Rape in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy and Beyond

Contemporary Scandinavian and Anglophone Crime Fiction

B. Åström, K. Gregersdotter, T. Horeck, B. Åström, K. Gregersdotter, T. Horeck

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780230308404
• eBook ISBN: 9781137291639
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Psychology

Focusing on the sexualized violence of Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium trilogy – including the novels, Swedish film adaptations, and Hollywood blockbusters – this collection of essays puts Larsson's work into dialogue with Scandinavian and Anglophone crime novels by writers including Jo Nesbø, Håkan Nesser, Mo Hayder and Val McDermid.

Part I

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy: Opening up the Debate

1

‘The Girl Who Pays Our Salaries’: Rape and the Bestselling Millennium Trilogy

Priscilla Walton

In May 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, President of the International Monetary Fund, and socialist hopeful for the upcoming French presidential elections, was arrested in New York City for sexually assaulting a chamber maid. Charged immediately, Strauss-Kahn was placed under strict house arrest in New York City, and the prosecution moved to protect the maid, their star witness. By the next month, while the reputation of ‘DSK’ (as he is often referred to) was in tatters and various women had turned up and spoken out about questionable dealings with him in the past, the prosecution began to challenge the chamber maid’s reliability: she had lied on her immigration papers; she had a boyfriend who was a drug addict/peddler, as well as several large unexplained deposits of money in her bank account. Ultimately, the case was dismissed due to lack of evidence and DSK is free to pursue his political ambitions. The DSK affair presents what I consider to be a typical rape scenario: he said/she said, where the one with power and influence – usually the man – wins. Generally, it is cases like DSK’s that receive media attention because of the celebrity of the male in question. Those that tend to attract media attention when they come to trial, such as the high profile American rape cases of William Kennedy Smith, Mike Tyson, and Kobe Bryant, are undoubtedly problematic, and most probably deter women from reporting rape, given the publicity, the character attacks, and the sheer trauma of the process.

The story of the rape victim, whose identity is protected, often gets obscured, overlooked, and distorted in the media’s depiction of such cases.¹ Where, then, do we find the victims’ stories? Popular culture has always proved a useful springboard for information on major social issues – for example, daytime drama and AIDS, large studio films and rape, and romance fiction and female sexuality. In similar fashion, crime fiction is an important site for exploring questions regarding sexual violence and victimization. In Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition, my co-author Manina Jones and I conducted interviews with the major bestselling female crime writers of the 1980s (the heyday of the female dick), and found that one of their primary purposes in writing fiction was to keep feminism alive and women informed through their characters and scenarios. While claims to authorial intentions are tenuous at best, it is clear that the feminist hard-boiled genre certainly did work to foreground the intricacies of being a woman in a man’s world and the difficulties involved therein. However, with a few exceptions, the hard-boiled female PI is a woman of the past, although the issues she helped to raise remain alive to some extent in other media: for example, television series like The Closer and Damages. But what is current, amidst the few detective writers from that era who remain, and others who have since begun writing, is a focus on the horror of rape and its impact on the victim.

Most recently, it is Stieg Larsson’s phenomenally successful Millennium trilogy – and the character of Lisbeth Salander in particular – which has opened up significant public debate regarding questions of rape and the sexual violation of women. While many have hailed Lisbeth Salander as a new feminist heroine for the twenty-first century, others, such as Melanie Newman, have ‘difficulty squaring Larsson’s proclaimed distress at misogyny with his explicit descriptions of sexual violence, his breast-obsessed heroine and babe-magnet hero’ (2009). Regardless of where one stands in relation to this debate about Lisbeth Salander, it is extraordinary the extent to which Larsson makes the question of rape and the sexual abuse of women the focus of his blockbuster trilogy. In what follows, I want to explore how the Millennium trilogy, and its overt concern with the plight of women, builds on the work of feminist crime writers of the 1980s and 1990s, while at the same time raising important new questions about the politics of revenge, the individual and the state, and victimhood and justice.

In the beginning

It is important to note that it was the Anglophone feminist crime writers of the 1980s, several of whom were openly admired by Larsson, who first politicized sexual abuse in popular fiction. Barbara Wilson broke new ground in crime fiction in 1986 with Sisters on the Road, in which her lead female character, amateur detective Pam Nilsen, is raped during a case. The experience of the rape is described through the eyes of the female protagonist:

He raped me. With a punishing violence that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with rage and hatred. My vagina was as dry as my mouth and every pounding blow stabbed through my body like a sword dipped in fire … I almost blanked out; my whole being reduced to a tiny pinprick that cried out no. (Wilson 1994: 194)

