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

Abstract

The most famous vengeful heroine in contemporary crime fiction is Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, but she has many avenging soulmates. This chapter explores the tradition of the post-feminist avenging angel in contemporary crime fiction, with a particular focus on Scandinavian crime fiction. While Carol Clover has argued that rape-revenge stories fit into the horror genre (1992: 3–59), they also play a central role in contemporary crime fiction. Taking Jacinda Read’s investigation of the rape-revenge cycle as a starting point (2000: 241–248), and considering melodrama as a dramatic mode where the core function is to make the readers feel sympathy for the victim-heroine (Williams 2001: xiv, 24, 29–32 et passim), I want to investigate the dominance of female victim-avengers in Scandinavian crime fiction, and the importance of expressive strategies and melodramatic structures in novels that present the female avenger as the point of identification. To bring some features of the avenger into starker relief, I will also discuss her appearance in a few Anglo-American crime novels. I begin by demonstrating how crime fiction, through the incorporation of some of the features of melodrama, has come to blur the boundaries between investigators, victims, and perpetrators. Through an analysis of a representative sample of Scandinavian and Anglophone crime novels by Hakan Nesser, Unni Lindell, Peter Robinson, and Sara Paretsky, I examine how female protagonists and their traumatic involvement in a primal scene of sexual violence are used in these works to raise rovocative questions about the relationship between the detective and the criminal, and between the culprit and the victim.