Rape in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy and Beyond: Contemporary Scandinavian and Anglophone Crime Fiction

Focusing on the sexualized violence of Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium trilogy – including the novels, Swedish film adaptations, and Hollywood blockbusters – this collection of essays puts Larsson's work into dialogue with Scandinavian and Anglophone crime novels by writers including Jo Nesbø, Håkan Nesser, Mo Hayder and Val McDermid.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Oct 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781137291639

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Rape in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Beyond

Contemporary Scandinavian and Anglophone Crime Fiction

Edited by

Berit Åström

Senior Lecturer, Umeå University, Sweden

Katarina Gregersdotter

Senior Lecturer, Umeå University, Sweden

and

Tanya Horeck

Senior Lecturer, Anglia Ruskin University, UK

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Berit Åström,

Katarina Gregersdotter and Tanya Horeck 2013

Individual chapters © Contributors 2013

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2013 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Tanya Horeck, Katarina Gregersdotter, and Berit Åström

Part I   Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy: Opening up the Debate

1 ‘The Girl Who Pays Our Salaries’: Rape and the Bestselling Millennium Trilogy

Priscilla Walton

2 The Millennium Trilogy and the American Serial Killer Narrative: Investigating Protagonists of Men Who Write Women

Barbara Fister

3 Lisbeth Salander as a Melodramatic Heroine: Emotional Conflicts, Split Focalization, and Changing Roles in Scandinavian Crime Fiction

Yvonne Leffler

Part II   Dismembered Bodies, Wounded States: Gender Politics in the Millennium Trilogy and Beyond

4 Rape and the Avenging Female in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Håkan Nesser’s Woman with Birthmark and The Inspector and Silence

Marla Harris

5 The Body, Hopelessness, and Nostalgia: Representations of Rape and the Welfare State in Swedish Crime Fiction

Katarina Gregersdotter

6 Over Her Dismembered Body: The Crime Fiction of Mo Hayder and Jo Nesbø

Berit Åström

Part III   Rewriting Scripts: Language, Gender, and Violence in Contemporary Crime Fiction

7 Disarticulated Figures: Language and Sexual Violence in Contemporary Crime Fiction

Meghan A. Freeman

8 Male Fantasy, Sexual Exploitation, and the Femme Fatale : Reframing Scripts of Power and Gender in Neo- noir Novels by Sara Paretsky, Megan Abbott and Stieg Larsson

Zoë Brigley Thompson

Part IV   Ethics, Violence, and Adaptation

9 Rape and Replay in Stieg Larsson, Liza Marklund, and Val McDermid: On Affect, Ethics, and Feeling Bad

Tanya Horeck

10 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo : Rape, Revenge, and Victimhood in Cinematic Translation

Claire Henry

11 ‘Hidden in the Snow’: Female Violence against the Men Who Hate Women in the Millennium Adaptations

Philippa Gates

Index

Acknowledgements

In a book that seeks to open up a dialogue between Scandinavian and Anglophone crime fiction, it seems important to acknowledge our own cultural location as authors. Two of us (Berit and Katarina) are Swedish and work at Umeå University, while the other (Tanya) is Canadian/British and works at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK. All three of us share an interest in contemporary crime fiction, and we came together for this project to see what kinds of questions we could open up about the status of violence in crime novels through a cross-cultural approach. Working across cultures – and languages – has thrown up a series of interesting challenges and has made each of us re-evaluate our views on violence in the crime novel and the ways in which we encounter it. The results have been more fascinating and engaging than we could have hoped for. We would first of all like to say a heartfelt thank you to our wonderful contributors, who come from Australia, Canada, the US, Sweden, and the UK. Each and every one of you rose to the challenge of exploring how your own research on sexual violence and crime novels relates to the intriguing cultural phenomenon that is Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. We would also like to thank Palgrave Macmillan, and in particular Felicity Plester, for seeing the potential of this project in its early stages, and Catherine Mitchell for answering our questions so patiently. Thanks also to the anonymous reader of our original book proposal, whose suggestions on narrowing the focus proved to be very astute. We could not have completed this work without the support of our respective institutions: thanks to Anglia Ruskin University for providing Tanya with a sabbatical during which she was able to complete the project and to Umeå Centre for Gender Studies, and in particular Annelie Bränström Öhman, for providing Katarina and Berit with much appreciated research time. Many other people helped along the way: thanks to Tina Kendall, still the best ‘reader’ in the business, who gave critical input at a crucial stage; Milla Tiainen for offering her ever intellectually astute and perceptive thoughts; Lisa Coulthard, Mary Joannou, Joss Hands, and Sarah Barrow for their support; Peter Messent for valuable and clever comments on an early draft; and Heidi Hansson for reading and asking difficult questions. Special thanks to Barbara Fister for being such a fantastic font of information on all things to do with crime fiction, and to Philippa Gates and Zoë Brigley Thompson for their wonderfully incisive and helpful suggestions. Finally, for all their support through the long winter months of writing and editing, we would like to thank our families: Patrick and Michael Yates, Liv Enqvist and Nicklas Hållén, and Hugh, Grace, and Edward Perry.

