Girls with Pepper Spray, Tattoos, and Piercings

Not since Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett have I met a literary heroine that has struck me with love and reverence the way Stieg Larsson’s ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ has. While Elizabeth Bennett contradicted the marital and societal norms that the Victorian Era prescribed for young women, limiting them of volition and choice, her contemporary, Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander, is a modern marvel of human frailty compounded with the desire for revenge.

Lisbeth is a brilliant hacker who experiences flashbacks of angrily walking toward her father’s car, tossing a cannister of gas in his face, lighting a match, and watching him burn to death. This one flashback doesn’t tell us what he did to her to make her so vengeful and murderous at such a young age, but it defines the girl we get to know for the duration of the story. She is not a victim. She wasn’t a victim when she was little, and she is not a victim as a young woman. A femme fatale, she is the most empowered heroine I have yet to come across, and I find her refreshing and a hope for a new kind of femininity that does not focus on the superfluous collection of bags, shoes, and breast implants with which to define the common practices of females today.

The first time we meet Lisbeth, it is at work where she is described by her boss as a bit of an odd girl. Clad in a black turtle neck, dark skinny jeans and sneakers, her equally coal-black-colored hair cut short on one side with loose strands hanging longer on the other side, her dark eyes and dark lipstick in stark contrast to the pasty white hues of her features, she is an aberration to the conservative suit-and-tie appearance dictated by the corporation for which she works. Looking past her wardrobe, nose piercings, and the dragon tattoo down the length of her back is indicative of how good she is at her job as a researcher; her bosses don’t care what she looks like — they value her for her work. A prodigy with photographic memory, she is the only one who discovers that the famous reporter whose life she has been paid to hack into is innocent of the libel suit against him. But I don’t want to focus on the storyline as much as I want to paint a portrait of this young woman’s strength — a strength that does not make her superhuman or infallible, but real, honest, and how most of us women wish we behaved — minus the tattoos and piercings, at least on my part.

With the flashback of Lisbeth’s younger version of herself burning her father to death, and watching, we see her in a train station in Sweden, smoking heavily, and being marauded by a group of drunken men.  They curse her, kick her, punch her, and douse her with alcohol when she accidentally bumps into them, but the bruises and the mass force of masculine fists and boots connecting to her flesh and bones do not stop her from getting a bunch of punches in herself, giving them some bruises to take home with them. She is a fighter with instinctive defense mechanisms that make you feel proud of her for defending her self. When women are attacked, they fall to their knees in feminine weakness, our hands covering our faces lest we are punched and bruised. She does not crouch or succumb to fear. She falls, she gets right back up, and she wails upon the drunkards that violate her space and her person because they think they can.  If more women acted like this, we would not be victims to male oppression and violence. And we are — we have always been, because society has always told us that we are the weaker sex, the softer and more frail of the two sexes. My son is seven, and he has already stated as a fact that boys are tougher than girls — this took place when he was trying to understand why women have babies even though men are evidently tougher than women. I have not taught him this — but he is away from me for hours, learning false values from other children in school. They never met Lisbeth — and they never met my mother.

Only twenty-four, Lisbeth is an orphaned ward of the state and at the mercy of a loathsome businessman who holds her inheritance hostage unless she plays the part of “a good girl.” When she needs money for a new computer that the drunken men broke during their attack of her, this businessman forces her face to his penis for a blow job, and then later on, when she needs more money, he ties her up and savagely rapes her, gagging her mouth to stifle her screams. I was irritated with her the same way I have always been irritated and impatient and intolerant of literary heroines that act against better judgement or in weakness. I turned the pages of her story with rushed angst and derision, my heart pounding with the injustice of her situation, until I realized that she had taped the rape and was going to use it as leverage.  She bursts into his apartment, tazers him, strips him of his clothes, ties his legs and hands, gags him, sodomizes him, and then forces him to watch the two-hour video she had taped the day he had raped her. When she returns, she tattoos him with words like “rapist” and “sadist,” marking him for life. Although she is victimized for her station in life by someone who is superior to her and in control of her money, Lisbeth usurps the power of her oppressor and gives him a full taste of what he had given her — she takes control of her situation and her body, and she turns the table around and pursues the sweet fruits that come with vengeance for such sexual assaults.

Later on, when she solves the case she and Mikael have been hired to solve, she saves his life from a rapist and murderer. Lisbeth rushes upon the evil-minded assassin of women and bashes his head in with a club. She chases him on her motorcycle, and she watches him burn in the flames of his upturned car, smiling at his pleas that she help him. She watches him burn to death the way she had watched her father burn, and she did it with calm, with a  sense of reserved coolness and loathing, handing them a cruel punishment equal to the suffering they enforced upon the women they assaulted. She has no pity for them, and offers no remorse for her part in their deaths. She is not a victim. She is an arbiter of justice, claiming the right with which we are all endowed to protect our selves and our bodies from the onslaught of masculine force.

And as cool and brilliant as she is — as vengeful and emotionally detached as she appears to be — she does have soft places inside her. She falls in love even though she has learned that no good comes from it. She uses that love not to wed, not to settle down with the man who has warmed the secret yearnings of her insides, but by utilizing her skills as a researcher and hacker and providing the man she loves with the story that will bring down his nemesis and the man that framed him. She is a modern woman, a powerhouse, a strong and virile archetype of femaleness that uses her brawn and intelligence to take possession of her circumstances, beating her fists upon the heads of those who try to bring her down and force her into sexual and gendered submission. They try to victimize her, but she will not surrender to being a victim. She fights back even when the odds are against her, and this is what makes her such a phenomenal female character worth remembering, worth claiming.

Here’s to the innate power and strength all women are endowed with, and here’s to learning how to use them when we are victimized.

Copyright© 2010 by Marina DelVecchio. All Rights Reserved.

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