly discussion of politics and literature. True to her reputation as an iconoclast, her theoretical contributions do not refer to any other views espoused by the politics or literature of her time; she reflects neither on the genre of the political novel nor on the tension-prone relationship between politics and literature in general (as, for instance, Irving Howe did in Politics and the Novel,Footnote ³⁹ which appeared in the same year as Atlas Shrugged). As in her other political and philosophical writings, Rand relies mostly on her own instincts and beliefs, rather than on scholarly references. Her personal literary tastes also preclude her from discussing the views of other political novelists, such as George Orwell, who mentioned, in addition to sheer egoism, political purpose as a writer's impulse.Footnote ⁴⁰

Although Rand would not acknowledge major influences on her theoretical writings, presenting her thoughts as innate rather than as the result of prolonged intellectual development, her answers to the questions above can be clearly retraced to her early acquaintance with writer and journalist Isabel M. Paterson (1886–1961). Paterson became widely known as a literary critic and columnist for the New York Herald Tribune in 1924, and provided Rand with what Jennifer Burns called “a virtual graduate school in American history, politics and economics.”Footnote ⁴¹ Rand and Paterson shared both political outlooks and views on the impact of literature on the individual, though the latter tended to be contradictory. Paterson believed that writers and their work had only a limited impact on individuals or society, an insight that she felt escaped other writers. In her column from 3 May 1942 she urges her readers to consider

At the same time, however, Paterson believed that books could make readers rethink their political standpoints and point out the flaws in their thinking. Thus she believed that both her own work and Rand's novels would have such an impact, inspiring further books promoting laissez-faire capitalism.Footnote ⁴³ Although she was aware that the effect literature can have ultimately depends on the reader, she seems to have still hung onto the belief that her works might have the kind of effect she felt desirable, a conviction clearly running counter to her statement above. Incidentally, her early disciple's opinions, many of which shone through in her fiction and her comments on other authors, are not that different – and as contradictory as Paterson's.

In a collection of essays titled The Romantic Manifesto,Footnote ⁴⁴ Rand lays out her theory of literature. She is basically in agreement with Paterson, believing that books do not alter people's minds, nor is it the task of art in general to lecture readers:

In a similar manner, Rand dismissed any allegations that her novels were mere political tracts, written with the intention to convert readers into laissez-faire capitalists. In earlier private correspondence following the publication of The Fountainhead, she even contradicted her reader-response position when she stated according to Burns that “spreading our ideas in the form of fiction is a great weapon, because it arouses the public to an emotional, as well as intellectual response to our cause,”Footnote ⁴⁵ and expressed her desire to become a John Steinbeck for the political right.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, she might have learned in the course of her success that readers tended to interpret her novels differently than she had intended them to be read. In this context, it is interesting to note that the three books that Rand declared to “hate most” (Q&A 201) were Cervante's Don Quixote, Leo Tolstoi's Anna Karenina, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary.Footnote ⁴⁷ In other words, Rand despised two characters cast as among the most dedicated readers of world literature, Don Quixote de la Mancha and Emma Bovary. These characters not only read voraciously, but also follow the lead of their fictional companions, inviting readers into a metafictional maze. Although Rand claimed to dislike these novels mainly for their propagated values and their depiction of individuals as victims of both their own emotions and of society, one wonders whether she did not also find fault with the way literature influences the reasoning of the protagonists in these writers' novels, casting a spell on their thoughts and supplanting reason.

As she explained in an interview after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Rand did not think of herself “as a propagandist, either, but primarily as a novelist.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Rand shows an attitude not unlike that espoused by reader-response theory,Footnote ⁴⁹ whereby the meaning of a text is basically in the hands of the reader (The Romantic Manifesto 44). At first sight, this may contradict her manifest belief in the existence of an objective meaning. But to reach the “right” conclusion, the reader has to depart from the “right” premises, thus leaving the ultimate understanding of the text to the reader. Rather than spreading particular political ideas, Rand describes her intention as “the projection of an ideal man” (The Fountainhead ix; The Romantic Manifesto 162; Q&A 230); any other effect her writing may have is welcome, but is not her primary motivation. The novelist has, according to Rand, to act as a “combination of prospector and jeweler” who tries to discover “the potential, the gold mine, of man's soul, [and] must extract the gold and then fashion as magnificent a crown as his ability and vision permit” (The Romantic Manifesto 165). In fact, she perceives this intention as a key task of literature, a conclusion she draws from Poetics, a treatise by her favorite philosopher, Aristotle. According to Rand, Aristotle argues that “fiction was more important than history” since fiction presents things “as they might be and ought to be.” Rand not only focusses on Aristotle's assessment of literature's potential, but offers a normative reading by claiming that Aristotle had stipulated the “basic principle [that] the role of a fiction writer is to present things, not as they are, but as they might be and ought to be.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In light of the dominance of “naturalist literature,” Rand considers herself to be one of the few writers who have assumed this task, offering her readers this needed ideal.

