The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy

Everything Is Fire

Eric Bronson, William Irwin

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470947586
• eBook ISBN: 9781118132937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The essential companion to Stieg Larsson's bestselling trilogy and director David Fincher's 2011 film adaptation

Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium Trilogy— The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest —is an international phenomenon. These books express Larsson's lifelong war against injustice, his ethical beliefs, and his deep concern for women's rights. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy probes the compelling philosophical issues behind the entire trilogy. What philosophies do Lisbeth Salander and Kant have in common? To catch a criminal, can Lisbeth and Mikael be criminals themselves? Can revenge be ethical? Drawing on some of history's greatest philosophical minds, this book gives fresh insights into Larsson's ingeniously plotted tale of crime and corruption.

• Looks at compelling philosophical issues such as a feminist reading of Lisbeth Salander, Aristotelian arguments for why we love revenge, how Kant can explain why so many women sleep with Mikael Blomkvist, and many more
• Includes a chapter from a colleague of Larsson's—who worked with him in anti-Nazi activities—that explores Larsson's philosophical views on skepticism and quotes from never-before-seen correspondence with Larsson
• Offers new insights into the novels' key characters, including Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, and investigates the author, Stieg Larsson

As engrossing as the quest to free Lisbeth Salander from her past, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy is ideal reading for anyone interested in unraveling the subtext and exploring the greater issues at work in the story.

PART ONE

LISBETH “THE IDIOT” SALANDER

The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world.

—Donna Haraway

Chapter 1

LABELING LISBETH: STI(E)GMA AND SPOILED IDENTITY

Aryn Martin and Mary Simms

Lisbeth Salander is “a sick, murderous, insane fucking person. A loose cannon. A whore.”1 At least, that is what Advokat Bjurman thinks after combing her official record. In just one brief conversation, Dr. Teleborian describes her as “psychotic,” “obsessive,” “paranoid,” “schizophrenic,” and “an egomaniacal psychopath.”2 In the wake of her institutionalization at St. Stefan’s, she is characterized as mentally ill and, at the age of eighteen, declared legally incompetent. Even her allies, Holger Palmgren and Mikael Blomkvist, throw their hats into the diagnostic ring with speculation that Lisbeth has Asperger’s syndrome. Lisbeth Salander is a magnet for labels.

The impetus for this labeling frenzy is Lisbeth’s uniqueness in both biography and character. Her father is a Russian spy who is protected by an overly zealous secret section of the Swedish government. Her entanglement with the mental health system resulted from an elaborate and unprecedented conspiracy. She is a diminutive hacker genius accomplished at kickboxing but hopeless at small talk. We readers are invited to sympathize with Larsson’s heroine because of her fantastically raw deal. In the exhilarating court scene in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Salander’s lawyer, Anita Giannini, tramples Dr. Teleborian as she demonstrates that Lisbeth is “just as sane and intelligent as anyone in this room.”3 This victory puts Lisbeth back on the right side of the asylum’s doors, as her declaration of incompetence is rescinded, then and there. Sanity prevails.

Yet Larsson’s heroine may not be so exceptional after all. In his classic books Stigma and Asylums, Erving Goffman (1922–1982) showed us that people are shaped by their social situations. Goffman argued that once institutionalized—whether in a prison or a psychiatric hospital—“inmates” share certain experiences and adaptations owing to their social location (and not because of their inherent illness or badness). After leaving these institutions, former inmates bear the discrediting mark of having been there: the label of “mentally ill,” “incompetent,” or “criminal.” This stigma, Goffman argued, powerfully shapes their subsequent social encounters, whether their stigma is known or hidden.

By drawing attention to the vehemence with which people and institutions repeatedly label Lisbeth, Larsson covers much of the same ground as Goffman. He illustrates the ways in which labels come to stand in for and eclipse the person. He shows that there is slippage among discrediting labels, so that we are more likely to believe, for example, that someone labeled mentally ill is also prone to violence, promiscuity, or substance abuse. Once someone enters the bureaucratic machinery of a psychiatric institution, behaviors that would go unnoticed in “normals” are recorded as symptoms of illness. Finally, we see that labels solidified in official state records are called into play in subsequent incidents, strengthening one another like so many spools of barbed wire.

Perhaps the most powerful lesson we learn from Lisbeth’s labels is about the incongruity between the paper version of a discredited person and her flesh-and-blood self. It seems that Lisbeth is victimized and later vindicated only because she was wrongly labeled. Yet if we read the Millennium series as being only about one person’s raw deal, and we feel triumphant when she is restored to freedom, we miss something important. This reading ignores countless people—the so-called rightly labeled—whose stigma appears justified. And that’s a problem. It’s never okay to reduce people to the less-than-human status prompted by easy labels.

