The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

One of the novel’s prominent themes is violence against women and its ubiquity and normalization in society. Larsson does not leave this theme up to interpretation, establishing it immediately with the book’s original title: Män som hatar kvinnor, or Men Who Hate Women. Additionally, an epigraph accompanies each of the novel’s four parts and provides a statistic on the percentage of Swedish women who have been threatened or assaulted by men and the high number of unreported cases. Larsson thereby roots the different types of violence against women in his narrative–sexual violence, domestic abuse, assault, murder, and institutional violence in fields like medicine, psychiatry, and law–in the real world.

In addition to the central plot of Gottfried’s and Martin’s serial killings of women, the novel delves into the violent histories of the men abusing Harriet, Cecilia, and Salander. Armansky’s private investigation cases often involve women seeking protection from former partners, and Salander grows up not knowing a single woman who has not experienced sexual assault. She assesses that “this was the natural order of things” (249), and her comment ties directly to the ways society normalizes misogyny and the violence that it fuels.

Salander is quick to categorize the perpetrators of violence against women as misogynists. Gottfried, Martin, and Wennerström are men who hate women (417, 597), and she conceptualizes their violence as a form of hate crime. Salander rejects framing their attacks in terms of male lust or female promiscuity and recognizes sexual and physical assault as systemic violence. The novel criticizes the ways that institutions perpetuate sexist ideology, including the criminal justice system that relegates women as “legal prey” (249). Harriet, Cecilia, and Salander do not report their experiences of assault to the authorities, and their silence points to the ways the legal system minimizes the crimes and attributes blame and shame to women.

The social institutions of family, marriage, and religion also factor in the Vanger family’s abuse, as the perpetrators of violence against Harriet and Cecilia use their ideologies of “a woman’s place” to justify their assaults. Gottfried’s murders are entrenched in biblical verses that punish women who are deemed deviant. Harald and Birger’s verbal attacks on Cecilia place the blame of her failed marriage on her inability to “keep a man” (280), rather than her husband’s violence and abuse. Harriet and Cecilia both attempt to keep the appearance of healthy families and marriages. Their experience of shame illustrates how the stigma of dysfunction in the family or marriage pressures and blames women for not fulfilling their presumed domestic roles.

Larsson’s narrative incorporates other less-overtly violent forms of sexism as well, illustrating that misogyny is a spectrum and a multi-faceted issue. Salander experiences brutal, physical violence, but is also frequently considered incompetent on the basis of her gender and how she presents herself. Throughout the novel, men doubt her competence and are embarrassed when she proves them wrong. That the same character experiences wildly different types of sexism shows that these different experiences are all part of a culture of misogyny; the seemingly minor experiences like being underestimated or misbelieved create the circumstances in which more violent crimes can persist.