The Cyborg Woman of Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is, from one perspective, about a woman who runs a railroad. But this oversimplified description hardly captures the breadth and depth of the novel, much less the character of its strong female protagonist, Dagny Taggart. Miss Taggart does not really “run” a railroad; she is directly responsible for its operations, of course, but Vice President Taggart is far more than a company executive.

She is a cyborg.

Her passion for steel and rails, for locomotives and logistics consumes her, and when we meet her in the pages of Rand’s novel, her identity, her very being has merged with metal and machine until she is no longer distinguishable from them. She is her railroad, and it is her. In her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Donna Haraway defines a cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (p. 149). Haraway does not, I must point out, refer to fictional characters in her book. Rather, Haraway is speaking of “real” people, people for whom “reality” and “fiction” have merged into a unity of being. Yet if real people can merge with fiction, why then cannot fictive people merge with reality? Haraway herself claims that “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (149), and thus subject to the kind of permeability, the kind of transgression, that I am asking you to consider.

A merging of woman and machine?

The transgressions of Dagny Taggart are a fascinating subject. Her situatedness within a fictive, capitalist white male world is so tenuous, and yet so darkly poetic. In her rise to power, she has deliberately stripped away as much evidence of her femininity as possible, assuming manners and attitudes that mimic the men with whom she associates. Not only this, however: she has assumed an exoskeletal shell of machinery that both protects and limits her, lends her strength and power, and prevents her from developing a self that embraces, rather than denies, the soft, fleshy, sexed body underneath. What she accomplishes is only possible because she is, as Haraway puts it, “out of place,” a unity that is both “monstrous and illegitimate” within the world that Rand imagined for her.

This, then, is what makes Dagny Taggart a monster. She is not evil, nor animal, nor male. She is a woman out of place, a woman who has become the beating iron heart of a railroad. She is transgressor of borders, a chimera, and an unsolvable enigma. She is a cyborg, dependent upon her steam and metal for her very existence (as she understands it) to continue.

Yet strangely, she is you and she is me; she is each of us and no one in particular. As Haraway explains, “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics—the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other—the relation between organism and machine has been a border war” (p. 150). A war that rages on, does it not?