Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Kick Their Asses: Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy in Feminist Perspective

12. Corporations, the Welfare State, and Covert Misogyny in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

123 12 Corporations, the Welfare State, and Covert Misogyny in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Anna Westerståhl Stenport and Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm I nternational readers of the Millennium trilogy may identify Sweden with high taxes, generous welfare state policies, and a strong commitment to social justice and gender equality. While many aspects of these policies remain, Sweden has become an integral part of a larger global economy. Here, we examine how narrative strategy in Dragon Tattoo depends on corporate structures as predominant vehicles of storytelling that shape and distinguish Stieg Larsson’s characters. Additionally, we observe how corporate and gendered practices are consistently intertwined in the novel. For example, the titles of Dragon Tattoo’s four major sections are derived from corporate rhetoric—“Incentive,” “Consequence Analyses,” “Mergers,” and “Hostile Takeover”—as is the epilogue’s title,“Final Audit”(449). Yet each of these snippets of business jargon is juxtaposed with statistics about women’s abuse in contemporary Sweden. Under “Part 1: Incentive ,” for example, we learn that “eighteen percent of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man” (9). Under “Part 2: Consequence Analyses,” readers are informed that “forty-six percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man” (103); under “Part 3: Mergers,” it is revealed that “thirteen percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to aggravated sexual assault outside of a sexual relationship” (217); and the statement paired with “Part 4: Hostile Takeover” tells us that “ninety-two 124 Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Kick Their Asses percent of women in Sweden who have been subjected to sexual assault have not reported the most recent violent incident to the police” (351). (Sources for these details are given on the novel’s copyright page in the original Swedish version; no sources are provided in the English translation.) This structural juxtaposition between corporate rhetoric and statistics on violence against women indicates that Larsson clearly intends to bring these two domains together in Dragon Tattoo. But to what end? Countering the popular notion that Larsson’s work is feminist, we link his narrative strategy to misogynist features of the novel that are frequently overlooked. We link these misogynistic features to the novel’s depiction of a welfare state in decline, in which market-driven considerations promote notions of transformative individualized action as opposed to collective or public justice. In fact, Dragon Tattoo’s emphasis on corporations and individualism masks the ethically jarring crimes of the story. These crimes are the cover-up and depreciation of the torture and murder of women—of cases that involve the most brutal corporatization of gender inequality today: the profitable sex trafficking of women and girls. Whereas corporate crimes are exposed in Dragon Tattoo and corporate inefficiencies rectified, the bestial crimes actually committed against women in the novel are suppressed and never brought to public awareness or trial. Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander get their hands on large sums of cash at the end, and all the viable corporations—those producing material goods or tangible services—are chugging along just fine after painless restructurings. Decline of the Swedish Model and Consensual Corporatism The novel’s primary corporate model is the Vanger Corporation and its figurehead, Henrik Vanger, a former business icon and ex-CEO who still shows characteristics of “the ruthless captain of industry from his days of power” (69). Henrik Vanger’s isolation in the wintry landscape of Hedeby, the Vanger Corporation’s headquarters, and Corporations, the Welfare State, and Covert Misogyny 125 his declining health can be seen as allusions to the downturn of a traditional Swedish corporate-industrial model with large companies closely tied to the agenda of the nation-state. Depicted as once having enjoyed the near-majestic level of the Wallenberg family (a prominent player in the actual Swedish economy), Henrik Vanger personifies big manufacturing corporations that have experienced better days. In his own words, “The Vanger companies will be consigned to the scrap heap of history” (70). The Vanger Corporation’s fate reflects the twentieth-century Swedish welfare state and the socalled Swedish Model, including its basis in consensual corporatism. Formulated between representatives of industrial employers and trade unions, this practice aligned the interests of major corporations with those of the Social Democratic party (Svenska Arbetarepartiet; SAP) and included agreements on wage and benefits negotations. Dragon Tattoo’s narrative nostalgically recalls Henrik...