Part I The critic and scholar Karen Sanchez-Eppler says, "Narrative formulas index cultural obsessions." The narrative formula for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson follows two unlikely heros, each guided by their own set of principles and outlooks on the world and influenced by the events in the story, coming together to solve a seemingly unsolvable mystery.
A cultural obsession that’s being indexed is sex and sex crimes.In many cultures sex sells and this is especially true in American culture. Many best sellers seem to be so because there is either sex or violence or both prevalent throughout the novel. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novel happens to not only have both but also has them comingled together since the sex is violent. Sexism makes this novel. The main character, Mikael Blomkvist has a lot of casual sex with three different women, his co-editor at Millennium Erica Berger, Cecilia Vanger, and Lizbeth Salander, his “side-kick” in the Harriet Vanger investigation.
While these encounters are not violent, they are not the actual focus of the story but there to further establish Mikael’s character and likely to suggest his healthy need for “normal” sex and female companionship. Salander, is not so lucky. She is raped by her new guardian, Nils Bjurman. First it’s just oral but the second time he performed heinous and sadistic acts on her beginning with tying her up and anally sodomizing her.
Salander’s way of getting back at Bjurman has a sexually aggressive tone to it especially when she “roughly spread his cheeks and rammed the [anal] plug into its proper place (Larsson, ch 14)” and after showing Bjurman the video she had taken with her hidden camera of their previous encounter “grabbed the whip and flicked it right over his genitals (Larsson, ch 14)” in order to grab his attention.She uses extreme pressure on his genitals to subdue him when she goes to tattoo “from his nipples to just above his genitals: I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT, AND A RAPIST (Larsson, ch 14).” Not only do these scenes display Salander’s own sense of order and justice and the lengths she’ll go to in order to get revenge, it also shows us the depth of Salander’s feelings about the issue of being raped and controlled which is important since she is cast, for the most part, and an emotionally distant person. This act of vengeance and aggression is very passionate and an emotionally charged moment for her character. Perhaps this is why it is such a poignant and memorable scene.
There are two main antagonists in Larsson’s novel, the Wennerström Group and Martin Vanger. While Wennerström’s unscrupulous activities seem to set the stage for why Blomkvist decides to work for Henrick Vanger, the real villain is Martin Vanger, son of Gottfried Vanger and brother to Harriet Vanger, the missing girl. In an unexpected twist, it was discovered that he had followed in his father’s footsteps who was a raping, murdering, psychopath.Martin had been systematically stalking, capturing, torturing and raping, and then murdering women long after his father had died taking his part in a father-son 40 year reign of terror on women. It’s almost as if they were waging war upon the opposite sex. This kind of subject matter has become part of pop culture.
We can infer this from popular books such as the S&M book series 50 Shades of Gray and hit television shows such as American Horror Story and True Blood, both of which have strong sexually violent themes. Our culture have become violence junkies and sexual violence is no exception which likely accounts for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s acceptance into the canon of current pop culture.Part IIViolence against women plays a large role in Stieg Larrson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It moves the story along.
The violence isn’t promoted or glorified, indeed the exact opposite. The novelist even sees fit to place statistics about the rates of violence against women in Sweden where the novel is based: “Forty-six percent of the women in Sweden have been subject to violence by a men (Larsson, ch 8).” “The main protagonists, Blomkvist and Salander, are both disgusted by these violent acts and work to bring the parties responsible to justice.When Blomkvist gets started working on the Harriet Vanger case he never believes that he will uncover any new evidence and certainly doesn’t imagine that he would uncover that a member of the Vanger family is a woman hating rapist and murderer. Salander becomes subject to violence against her when she is raped by Bjurman but her suffering is nothing when compared to the countless women who were brutalized and suffered for days and days in Martin’s basement torture chamber or perhaps it is actually magnified. Salander is no stranger to sexual violence and Larsson says that “in her world this was the natural order of things.
As a girl she was legal prey, especially if she was dressed in a worn black leather jacket and had pierced eye brows, tattoos, and zero social status (Larsson, ch 11).”Salander even considers her rape by Bjurman as nothing to whimper about (Larsson, ch 11), However blasé Salander might appear about her sexual assault we can infer that her emotional scars run deeper than can be seen by her cool, uncaring demeanor. After recuperating from the rape she goes to the tattoo artist and has another tattoo added to her collection. We can conjecture that for each sexual trauma that Salander has had to endure in her life she has added a mark to her body to reflect the pain she feels inside.
Her outward appearance and her hostile personality is likely directly related to her mistrust of other due to sexism and violent sexual attacks in the past. Violence and sexism toward her and her gender has jaded her toward, not only men, but society in general.Sex and violence is a very entertaining, lucrative business. It proliferates all types of our media from video games to movies and television shows to books. Even commercials take advantage of sex as a seller. If you want to sell a product whether it’s a cheeseburger, car or lingerie, put a scantily clad, tall blonde with a tanned bod and tight butt and it will turn heads.
Sex and violence are plastered all over magazine covers in the grocery store along with the recent dish on scandals.And when you turn on the news you are more likely to hear about the latest murder or political sex scandal than you are the Good Samaritan or the beautiful birth of a new baby. It’s even in the music that we listen to on a daily basis: pop, rap, country, ect. It is ingrained in our culture here in America and abroad. It’s sad but true.
Without the sex and violence in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it would have been just another paperback on the shelf someday bound for the recycle bin.
