Wicked girls, saving ourselves (again)

[dolorosa_12]

Because I am wary of jumping on bandwagons, I only recently read Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest). Being me, I had Thoughts. Oddly enough, they weren't the Thoughts I expected to have.


One reason why I avoided this series for so long was that a couple of friends of mine (I believe it was isigfethera and stefeny) wrote reviews to the effect that although the series was meant to be an attack on misogyny and violence against women, it lingered too long on descriptions of violence and violation in an almost fetishistic manner. (This is a common criticism levelled at works that are ostensibly about - and opposed to - oppression of women. See, for example, Dollhouse. It might be worth asking if it is at all possible to depict acts of violence against women without being somehow complicit. But I digress.)

There's no denying that the series is horrifically violent. I found the first book particularly shocking, probably because it took me a while to adjust to having such violence written so explicitly. The force of the hatred the villain feels towards women, and the brutality with which he expresses this hatred made me feel physically ill and distraught. I am a woman, and I was alone in the house for most of the time I read that book (it took me a day), and I felt every act of misogynistic violence as if it were a blow to the head. It was frightening for me to read.

And yet, I can't really condemn Larsson. Ultimately, I think he walks the walk. The final courtroom scene in Hornet's Nest is one of the best condemnations of patriarchy I've ever read. Step by step, Larsson dismantles the structures of oppression and shows them up for how flimsy and stupid they are. I admit that was my favourite scene in the whole series, because, to my sensibilities, this was the proper justice that Lisbeth Salander got for the 26 years of abuse she suffered at the hands of those who should've protected her: a courtroom of officials recognising how she had suffered, not the violent acts of revenge she performs throughout the series.

And yet, and yet...Lisbeth Salander is the reason I still can't quite like this series, and why I think it ultimately fails in conveying its message. (And that's ignoring the frankly ridiculous writing and silly, histrionic plots, and the fact that Mikael Blomqvist is clearly a wish-fulfilling author-avatar.) Lisbeth is a stereotype of both the Strong Female Character™ (tattooed, pierced, leather-clad, motorbike-riding, gun-toting, supersmart hacker) and the Violated Victim (raped and/or subjected to violence by just about every man in her life). And the villains in this series are similarly stereotypical: grotesque paedophiles, religious fanatics, Russian spies, involved in people-trafficking. To a man, they do not view women as people. They have no motivation other than that they 'hate women' (the first book was published in Sweden with the title Men Who Hate Women).

It's too easy to write a book attacking the patriarchy when your villains are like this, and when your heroine is like that. No reasonable person could, when confronted with such source material, think otherwise. But they're so exaggerated, so cartoonish. Any person who thinks that Lisbeth Salander's situation is not unjust, that the men in the book are behaving in a reasonable way, is a monster. But in painting everything in such lurid, black and white brushstrokes, Larsson lets his readers off the hook. I realise that you do not create a bestselling thriller by writing a thoughtful exploration of all the tiny, insidious little things that make and sustain patriarchy. However, neither will you have much luck in changing the minds of those whose complicity sustains the patriarchy. They will shake their heads at the horrors meted out to Lisbeth Salander (and the other victims in the series), nod approvingly when justice is finally done, and go on failing to notice the millions of other Lisbeths whose suffering, while not as dramatic, is ongoing, and right next door.

Comments

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

Also, it's just occurred to me that there's a further nasty layer to all this: Salander fought back, with every fibre of her being, and so she was worthy of justice. The other female victims didn't fight back, or didn't fight back enough, and they ended up dead or silenced. Ugh.

[ansketil-rose.livejournal.com]

I work part-time in a bookshop, so I've sold so many copies of these books it isn't funny. But, like you, I was leery of jumping on the bandwagon. I was just considering finally getting around to reading them when I read this. Thank you, you have saved me time I can now spend reading something else. :)

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

I can see *why* they're so popular - they're very fast-paced, the writing is easy to read and the stories are inherently dramatic. But there is this rather icky (if not entirely intentional) subtext that I found really troubling.

Glad to help make the decision not to read them for you!

[isigfethera.livejournal.com]

I didn't read the whole series, so never saw that courtroom scene, I can only really talk about the first book. But I strongly agree with your comment on it being exaggerated and cartoonish, it's easy to put in chapter headings about the number of women suffering sexual violence in Sweden, but I don't think this book really speaks about that well- how many are the victims of sadistic serial rapists with designated torture cellars? For me this was where it stepped into being voyeuristic- it's all very lurid, and fails to address "the millions of other Lisbeths", or challenge a reader to think harder about violence than your average CSI episode. To my mind at least. But obviously this book really struck me the wrong way...

*ahem* rant aside, really interesting to hear your thoughts on it.

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

I totally agree with you about almost everything, although I'm not convinced that the author himself really understood the implications of what he was writing. From what I've read, he was genuinely concerned about violence against women. He just approached the issue in the wrong way - in a way that ensured his books got a mass readership, but not that this readership would really understand the problem he was trying to write about.

[(Anonymous)]

You're probably right about that. I guess part of my frustration is that I don't think it lives up to the hype.

[isigfethera.livejournal.com]

You're probably right about that. Unfortunately, I think for me the hype around the books only makes them more irritating. But I guess it is worth appreciating that he made the effort.

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

I was talking to a friend of mine about this and she mentioned that he may not even have been intending to publish these books. Apparently he witnessed the rape of a teenage girl when he himself was a teenager, and did nothing. The event horrified him so much that he wrote these books as a kind of catharsis. And then he died, so didn't have any control over what happened to them.

I guess we'll never know. And in terms of books living up to the hype, over-hyped books rarely do. The Da Vinci Code? Twilight?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_menthapiperita/]

I think the first one had already gone to publishers before he died... but being dead he had no control over the process.