Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed by Lisa Duggan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed by Lisa Duggan Claudia Franziska Brühwiler MEAN GIRL: AYN RAND AND THE CULTURE OF GREED, by Lisa Duggan. American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. 136 pp. $85.00 cloth; $18.95 paper; $16.95 ebook. The mean girls of Tina Fey and Mark Waters's cult teen comedy Mean Girls (2004) were high school queen bees who bullied their fellow students and felt superior to them due to their looks, their parents' affluence, and their alleged popularity. In Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, Lisa Duggan argues that Ayn Rand (1905-1982), born as Alissa Rosenbaum in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), is "the original Mean Girl," claiming that Rand's "heroes and heroines prevail over inferior others in ruthless hierarchical worlds not unlike the high school [in] Mean Girls" (p. xi). I beg to differ; Rand was not the caricature of a cruel and heartless creature that she is often made out to be. Rand may not have been particularly likeable—she was often imperious, demanding, pompous, and, particularly once she was successful, without an iota of self-doubt. Yet Rand was a far more complex and contradictory figure than many have allowed her to be. Duggan claims that she writes her book for activists and others willing to "expose the cruelty at the heart of neoliberalism," which she conflates with Rand (p. 90). In other words, Duggan takes the stance of a scholar-activist who sees Rand's influence manifest in our times: The incoherence of the Trump administration is symptomatic of the confusion [about where we are headed,] as politicians and business elites jockey with the Breitbart alt-right forces while conservative evangelical Christians pull strings. The unifying threads are meanness and greed, and the spirit of the whole hodgepodge is Ayn Rand. (p. xiii) Duggan acknowledges that many quote Rand without knowing or understanding her work. Yet instead of pondering to what extent one may blame a culture on an author whose name often serves more as an empty reference, Duggan suggests that Rand's fiction had an apocalyptic impact on American society by providing it with the wrong education of sentiments. Moving chronologically through Rand's oeuvre, in the first chapter, Duggan discusses Rand's Russian roots and her début novel, We the Living (1936), in which Duggan traces imperialist imagery and classist resentment fueled by young Rand's experience of the Russian revolution. She reads the novel less as an insightful panorama of Russia at the time, as many early reviewers did, but rather as a reflection of Rand's resentment: Alissa Rosenbaum [or Ayn Rand] had lived her short life oblivious to the existence of workers and peasants except as shadowy apparitions, specters of irrationality, or properly subordinated social inferiors. Then oh my god: there they were in the Winter Palace and at her door, behaving as equals and asserting their collective will with the backing of state power. (pp. 17-18) [End Page 179] Duggan sympathizes with the motivations of the communist revolutionaries, denying Rand the right to criticize both their ends and means. This interesting tonality pervades the next chapters; chapters two and three offer equally critical readings of The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), reducing them to "treatises, presented in fictional narrative form" that resonate only with people's worst character traits (p. 113). Duggan interweaves each of her ironic readings with scathing remarks on Rand's personal life and the growth of her following, all of them in the service of what Lauren Berlant terms "cruel optimism."1 The slender volume then takes a leap in chapter four that attempts to substantiate the claim that Rand is the guiding spirit of the neoliberal revolution and the dark sides of capitalism. Duggan's argumentation at many instances echoes the BBC documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011) by Adam Curtis as well as the graphic novel Supercrash: How to Hijack the Global Economy (2014; published under the title The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis in the United...