In this week’s reading I
took a big interest in Cherryl, James’ wife. The first time we met Cherryl I thought she was just another
looter who married James for the fortune and fame. When we see Cherryl in Part 3 Chapter 4, she is not the
young girl we saw earlier in the book.
First off, we get a glimpse of her relationship with James and we see
that is not a good one. They argue
a lot and she does not seem to care about his work and that is all that he
seems to care about. They are also
from two opposite sides of economic statuses. James was born into the Taggart family that makes a lot of
money and is famous and Cherryl was from a poor family and is from the
slums. This shows that from the
beginning the two of them did not have much in common. The biggest difference is that Cherryl
and James have is that Cherryl admires Dagny and obviously James does not. However Cherryl finally realizes that
the picture that James has painted for himself is not actually him but is who
Dagny actually is. Dagny has
always been the superior one and James the weak one and I am so happy that
Cherryl finally sees and understands this. Cherryl does not like this big world and wants the clarity
that she had when she was a little girl.
Now all her clarity has become distorted and she just can’t take it all
anymore. The last straw was when
Cherryl hears James having sex with Lillian Rearden. She is one of the first characters besides Dagny to confront
James and tell him who he really is, “a killer . . . for the sake of killing .
. .” (page 827). Also in this
scene we see the man James really is.
He is one of the biggest looters in this book but he tries to hide
it. He likes seeing when great men
are destroyed. For example, he was
so happy when he heard that d’Anconia copper was going to be gone forever. I found it weird that he was happy over
Francisco’s failure. Cherryl is
one of the characters that actually saw the worst of the people in the book. Dagny and Cherryl also have a
connection in this chapter. Dagny
acts as a bridge for Cherryl, meaning that Dagny is a source of protection for
Cherryl. However, Cherryl realizes
that Dagny is fighting against the world by herself and that Cherryl is not
strong enough for that. It made me
sad to read that Cherryl drowned herself because she was one of the true
characters and she first handed had to deal with the greatest problems in the
world.
I too was particularly interested in the change in Cherryl’s character in this week’s reading and how we see the gap close between her and Jim’s relationship, as it is no longer defined as one consisting of two people from completely opposite ends of the social spectrum. We no longer see Cherryl mesmerized by a seemingly enchanting rich man’s world, but rather see how she feels trapped in a distorted and corrupt evil world. In my opinion, a particularly powerful part of the reading that depicts this idea is when she observes the previously “great skyscrapers” in the distance and how they were “vanishing quietly into a veil of fog” (pg. 829); at this point we see that Cherryl sees with clarity and is no longer fooled by seemingly endless promises in the higher end of the social hierarchy that she used to be fooled by when she was poor. She sees this world for what it truly is and now feels trapped in its distortion. I also agree that Dagny acts as protection for Cherryl, for I think that she is Cherryl’s source of admiration, almost like she is her God. I think that what Galt is to Dagny, Dagny is to Cherryl. When she realizes that her husband is a fraudulent pig, she turns to Dagny for a source of protection against him; she furthermore realizes that she fell in love Jim because she believed him to be a male version of Dagny.
ReplyDelete- Meagan Adler