Contributors

Berit Åström is Senior Lecturer in English at Umeå University, Sweden. Her work spans centuries and genres, from Old English love poetry, to contemporary crime and science fiction, to male pregnancy fan fiction. In 2011–2012 she was visiting scholar at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, where she held an Intra-European Fellowship from Marie Curie Actions, Seventh Framework Programme, for a project called ‘Transhistorical Tropes of Female Subordination’, which investigates the recurring trope of dead and absent mothers in Western literature, from antiquity to the present day.

Zoë Brigley Thompson is Lecturer in English and Creative Writing. She is a reader for the journal Orbis Litterarum and for the Routledge/Taylor and Francis database ABES (The Annotated Bibliography of English Studies). She has published the edited collection Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation (2010), which also features her essays ‘Introduction: Transnational Feminism(s) and Rape Scripts’ and ‘The Wound and the Mask: Rape, Recovery and Poetry’. She has also published a collection of poetry The Secret (2007).

Barbara Fister is an academic librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota and the author of a guide to women’s literature from the third world as well as three mysteries, the most recent of which is Through the Cracks (2010). She maintains a website on Scandinavian crime fiction in English translation and writes about academic libraries for Library Journal and Inside Higher Ed.

Meghan A. Freeman received her doctorate in Victorian literature from Cornell University and is currently employed as an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of English at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her current project concerns the representation of aesthetic experience in the nineteenth-century novel, with a particular emphasis on how this experience is refracted through the lens of gender and sexuality. She has taught courses on Victorian literature and culture, mystery and crime writing, as well as women’s literature.

Philippa Gates is Associate Professor in Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. Her publications include Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective Film (2011), Detecting Men: Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film (2006), and The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film, co-edited with Stacy Gillis, (2002). Her current book project is an edited collection titled Transnational Asian Identities in Pan-Pacific Cinemas: The Reel Asian Exchange (with Lisa Funnell; forthcoming).

Katarina Gregersdotter is Senior Lecturer at Umeå University, Sweden, and a literary critic. Her main area of research is Anglophone and Scandinavian contemporary crime fiction, but she works on a wide variety of subjects, including Margaret Atwood, zombies, gender, and emotions. Her latest article is ‘Made Men and Constructed Masculinities: Viewing the Father-Son Relationship in The Sopranos’, and she is currently co-editing, with Nicklas Hållén, an interdisciplinary anthology on masculinity and femininity in literature, media, politics, and social studies (forthcoming).

Marla Harris is an independent scholar with a PhD from Brandeis University, where she completed a dissertation on silence in eighteenth-century British women’s fiction. She has published journal essays and book chapters on a variety of literary topics, including detective fiction, young adult literature, and graphic novels.

Claire Henry is a PhD candidate in the English, Film, and Media department at Anglia Ruskin University. Her current research examines the politics, ethics, and affects of contemporary rape-revenge cinema. She holds an MA in Screen Studies and a BA in Cinema Studies and Gender Studies from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Tanya Horeck is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Anglia Ruskin University. She is the author of Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film (2004) and co-editor, with Tina Kendall, of the anthology The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe (2011). Her research interests include contemporary film and theory, documentary, violence, crime, affect, and spectatorship.

Yvonne Leffler is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She has published several books and articles about Gothic fiction, nineteenth-century novels, and popular fiction in postmodern society. She is currently leading an interdisciplinary research project, ‘Fiction, Play, and Health’, the aim of which is to explore how popular stories serve as modern myths that establish and reveal present ideas of happiness, success, and well-being.

Priscilla Walton is Professor of English at Carleton University in Canada. Her publications include Our Cannibals, Ourselves: The Body Politic (2004), Patriarchal Desire and Victorian Discourse: A Lacanian Reading of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels (1995) and, together with Manina Jones, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hardboiled Tradition (1999). She is presently working with Sheryl Hamilton, Neil Gerlach, and Rebecca Sullivan on a new project called Biotechnological Imaginings: From Science Fiction to Social Fact.