Other feminist crime writers from this time also deal with the theme of violence and rape; Canadian writer Elizabeth Bowers’ Ladies Night (1988), for example, features a female protagonist, Meg Lacey, who becomes a detective because she was raped in the past and now wants to help the victims of sex crimes. In the work of Wilson and Bowers and others such as Leah Stewart and Barbara Neely, rape is treated as a central event which has consequences for the victim and which often serves as the ‘origin story’ for her emerging sense of strength and empowerment (Horeck 2004: 125–130). As Tanya Horeck has argued in Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film, the ‘political and representational issues surrounding rape are … inextricably connected to the form of the thriller itself. In particular, that subgenre of the thriller Tzvetan Todorov has deemed “the story of the vulnerable detective”’ (2004: 127). Rape appears time and again in feminist crime novels from this period, which take as their primary concern the thorny issue of the relationship between woman’s victimization and woman’s agency.

The relationship between victimhood and agency, endangerment and empowerment, is explored throughout the V.I. Warshawski series by American crime author Sara Paretsky, who is name-checked in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008: 356). While Warshawski is not subjected to sexual assault in these early novels, she is continually placed in risky situations in which she has to defend herself. The comparison to be made between the feisty Salander and the ‘tough’ and ‘sassy’ Warshawski has not gone unnoticed. As Jennifer McCord comments: ‘Before Lisbeth Salander of Stieg Larsson’s books entered the consciousness of readers who love edgy, strong women, there was V.I. Warshawski’ (2010). In Warshawski we find a precursor for Salander and her retaliatory violence, although Paretsky’s heroine is much more restrained by her moral conscience. In 1985, in Killing Orders, Warshawski notes, after shooting a man in the leg in the midst of mildly torturing him to get a confession: ‘What kind of person kneels in the snow threatening to destroy the leg of an injured man? Not anyone I wanted to know’ (237). And she continues to agonize about her inclinations even though the thug in question had tried to throw acid in her face: ‘I didn’t like to think too much. About Rosa, or my mother, or the ugliness I found in myself that night with Walter Novick in the snow’ (75). While this level of violence may, by contemporary standards, seem positively tame, it nonetheless anticipates the kind of reworking of a standard script of male violence and female victimization that began to appear in women’s crime writing during this time.

In the UK, for instance, Sarah Dunant’s heroine, Elizabeth, dreams of a way of rewriting the script of sexual violence. In Transgressions (1998), Elizabeth, the victim of an attempted rape, wonders what would happen if authors started ‘to fight fantasy with fantasy’ (Horeck 2004: 105). In Elizabeth’s fantasy, the passive female victim in the thriller she is translating would be transformed into ‘a kind of avenging angel for women in trouble, whooping down on violent men and snapping their bodies between their dog-like teeth’ (105). Elizabeth later revisits this idea of fighting fantasy with fantasy when she wonders how she would take her ‘own revenge like the avenging angels of her fantasies’ (130).

While Dunant’s novel appeared in 1998, seven years before the publication of Larsson’s novel about Lisbeth Salander, her appearance accords with the rise of female action heroes in wider popular culture, like Xena, Buffy, and Lara Croft. Certainly there is enjoyment to be had in watching Lara fly through the air in some amazing kickboxing feat, or in Buffy’s clever quip to some large vampire before she stakes his heart, but I would argue, as does Susan Douglas, that at least partly due to their generally masculinist venues (originally comic books, action television, computer games, and so on), these texts are often contradictory in their depiction of women’s issues and are simultaneously feminist and anti-feminist (2011). This cult of the (sexy) female super-heroine may be an important context within which to situate the figure of Lisbeth Salander, but it is not so easy to dismiss her on these grounds. As Jenny McPhee argues, Salander is ‘no Lara Croft or Charlie’s Angels who must pay the price for her physical prowess by titillating the phantom male reader/viewer with her 36–24–36 scantily clad body’ (2011: 26). For the petite, but strong, and fiercely intelligent Salander, who ‘triumph[s] over relentless male aggression in deeply satisfying ways’ (McPhee 2011: 26), is also, significantly, moulded from the tradition of the hard-boiled female private investigator novel of the kind fashioned by Sara Paretsky, as discussed above. The emphasis on the victim of violence and the aftermath of rape found in the feminist crime novels of the 1980s and 1990s is something that is pursued in depth in the work of Stieg Larsson, where questions of revenge and victimhood are amplified and put centre stage.

Rape and reparation

Larsson makes rape the leitmotif of his three novels, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008), The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009a), and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2009b), all of which comprise the Millennium trilogy. Larsson, who died suddenly after signing a contract for his trilogy, did not live to see booksellers call his novels ‘The Girl Who’s Paying Our Salaries for the Next Few Months’ (Burstein 2011: xix) due to their overwhelming earning power. These are not just bestsellers, they are blockbusters, and, on every level, they are about rape. It is, in many ways, the raison d’être of the series and I would suggest that the Millennium trilogy, which Larsson called Men Who Hate Women in Swedish, can be described as nothing less than a feminist manifesto which argues that violence against women is at the root of all society’s ills.

