Dagny Taggart

Aliases: Miss Taggart; "the woman who runs Taggart Transcontinental"; in the valley, simply "Dagny."

Role

Vice President in Charge of Operations of Taggart Transcontinental Railroad. The novel's protagonist. The most capable producer of her generation and the last great holdout — the one major character who, even after seeing Galt's Gulch, returns to fight for the world from outside before finally taking the strikers' oath.

Personality / energy

Decisive, exact, alert, severe. Quietly passionate. Rand's prose treats her as a kind of clean blade — precision in service of love of the work. She inspires an awed loyalty in good men and a smothering hatred in weak ones. She refuses self-pity, refuses comfort, refuses to drop her standards for anyone.

Physical description

Tall (~5'7"), slim and athletic. Long dark-brown hair worn pulled back severely or in a low knot. Gray eyes. Sharp, austere planes — "a face of austere beauty" — high cheekbones, a strong straight nose, a clean jawline. Mid-thirties. Long fine hands. Long legs.

Outfit

• Working: a tailored gray flannel business suit with a crisp white shirt; low-heeled pumps; sometimes a slim leather belt
• On the John Galt Line cab: gray slacks, a thin shirt, gray pullover
• Galas / Wayne-Falkland: a long sleeveless black evening gown of severe cut, no jewelry except (in Ch. 6 onward) the green-blue Rearden Metal bracelet
• In the valley: a plain blue cotton dress; sturdy boots
• Field travel: a long camel overcoat, a small soft hat

Visual motifs

• The bracelet of green-blue Rearden Metal (won from Lillian in Ch. 6)
• The Taggart Transcontinental green-and-silver insignia
• Dispatcher's wall map at her shoulder
• The cab of a diesel locomotive
• A small monoplane on a grass strip

Power signature

Not applicable — this is realist industrial fiction. Her "signature" is competence: a corner of a railroad map, a clipboard, a slide rule, a phone receiver lifted at midnight.

Chapter appearances

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 (every chapter except 16 and possibly 24 by camera, but always centrally implicated).

Source references

• Wikipedia — Atlas Shrugged: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged
• SparkNotes — Atlas Shrugged character list: https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/atlasshrugged/characters/

Confidence

High — Rand gives Dagny one of the book's most fully described visual signatures.