Introduction

Tanya Horeck, Katarina Gregersdotter, and Berit Åström

A ‘bleak and savage story’

The long-awaited Hollywood remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), by director David Fincher, came with warnings from its lead actor, Daniel Craig, that it contained very violent material, and was for adult eyes only. The film’s reviewers duly noted its graphic and ‘slick’ violence (Scott 2011; Phillips 2011) but it is rather surprising how the rape and revenge scenes – which are central to the film and to the Millennium trilogy as a whole – are elided in the film’s critical reception in North America and the UK. Sexual violence is not seriously discussed, debated, or indeed in some cases even mentioned, in the film’s reviews,¹ possibly because at this stage in the cultural retelling of the bestselling Millennium trilogy, the story is so familiar. As Kenneth Turan wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

As readers of the Stieg Larsson novel and viewers of the recent Swedish film version know all too well, what’s on offer is a bleak and savage story of crime and punishment that features generous portions of sadistic rape, twisted torture and murders that can charitably be called grotesque. (2011)

Of course, such a statement begs the question of what, exactly, is so fascinating about such ‘grotesque violence’ which, by now, has been replayed over and over for our cultural consumption, from novels to Swedish film versions to Hollywood blockbuster.

Taking as our starting point the ‘bleak and savage story’ of rape and revenge found in the Millennium franchise, this book sets out to explore the issue of rape and sexualized violence in contemporary Scandinavian and Anglophone crime fiction. One of the main aims of this anthology is to contextualize Stieg Larsson’s work by putting the Millennium trilogy into dialogue with, on the one hand, a selection of Scandinavian crime writers such as Jo Nesbø, Liza Marklund, and Håkan Nesser and, on the other hand, Anglophone crime writers including Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid, and Megan Abbott. While many commentators have noted the influence of Anglophone writers on Larsson’s work, this source of inspiration has not yet been explored in any detail. At the same time, as publishers continue to eagerly capitalize on each new Scandinavian writer as ‘the next Stieg Larsson’, there has not been a sustained attempt to put the work of Larsson into dialogue with that of other Scandinavian writers. In comparing and contrasting the work of these different writers, and in exploring the productive exchange that occurs between Anglophone and Scandinavian crime fiction, we open up important questions about the ‘bleak and savage’ violence that Larsson’s work has come to be both criticized and applauded for.²

It is necessary to keep in mind that the idea of a unified ‘Scandinavian crime novel’ is problematic (Nestingen and Arvas 2011: 9), as indeed is the idea of an ‘Anglophone’ one. While we recognize the necessity of respecting the cultural and historical specificity of individual novels, our concern is how reading crime novels from different geographical and cultural locations provides insights into how notions of sexual violence, victims, and vengeance are constructed across cultures. And, as many of the essays illustrate, there are close links and similarities (as well as intriguing disjunctions) between the approaches to sexual violence in the selection of Scandinavian and Anglophone crime novels (and films) explored in this volume.³

Violence towards women has a long and complicated history in crime fiction, dating back at least as far as the lurid penny dreadfuls of the nineteenth century, with their stories of sexual violation, murder, and mayhem. It should be noted, however, that this volume is not intended as a study of the history of sexual violence in crime writing;⁴ rather, we are interested in exploring the ways rape is used to voice social and political criticism and to explore questions of victimization and agency. While rape and sexual violence is an integral part of crime fiction, this is the first book-length study to interrogate the role that it plays in the genre.⁵ That rape is everywhere present in crime fiction yet surprisingly under-theorized in the critical literature on the genre attests to the curious way in which ‘rape is at once present and absent, a given, but not quite there’ (Russell 2010: 2). Though it is often overlooked as a mere plot device, or dismissed for its violent excess, sexualized violence is, as the contributors to this book demonstrate, fundamental to contemporary crime fiction and its attempts to raise critical questions regarding socio-political formations, the body politic, and the relationship between the individual and society.

In our engagement with debates over gender, sexual violence, and vengeance in contemporary crime fiction, we want to build on the (by now) substantive body of feminist theory on rape and representation in literary and visual culture,⁶ at the same time as we are keen to open up a set of new questions regarding the issue of the affect and ethics of violence, and the entangled relationship between victimization and empowerment. As Sorcha Gunne and Zoë Brigley Thompson write, ‘In the twenty-first century, the most urgent task for feminism is to build on the work of late twentieth-century feminism(s) by recognizing the subversive work that is being done by modern and contemporary writers on the subject of sexual violence’ (2011: 4). In other words, it is critical to explore texts that attempt to ‘challenge the stipulation of gender roles and myths in relation to sexual violence’ and that seek to rewrite ‘the roles of victims and perpetrators’ (11). It is our contention that contemporary crime fiction is doing critical and challenging work on the subject of sexual violence, and one of the themes that runs throughout the chapters that follow concerns how the relationship between ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ is undergoing complex revision in the work of a range of crime writers.