Only in Victor Hugo's prose did Rand find the “glimpse of human grandeur” that she had been aching to find, a writer who “is not a statistician of gutter trivia, but a Romanticist who presents life,” as Aristotle might argue, “as it might be and ought to be.”Footnote ⁵¹ Rand's predilection for lowbrow thrillers like westerns and the stories of James Bond or Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (Column 35–37) is just another manifestation of her preference for Romanticism, as such stories are “a simplified, elementary version of Romantic literature” (The Romantic Manifesto p. 132). They share with Romantic literature their portrayal of “man as a purposeful being who is able to choose his goals, to fight for his values, to resist disaster, to struggle and to win” (Column 12). Rand found such a “purposeful being” in her favorite novel,Footnote ⁵²Calumet “K” (1901) by Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster,Footnote ⁵³ which describes how a young foreman leads the construction of a grain elevator, fighting the resistance of plotting plutocrats. Popular writing is also set apart from “serious” literature, according to Rand, solely on the basis of “the seriousness of approach” (Q&A 221), namely the issues addressed in the storyline. Elitist disdain for such entertaining stories is, in Rand's eyes, commensurate with disdain for heroism (Column 11).

Ayn Rand's interpretation of Aristotle's comparison between literature and historiography, however, does not hold, as has been pointed out by Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the original passage in Poetics (chapter IX), Aristotle states that the “true difference is that [history] relates what has happened, [poetry] what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” Aristotle certainly held poetry in high esteem, not only for its ability to develop counterhistories, but also for its universality. Moreover, he did not urge writers to strive to project an ideal world or man, as Rand had interpreted his words. Instead, Aristotle simply implied this possibility, without making any normative claims. Consequently, other readers of Aristotle have suggested that literature could surprise readers not only with the creation of ideal worlds, but also with the very opposite. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum points out, “Another way of putting this point is that good literature is disturbing in a way that history and social science writing frequently are not. Because it summons powerful emotions, it disconcerts and puzzles.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Rand's misreading of Aristotle's statement is probably less due to her lack of insight into his work and philosophy, and more due to her own definition of art. She defined art as “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments,” the “voice of his [the artist's] sense of life” (The Romantic Manifesto 33). Art, and thus literature, become “the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal” (The Romantic Manifesto 21, emphasis in the original). If writers declare figures of poor character to be their heroes, Rand would argue that these writers thereby betray their actual values, revealing what low values they actually hold. Accordingly, the experimental author Cook in The Fountainhead shows an approach to life that cannot meet the approval of a Randian hero like Howard Roark, as Cook apparently mocks readers with absurd plots and unlikely heroes (e.g. a gallstone), which, in Rand's world, could not feature in actual literature; literature has to focus on humans, to re-create the world according to the writer's values (Q&A 183). By contrast, Kira Argounova's mother had to hide her French novel – probably the work of Rand's most beloved author, Victor Hugo – as it showed the possibility of “grandeur,” which clashed violently with the reality of post-Revolutionary Russia. Although literature is an individual achievement, the works cherished by a society are a “barometer of a culture” (The Romantic Manifesto 129), and a culture that reveres writers like The Fountainhead's Cook, with her Gallant Gallstone, could only be doomed.

In contrast to critics like Irving Howe, Rand did not perceive any tension in the relationship between politics and literature. Her definition of literature's objective was inherently political; unwittingly, she subjected her own writing to her political theories, which she could only deny following her tautological reasoning. She did not see herself as a “propagandist” because she believed art always had to serve ideals – political ones and others. In Rand's world, it seems, art cannot escape propaganda.

FINDING “HER KIND OF READER”

Rand's actual verdict on the effect of fiction on individual political thinking is less straightforward than she made it out to be. Although she argued in her Romantic Manifesto that teaching was not the duty of literature, she felt that writers should develop ideal counterworlds and heroic characters, in order to make their readers see what lies within them, or what values they should cherish. As much as Rand despised characters like Madame Bovary (Q&A 201), who lived too much through her reading and tried to liken her life to fiction, Rand wanted her readers to experience her novels and her protagonists in the way that she had designed them. Unlike Vesta Dunning, the character cut from The Fountainhead, Rand's readers should not surrender to a plot and its heroines, but rather find a means to express themselves and resist whatever might lead them astray, very much in the way that Equality 7-2521 or Leo Kovalensky claim their independence not in least in their reading. From this perspective, it was fitting for Ayn Rand to claim that she was writing mainly for her “kind of reader,”Footnote ⁵⁶ and not to convert anyone to her beliefs: “An artist reveals his naked soul in his work – and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it” (The Romantic Manifesto 44).

At the same time, Rand explained why her books had to be as political as they were – why she had to be a “purpose writer,” should we want to use Fletcher's term, even though she did not think of her fiction as “tracts.” Literature and art in general may in Rand's eyes not have been “the means to any didactic end” (The Romantic Manifesto 22, emphasis in original). But if literature is a reflection of a writer's ideal and values, if a writer's task is to present readers with ideal characters, then Rand's protagonists had to turn out to be the individualistic, independence-seeking, and innovative heroes that she made them out to be, destined to turn against society. This may not reflect a didactic end in Rand's eyes, yet the effect is identical. What Rand defined as the purpose of her fiction was congruent with the purpose of her lectures, columns, and essays: to inspire people to become the individuals she wanted them to be.