ABSTRACT
In Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, each section opens with a chilling statistic: “Forty-six percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man,” we read, “Ninety-two percent of women in Sweden who have been subjected to sexual assault have not reported the most recent violent incident to the police.”1 Sexual violence and physical abuse are in fact just two of many injustices that specifically disfavor women, injustices that at the same time – while coming in many different forms and degrees of severity – plague our whole society and cannot be reduced purely to “women’s issues.” In the economic sphere, women – mothers, daughters, sisters, partners – continue to face the glass ceiling at the highest levels of the corporate world and receive chronically low wages in “pink collar” ghettos. These forms of unequal access to resources could be multiplied across virtually every arena of contemporary life, making it difficult for women to achieve their full earnings potential over the course of a lifetime. The consequences often include economic dependency for much of the woman’s life and grinding poverty in old age, affecting in turn the whole fabric of family and community. Larsson’s response to these injustices is a powerfully feminist novel, whose tattooed female heroine overcomes the threat of potential victimization to neutralize three evil, exploitative, wealthy and respected men, while rescuing the male protagonist in the nick of time from near-certain death. Because I do not wish to spoil the surprises of this suspenseful thriller for those who have not read it, I will not reveal the details here; suffice it to say that in doing so she employs a combination of physical strength, financial savvy, linguistic skill, and technological prowess. The “pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander” is Larsson’s effective answer to the paralyzing myth that women are naturally passive or perpetually victimized. His heroine belies his own alarming statistics, providing an exemplary role model who can inspire other women to refuse abject victimhood.