Contemporary crime fiction: a new violence?

To argue for the subversive potential of crime fiction is not without dispute, however, especially given the genre’s reputation for conservatism. The retrograde aspects of crime fiction are visible in the resolutions of the stories and in the narratives’ alignment with male authorities and institutions of law and order, and in particular in the genre’s predilection for female victims, and extreme and brutal violence against women. For example, in 2009, a minor controversy broke out when British crime fiction writer and reviewer Jessica Mann declared that she would no longer review crime fiction featuring misogynistic violence. She wrote:

Each psychopath is more sadistic than the last and his victims’ sufferings are described in detail that becomes ever more explicit, as young women are imprisoned, bound, gagged, strung up or tied down, raped, sliced, burned, blinded, beaten, eaten, starved, suffocated, stabbed, boiled or buried alive … Authors must be free to write and publishers to publish. But critics must be free to say they have had enough. So however many more outpourings of sadistic misogyny are crammed on to the bandwagon, no more of them will be reviewed by me. (2009)

This declaration struck a chord with many female crime writers and readers and led to much debate regarding the extent of violence against women in contemporary crime fiction. Echoing some of Mann’s comments, feminist writer Melanie Newman brought Stieg Larsson’s books into the discussion when she argued that, despite being labelled ‘feminist’, they were ‘just the latest in a line of novels which aims to titillate readers with graphic depictions of men raping and murdering women’ (2009). In other words, though Larsson so clearly disapproves of misogynist violence, it does not mean that his descriptions of such violence are any less problematic. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, however, the violence found in Larsson’s works cannot automatically and simply be dismissed as ‘sadistic misogyny’. In the Millennium trilogy, and many of the other novels discussed within this volume, violence is used to carry out important cultural work, raising questions about society, gender, and politics, and forcing readers to question their attitudes towards vengeance and victimization. In this anthology, then, we want to explore how violence operates in a selection of contemporary crime novels and films, interrogating what makes scenes of sexual violation so compelling and disturbing.

What film scholar Linda Williams has written of the popular and much reviled film genres of horror, pornography, and melodrama is equally applicable to a consideration of the contemporary crime genre:

To dismiss them as bad excess whether of explicit sex, violence, or emotion, or as bad perversions, whether of masochism, or sadism, is not to address their function as cultural problem-solving. Genres thrive, after all, on the persistence of the problems they address; but genres thrive also in their ability to recast the nature of these problems. (2000: 219)

