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Popular Culture Review
hardly noticeable, but it is in death that the girl fights back. Just before Marcelle
dies she is described as an “extraordinary hallucination,” her death is foretold as
part of a romantic fantasy. The protagonists are “furious” and “frightened” but
not “awestruck” by the body hanging in the wardrobe. “Marcelle belonged to us
so deeply. . . that we could not see her as just another corpse” (Bataille, 24).
Alive she is a thing instead of a person, but when she dies she recovers herself
from the debauchery becoming transcendent and holy. She becomes the maiden
dangerous who rises above. Rising above the muck, she haunts the last murder
with her absence and accompanies the priest to his redemption. What was
beautiful about the trio was contained inside Marcelle. Unwilling and unable to
resist in life she serves her abusers, but after death the voice that shapes her
gives her heft and suddenly it is her abusers who become faceless creatures
forced to find their futures at sea.
Stieg Larsson uses Lisbeth in part to expiate guilt and as an expression of a
lifetime spent fighting racism and right wing extremism (Stieg Larsson bio). In
his trilogy, this author presents an abused girl who buries her emotions, but who
is a complicated, intelligent, vindictive, violent, moral, and sexually
promiscuous character. As with the other two girls, she is defined by the people
who describe her more than by what she chooses to say or do. We spend much
more time in the story reading about people talking about Lisbeth than we do
reading Lisbeth’s words and thoughts. We know her because her enemies deface
her and ascribe their sins and sicknesses to her. We understand her by the way
her friends defend her. Lisbeth rarely speaks up for herself, seldom defends what
she has become, and is not seeking a savior. Unlike the other girls however, she
is a champion. She rescues the crusading journalist (the fictive representative of
the book’s author) in the first book, saves a wife from a murderous husband in
the second, and ensures that her legal guardian, a man incapacitated and
institutionalized, gets better treatment that she ever did in the same situation.
Unlike his scribing fellows, Larsson turns the lens away from the girl and
focuses more on the process by which a girl is muzzled and debauched by
society. This story is about how the little girl’s tormentors react when she
resists. She has more fiber than her predecessors and stands more in the
background unless absolutely necessary. She fights back when she is abused and
as a result is labeled a psychotic and locked away. But she understands her
captors and controls the situation by shutting up so that her enemies can only use
their words to define her. She persists by remembering that she has a separate
self, different from the sullied girl her captors want her to be. She is called a slut
because she fends off her rapists and is then labeled anti-social when she shuts
out the world that wants to ruin her, but her creator gives her an interior that
keeps track of the girl she was meant to be so she never loses her way. Larsson’s
little girl is a tape recorder. She is also the grit in the machine that wants her
effaced. Being anti-social keeps her whole and allows her the free will and
definition that her literary sisters are denied. As a result, the authorities in the
male made society that need her silenced can only accuse her of their sins. If she