The Right to Remain Sullen

Although we don’t know much about Lisbeth’s time in St. Stefan’s (aside from the fact that she hogged the sensory deprivation room), Goffman described a number of rituals common to such institutions.4 “Abasements, degradations, humiliations, and profanations of self” radically change the victims’ view of themselves and others.5 First, inmates are cut off from the outside world and from the roles they occupied outside of the institution. No longer daughter, student, or sister, the psychiatric inmate is a patient only, subordinate to staff around the clock and in all physical spaces. The time spent away from roles “on the outside” can never be recovered. Admission procedures such as “photographing, weighing, fingerprinting, assigning numbers, searching, listing personal possessions for storage, undressing, bathing, disinfecting, haircutting, issuing institutional clothing, instructing as to rules, and assigning to quarters” turn the patient into a standardized object.6 We can imagine that it would be particularly traumatic for a young Lisbeth to surrender what Goffman called an “identity kit,” the cosmetics and the clothing that people ordinarily use to manage the guise in which they appear to others.7

Goffman discussed in detail many other “attacks on the self,” including forced social contact necessary to group living and lack of control over decision making, scheduling, finances, nourishment, and movement. A key practice that characterizes life in a psychiatric institution is that everything is written down. We know this was true of Lisbeth’s stay at St. Stefan’s because the records are available for Giannini to count the days Salander spent in restraints. The casebook archives every aspect of an inmate’s history and hospital life in a form readily available to all manner of staff members but often not to the patient herself. Although record keeping seems an obvious, sensible, and benign convention, Goffman highlighted some of its worrisome effects. Patients are not in a position—as are those of us on the “outside”—to manage personal information in social interactions. When talking to others, we routinely tailor which bits of ourselves to share, which to hide or downplay, and which to exaggerate. If we have an embarrassing lapse of judgment, we can choose not to tell anyone or to spin it in a favorable and rational light. Psychiatric patients, however, might find that this mistake is just the kind of detail that would be recorded as a symptom of illness and thrown back at them should they attempt to present themselves to staff or fellow patients as “normal.”

Instead of constructing a “self-story,” as we all do, the mental patient’s story is already constructed by others and written along psychiatric lines. Lisbeth’s casebook “was filled with terms such as introverted, socially inhibited, lacking in empathy, ego-fixated, psychopathic and asocial behavior, difficulty in cooperating, and incapable of assimilating learning.”8 Each action and adaptation of the patient is scrutinized and recoded in psych-speak. “[T]he official sheet of paper,” Goffman wrote, “attests that the patient is of unsound mind, a danger to himself and others—an attestation, incidentally, which seems to cut deeply into the patient’s pride, and into the possibility of having any.”9

What we know about Lisbeth’s time in St. Stefan’s maps eerily onto Goffman’s account. At first, she tries to explain to doctors and other support workers her mother’s abuse and the reasons for her retaliation against her father. She finds she isn’t listened to. Goffman wrote of the mental patient: “The statements he makes may be discounted as mere symptoms. . . . Often he is considered to be of insufficient ritual status to be given even minor greetings, let alone listened to.”10 We can imagine that Lisbeth’s lowly social status and hence her invisibility are exacerbated by the added social failings of being female, small, and practically a child.

Lisbeth’s response to being ignored is silence:

Why won’t you talk to doctors?

Because they don’t listen to what I say.

She was aware that all such comments were entered into her record, documenting that her silence was a completely rational decision.11

Teleborian later calls this silence “disturbed behavior.”12 Silence, withdrawal, and sullenness are all predictable responses of mental patients to their social situation, although Lisbeth’s lifelong extension of this behavior to every authority is arguably somewhat extreme. Goffman described four candidate coping mechanisms, with the proviso that many inmates use a combination of them to get by. The first two, withdrawal and intransigence, become lifelong hallmarks of Lisbeth’s posture in the world. Goffman explained that such self-protective mechanisms have costs in the institution: “staff may directly penalize inmates for such activity, citing sullenness or insolence explicitly as grounds for further punishment.”13 This, too, mirrors Lisbeth’s experience. Punitive “treatments,” such as confinement in the isolation cell and force-feeding of both medication and food, follow defiant gestures on Lisbeth’s part, such as refusing to speak to Dr. Teleborian and rejecting medication. “Salander had rapidly come to the realization that an ‘unruly and unmanageable patient’ was equivalent to one who questioned Teleborian’s reasoning and expertise.”14

The events of Lisbeth’s life following her release from St. Stefan’s are marked by the stigma of having been there in the first place: she is dogged by her record of insanity. Her experiences in the institution—many of which can be understood as typical—forged the lonely, resilient, distrustful, and angry person she would become.

I Know You Are but What Am I?

In his book Stigma, Goffman pointed out...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments: Confidential Sources
• Introduction: The Girl Who Kicked the Sophists’ Nest
• Part One: Lisbeth “The Idiot” Salander
• Part Two: Mikael “Do-Gooder” Blomkvist
• Part Three: Stieg Larsson, Mystery Man
• Part Four: “Everyone Has Secrets”
• Part Five: 75,000 Volts of Vengeance Can’t Be Wrong, Can It?
• Contributors: The Knights of the Philosophic Table
• Index: Code Words