Larsson, like earlier feminist crime writers such as Barbara Wilson, depicts rape from the perspective of the rape victim; but he does not stop there, since the rape victim in his trilogy, Lisbeth Salander, exacts devastating vengeance on those who have violated her. These novels provide us with an image of the female protagonist as victim, avenger, and action hero, all at the same time, making their discussions of rape the most vivid in print to date. Setting out its theme in explicit terms from the very beginning, with the opening epigraph ‘18 percent of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man’, the first novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, involves an investigation into a disappearance/rape/serial-murder case from the past. The novel opens with journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who is manipulated into a situation where he is accused, and convicted, of libel. Blomkvist is financially ruined, disgraced, and a professional pariah (he is both fined and sentenced to jail), but like all of Larsson’s characters, he is not just a victim. He is down but he is not beaten, as he realizes when a potential client, Henrik Vanger, promises to give him the evidence he needs to help him out of his professional problems, thereby offering the possibility of revenge and the recuperation of Blomkvist’s career.

It is through ‘the girl’ of the title, though, that Larsson most closely explores questions of victimhood. Although Lisbeth Salander herself vehemently rejects the designation, readers discover that she has been a victim of the system all of her life. First, as a witness to the violent abuse of her mother by her father, the Russian spy Zalachenko. Later, as a mental patient under the care of Dr Peter Teleborian, having been sectioned for her attempt at stopping her father’s brutality. Finally, the serious illness of her first guardian, Holger Palmgren, places her in further jeopardy when she is appointed a new guardian, Nils Bjurman. Bjurman sexually abuses Salander, and when she attempts blackmail to protect herself it backfires, leading to one of the most talked about rape scenes in contemporary crime fiction (2008: 224).

Although the scene seemingly places her in the role of victim, Salander refuses to passively accept what has happened and, returning to Bjurman’s abode in order to set another trap, she rapes him and leaves him scarred for life: ‘Bjurman felt cold terror piercing his chest and lost his composure. He tugged at his handcuffs. She had taken control. Impossible’ (231). Using a recording of the previous rape, Salander blackmails him into submission, and then tattoos him with the following message: ‘I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT, AND A RAPIST’ (235).

Having thus controlled one sexual predator, Salander and Blomkvist confront another in their work on the Vanger case, which, it turns out, involves a serial rapist/killer who has been operative since at least 1949 (323, 402). As the two ultimately discover, Henrik Vanger’s brother (and eventually, his son) comprise a team of serial killers; although, later, the son proudly announces: ‘I’m more of a serial rapist than a serial murderer’ (402). The son, Martin, had been sexually molested by his father and initiated into the family business at a young age. When he raped his sister, Harriet, she fled the island and her previous life in order to avoid him.

Crucial to the conceptualization of victimhood in Dragon Tattoo is Salander’s outrage over the attempt to label Martin as a ‘victim’ of his father’s madness and abuse. When Blomkvist expresses a degree of sympathy for the kind of childhood Martin had, and how that may have led to his violence, Salander retorts as follows: ‘“Bullshit,” Salander said, her voice as hard as flint … There was not an ounce of sympathy in it. “Martin had exactly the same opportunity as anyone else to strike back. He killed and he raped because he liked doing it”’ (424). While it is the male character, Blomkvist, who recognises the horror the Vanger children must have endured and who tries to understand how such violence might beget further violence, Salander, the female victim of male violence, strongly refuses any such theory of victimhood. For Salander, it is imperative that those who are subject to violence fight back. Even more revealing, in this regard, is Salander’s attitude towards rape victim Harriet Vanger, whom she refers to as: ‘Harriet Fucking Vanger. If she had done something in 1966, Martin Vanger couldn’t have kept killing and raping for thirty-seven years’ (448). For Salander, it is not just about defending oneself, it is about making sure that others cannot be harmed; it is about a sense of collective responsibility.

After solving the Vanger case, Blomkvist realizes that he will not be given the evidence he needs for his journalistic revenge. As he consequently considers the possibility of writing a book on Harriet’s case, Saland...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy: Opening up the Debate
• Part II   Dismembered Bodies, Wounded States: Gender Politics in the Millennium Trilogy and Beyond
• Part III   Rewriting Scripts: Language, Gender, and Violence in Contemporary Crime Fiction
• Part IV   Ethics, Violence, and Adaptation
• Index