In depicting sexual violence as a serious social problem, many of the crime novels examined in this anthology are concerned with recasting a dominant script that features women as passive victims of violence. Rather than merely decrying the excessive nature of sexualized violence in contemporary crime fiction, then, we explore the kind of work it performs and consider the complex ways in which we are called upon to engage with it as readers. For example, in her contribution to this book, which conducts a comparative analysis of British author Mo Hayder’s Birdman (2008 [2000]) and Norwegian author Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman (2010), Berit Åström argues that the disturbing violence of these works is ‘central to their attempt to examine critically society’s contempt for women and their bodies’. And, in her chapter in the final section of this book, Tanya Horeck analyses two popular crime series – Liza Marklund’s Annika Bengtzon novels and Val McDermid’s Tony Hill/Carol Jordan novels – in relation to the Millennium trilogy, to make a case for ‘the productive potential of our engagement with violence’. The replay of sexually violent images in these works, Horeck suggests, functions as a space where difficult questions are raised about the uncertain relations between ‘victim and agent, abused and abuser, self and other’.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Unsurprisingly, a central point of interest throughout this anthology is the figure of Lisbeth Salander, variously described by reviewers as: ‘an outlaw fantasy feminist-heroine’ (A. O. Scott 2011); ‘a pitiless elfin avenger’ (Hitchens 2009); a ‘tattooed, pierced, vengeful, bisexual misfit’ (France 2009); ‘a feminist avenging angel’; ‘an androgynous, bisexual, computer-hacking twenty-something’ (Sandhu 2010); ‘a vision of female empowerment – a kind of goth-geek Pippi Longstocking’ (Gibbs 2008); and a ‘feminist avatar for the Wikileaks era’ (Hornaday 2011). Entertainment Weekly has recently gone so far as to call Salander the ‘most interesting character of our time’ (Harris 2011). What makes Salander so interesting, and so culturally relevant, is her blend of vulnerability and violence. As David Denby of The New Yorker writes, ‘She is both a victim and an avenger, a woman damaged, abused, yet defiantly sexual – a woman prepared to hit back and to stay out in the danger zone, unwilling to change, ready for more’ (2011). Victim and avenger: more than any other contemporary pop culture character, Salander brings these two categories together in ways that are both thrilling and troubling. To return to Entertainment Weekly, and a recent cover which featured American actress Rooney Mara dressed up in her Girl with the Dragon Tattoo garb, Lisbeth Salander is described as not only the most ‘interesting’ character of our time, but also the ‘coolest’. Salander’s ‘coolness’, of course, relates to her alternative appearance as a goth and her self-styled otherness as an individual who resists sexual and social conventions; as Philippa Gates suggests in her chapter on the Millennium film adaptations, her dramatic make-up and clothing is her superhero costume. This designation of Salander as ‘cool’ has gained great currency with the release of the Hollywood film and it is significant that the marketing of the American film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has brought out the more disturbing aspects of the sexual politics at the heart of Larsson’s trilogy. In particular, the concern that, when all is said and done, the bestseller is nothing but ‘a wish-fulfillment fantasy disguised as a thriller which, despite pretensions to feminism, conceives of women as beguiling, dangerous, complex systems to be investigated by men (i.e. Larsson)’ (Vishnevetsky 2011). Especially damning in this regard is a sexy and sensational promotional poster which has circulated for Fincher’s film, which features a topless Rooney Mara as Salander, nipple ring exposed, with Daniel Craig embracing her from behind.

There is something uncomfortable too, about how this hyper-sexualization of Salander relates to the strong images of rape that are at the heart of her story, as was recently captured by the controversy that broke out when the Swedish-based international fashion chain, H&M, developed a line of clothing known as ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo collection’. The clothing line was designed to tie in with the release of the Hollywood remake and sought to draw on the ‘edgy style’ of Larsson’s heroine (Dumas 2011). Such an appropriation of Salander’s sexually abused heroine for the purposes of commercial high street fashion did not go without controversy. Rape survivor Natalie Karneef published an open letter to H&M on her blog, where she emphatically stated that they were ‘putting a glossy, trendy finish on the face of sexual violence and the rage and fear it leaves behind’ (Karneef 2011).

Karneef’s complaint not only makes explicit the troubling undercurrents behind the sexualization of Salander as a global consumerist brand, it also raises the fascinating question of what happens when Larsson’s heroine is re-imagined and reworked in different contexts and cultural locations. The question of cultural translation and adaptability is one of the themes of our book, as addressed by film scholars Claire Henry and Philippa Gates in their individual chapters, which investigate the translation from novel to film and the subsequent movement from Swedish film to Hollywood blockbuster. More broadly, though, all of our contributors, in one way or another, address the issue of cultural exchange and explore what happens when different crime novels (and films) are put into dialogue with one another.

In the first part of our book, ‘Stieg Larsson’s The Millennium Trilogy: Opening Up the Debate’, the authors introduce the topic of sexual violence and contextualize Larsson’s work in relation to feminist hard-boiled crime novels, American serial killer fiction, and Scandinavian and Anglophone avenger crime novels respectively. Priscilla Walton’s opening chapter, ‘The Girl Who Pays Our Salaries: Rape and the Bestselling Millennium Trilogy’, considers the centrality of rape to Larsson’s novels, exploring how he builds on the work of feminist crime writers of the 1980s and 1990s at the same time as he opens up important ‘new questions about the politics of revenge, the individual and the state, and victimhood and justice’. While much emphasis has been placed on Lisbeth Salander as a lone wolf who battles against villains and institutional corruption on her own, Walton argues that Larsson shows how the struggle to achieve retribution and justice must be a communal undertaking. She writes that: ‘Rape and violations of power can rarely if ever be solved by an individual. They require a systemic change, which the Millennium series in many ways significantly foregrounds, given the webs it weaves both to imprison and then to free Salander.’

Barbara Fister’s chapter, ‘The Millennium Trilogy and the American Serial Killer Narrative: Investigating Protagonists of Men Who Write Women’, considers the success of Larsson’s novels with American audiences. Exploring the Millennium trilogy in relation to American serial killer fiction, such as Thomas Harris’ seminal novel The Silence of the Lambs (1988), and