Gender Stereotypes in Ayn Rand’s Novels

Abstract

Ayn Rand, a 20^th-century American writer and philosopher of the Russian origin, known to a wide range of readers as the author of the bestseller “Atlas Shrugged”, raises a number of socially significant issues in her novels. The key concepts in her author’s philosophy of objectivism, embodied in literary works, are the concepts of unregulated capitalism and the morality of rational egoism, which received a comprehensive analysis and various assessments in critical literature. However, along with these main themes, A. Rand touches on a number of peripheral issues arising from them, such as the gender problem. The aim of this study is to demonstrate the inconsistency of A. Rand’s philosophy by the example of her interpretation of the gender problem. The scientific novelty lies in the appeal to a problem that has been little studied in A. Rand’s work earlier. The results obtained have shown that A. Rand’s interpretation of the gender problem is in line with her controversial philosophical views.

References

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Funding

The study was carried out with the financial support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research within the framework of scientific project No. 19-312-60009.

Author information

About this article

Publication history

• Received: June 8, 2022.
• Published: July 29, 2022.

Keywords

• Айн Рэнд
• объективизм
• мужественность
• женственность
• миф об американском Адаме
• Ayn Rand
• objectivism
• masculinity
• femininity
• myth of American Adam

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)