Girl trouble

Lisbeth Salander is undoubtedly the current It girl in crime fiction. Investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist may be the moral compass of Stieg Larsson’s wildly popular Millennium Trilogy of books, but Salander is its complex soul.

Is Lisbeth Salander the personification of girl power? Or is she a male fantasy figure, a hybrid of vulnerable waif and kick-ass vigilante?

Blomkvist is a straight arrow, dedicated to uncovering corruption and injustice. Salander is somewhat bent — which is why the brilliant cyber-whiz is so compelling. A social misfit with a demeanour as stony as the Rock of Gibraltar, Salander has a capacity for cunning and ruthlessness to rival lawyer Patty Hewes on Damages.

"If I’m going to survive," Salander says at one point in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the final book in the series, "I have to fight dirty." And she does — whether that means hacking into her adversaries’ computers or taking them on in hand-to-hand combat. (It’s amazing what "a girl who looks as if she’s barely entered puberty" can do, armed with the element of surprise and a Taser.)

But is Salander the neo-punk personification of righteous girl power? Or is she simply a male fantasy figure, a disturbing hybrid of vulnerable waif and kick-ass vigilante?

Larsson, a Swedish writer who died in 2004, seemed to have a progressive agenda as a novelist. Like Mikael Blomkvist, he was a crusading journalist and editor who devoted much of his writing life to combating right-wing extremism. The Swedish title of Larsson’s first book is "Men Who Hate Women" — more forthright, albeit less evocative, than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

In that 2008 book, Blomkvist and Salander solve a gruesome series of murders; the killer is an equal-opportunity sexual torturer, but women are the main targets. In The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009), they tangle with a sex trafficking ring that includes Alexander Zalachenko, a nasty ex-KGB agent with a link to Salander’s hellish past. The uncommunicative Salander doesn’t share much, but Blomkvist manages to piece together her backstory over the course of the narrative.

The focus of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is a conspiracy that involves members of virtually every Swedish social institution — from the police and security forces to the medical profession and the media — plotting against Salander. What becomes clear is that she has been victimized not only by individuals, but by the system itself. "When it comes down to it," Blomkvist remarks near the end of the book, seeming to speak for the author himself, "This story is not about spies and secret government agencies; it’s primarily about violence against women and the men who enable it."

This might come as a surprise to many readers, because although the issue is a major motif, what dominates the series are elements more in keeping with the typical thriller: intricate, diabolical conspiracies; the suspenseful move/countermove progression of the plot; and, of course, flawed but sympathetic heroes. Larsson does stray somewhat from the formula — he bundles in lengthy primers on esoteric subjects (such as Sweden’s constitutional framework). But he is fairly judicious in interspersing exposition with action. It’s clear he’s done something right: the series has become a worldwide publishing phenomenon (27 million copies sold and counting).

Ironically, Larsson’s mastery of the crime genre often undermines his progressive agenda, so it’s not exactly a shock that many feminists aren’t rushing to pin a posthumous white ribbon on him. They’re troubled by the violence in the books, and by Salander herself.

Part of the problem is simply the structuring of the series. Larsson front-loads the trilogy with horrific violence — The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo contains a graphic depiction of Salander’s rape at the hands of her sadistic court-appointed guardian, as well as revolting descriptions of the savage mutilation of female murder victims. From a dramatic perspective, perhaps it makes sense to lead with over-the-top material. But the sensationalism is also off-putting. Larsson’s feminist sympathies are more substantively expressed in the final book, where subplots involve several secondary female characters who are intelligent, assertive and principled — and who are in conflict with their unenlightened male colleagues.

As for the depiction of Salander, Larsson is on record as saying he conceived her as a grown-up version of the eccentric, super-strong Pippi Longstocking — and, as such, something of a social outcast. But he also emphasizes that Salander is unusually small and slight. Her predatory guardian, Nils Bjurman, sees her as the perfect victim: "She was a strange girl — fully grown but with an appearance that made her easily mistaken for a child. He had control over her life; she was his to command."

No doubt Larsson wanted to suggest that no matter how small and helpless a woman or girl might appear, she can fight back. Salander’s foes are continually underestimating her — at the end of the second book, she literally rises from her grave after being shot multiple times and left for dead. But Larsson is tapping into an image of young women — waif-like, vulnerable — that is already entrenched in our culture, from fashion ads to music videos to pornography. He focuses so much on Salander’s smallness, and the assumptions that her abusers make about her, that in a perverse way, he actually reinforces those familiar associations.

Salander’s physical appearance isn’t what makes her fascinating to readers: it’s her resourcefulness, grit and unconventionality. And of course her ability to stomp motorcycle gang toughs and other creeps (which would seem more plausible if she weren’t so scrawny).

Even more problematic is how Salander falls for Blomkvist in the course of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (The affair ends, but her feelings for him don’t — which irritates her greatly.) Larsson seems to have capitulated to the tired notion that the male lead must be irresistible to most of the women he encounters. This makes Salander seem like a figure of middle-aged male wish fulfillment. In this context, her bisexuality becomes less an indication of her independence than a surreptitious turn-on for the hetero crowd.

One of Larsson’s great achievements was giving us a character who doesn’t fit society’s mould. Unfortunately, in many ways, Lisbeth Salander still conforms to the retrograde conventions of the thriller genre.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is in stores May 25.

Barbara Carey is a writer based in Toronto.