The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Part III

I have always had qualms about the sexual violence in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Though I understand Stieg Larsson’s project better than I did before, I remain ambivalent about those vivid, unsettling scenes. It’s a bit hard to overlook the fact that this supposedly feminist manifesto features a woman who gets brutally raped.

In Part II of this series, I mentioned Joan Acocella’s short piece about Larsson’s journalism in The New Yorker. Acocella also wrote a longer study of the Millennium trilogy for the magazine, in which she tried to reckon with the rape of its heroine. She points out that the original scene of Lisbeth Salander’s violation amounts to only four lines of text; the ensuing revenge scene in which she meets out the same punishment to her attacker, on the other hand, takes up six whole pages. In the book, the most lurid scene is the rape of a man.

As Acocella explains, a lot of the distaste the book provokes actually relates to the depiction of it onscreen. Although Larsson deliberately attempted to downplay the attack on Salander in his writing, the translation to a visual medium undermined the effort. Viewing a naked woman subjected to forced penetration is going to generate its own response. I did notice that in both the Swedish and English versions of the film, the directors try to minimize the salacious aspects of the scene. For instance, the camera spends much of the time focused on Salander’s screaming and crying face. And Fincher, in particular, chose to make the scene of her shuffling, painful walk home as long or longer than the attack itself.

Larsson’s intent now strikes me as clear, in that he deliberately tried to make the revenge scene the more searing and memorable than the original attack. Yet I can’t help but think that the male gaze or male fantasy plays a role in the view of Salander, not least because later in the book she begins a sexual relationship with the middle-aged journalist Blomkvist, who is clearly a stand-in for Larsson himself.

A few different commentators on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have observed that some of this theme of sexual violence was drawn from Larsson’s own life. When he was young, Larsson witnessed the gang-rape of a girl he knew. He did not participate in the assault, but he did nothing to stop it. As his friend John-Henri Holmberg explained, “After a few days, he phoned the girl to ask her forgiveness. She told him that she never wanted to speak to him again. And he felt she was right.” Having no idea of Larsson’s response to this incident beyond his friend’s description, and not knowing how much of his personal feeling about it spilled over into his writing, I can only guess that his lingering guilt influenced how he conceived of and wrote the scene. Did he identify with the rape victim, or with her attacker? Is the revenge on the attacker really an expression of culpability and self-hatred? Is it what Larsson wishes he had done to the perpetrators when he was young? However his personal experience influenced his idea of the scene, this reader certainly got a whiff of male sensibility in its execution.

Larsson set out to create a larger than life character, in a story mythic and powerful enough to resonate as a political fable, so I suppose it’s not a surprise that he chose to tell this tale of shocking violation and over the top revenge. He surely poured a good dollop of his own memories and feeling into the scene, as well, in order to give it life. When I first read it, though, I found the revenge theme absurd. It’s a convention in certain types of fiction to make a powerful woman character literally strong—and in this case, the conception of the character is that of a grown-up version of Pippi Longstocking, known for her superhuman strength—yet it strains credulity for such a small woman to be capable of so much physical mayhem. What Salander lacks in height and muscle mass, she makes up for in pure berserker energy, but still, there is a limit. And even if you grant this one character her unusual power, she is only of so much use as a model for the average woman.

I liked the old show Charmed as much or more than the next person, and enjoyed rooting for the trio of petite women fighting men—and demons—much bigger than themselves. But I did not look to it for biting social commentary. Women who can physically dominate men certainly exist. But the whole problem for women as a class is that men are more powerful than they are—including physically. This would be why they experience sexual assault and intimate partner violence at such high rates. You can wish away this imbalance with magical plot devices, but then you lose your ability to address the core issue.

For me, Salander works best as an abstract symbol of resistance, rather than any actual prescription for how to tackle the problem of male violence. Given Larsson’s role as a journalist, I expect this was the main goal of the books. Larsson traded in exposure, to the point where he called his magazine Expo. Perceiving the scale of the problem is itself a victory. What he originally tried to do was to force a comparison between Swedish society and the seemingly foreign culture of honor killings. Let me tell you, he was saying, Western societies are plenty misogynist, including our own.

And who now doubts the thoroughgoing misogyny of modern culture? A jury recently found the former U.S. president responsible for sexual assault. A major Hollywood producer went to jail for rape and sexual assault, after harassing or attacking dozens of the most famous women in the world. The #MeToo movement called the perception of reality itself into question, as it revealed case after case of powerful men able to shape the sphere of belief around them, no matter what the underlying facts happened to be. The accounts of women carried less weight, despite their overwhelming truth.

I admit that when I first read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I found the character and actions of Salander’s court-appointed guardian over the top. The escalation from sexist remarks to sadistic violence struck me as too quick and too far-fetched to work as drama. Now I don’t have that problem. I think about the button on Matt Lauer’s desk that locked his door from afar, and I realize it’s not that much of a stretch. And I can grant that Larsson did grasp the scale of the problem, twenty years ago. Indeed, it’s a theme in the book that one’s lowest expectations are not low enough. Salander goes to her guardian’s house knowing that he has already asked her for sexual favors in exchange for access to her bank account, but still does not anticipate the depth of his depravity. “I made a mistake last week,” Salander says to the guardian, Bjurman, as she dishes out punishment. “…I misjudged you. I didn’t know how fucking sick you were.”

Blomkvist has a similar moment when he decides to go to a remote location to confront the killer. “It was certainly not a sensible attitude to have,” Blomqvist thinks, “if he suspected [the man] of being an insane murderer.” The killer later observes that Blomqvist remains polite, even when he knows his suspicions are correct. Social conditioning and habit prevent him from having an appropriate reaction to his predicament.

My verdict on the rape and revenge scenes is more mixed these days. I accept that the sexual violence plays a role in the narrative; it injects a great deal of extra force into the point Larsson intended to make, helping to carry all of his other ideas along with it. I accept that his twenty-year-old view of the extent of misogyny and corruption in Western society turned out to be roughly accurate. In the end, though, I still think the more fantastical elements of Salander’s story detract from its power as a feminist parable.

I will leave Larsson here for the moment. I will eventually return to the other volumes of the Millenium trilogy, but in the next installment I’m going to revisit the first Scandinavian crime novel I remember reading, Smilla’s Sense of Snow.