Lisbeth Salander
Lisbeth Salander is a fictional character created by Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson in his award-winning Millennium series. She first appeared in the 2005 novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as an antisocial computer hacker with a photographic memory who teams up with Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and publisher of a magazine called Millennium. Salander reappears in The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, sequels that Larsson had written before he died in 2004.
The character has been positively received, with David Denby writing that Lisbeth Salander clearly accounts for a large part of the Millennium series' success. In the various film adaptations of the novels, actresses Noomi Rapace, Rooney Mara, and Claire Foy have all received praise for their portrayals of the character. In 2013, publisher Norstedts Förlag commissioned David Lagercrantz to continue the Millennium series with The Girl in the Spider's Web, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye, and The Girl Who Lived Twice.
Creation
In the only interview he ever did about the series, Larsson stated that he based the character of Lisbeth Salanderon what he imagined Pippi Longstocking might have been like as an adult. In the Millennium series, Salander has the name "V. Kulla" displayed on the door of her apartment on the top floor of Fiskargatan 9 in Stockholm. "V. Kulla" is an abbreviation of "Villa Villekulla", the name of Pippi Longstocking's house.
Another source of inspiration was Larsson's niece, Therese. A rebellious teenager, she often wore black clothing and makeup, and told Larsson several times that she wanted to get a tattoo of a dragon. The author often emailed Therese while writing the novels to ask her about her life and how she would react in certain situations. She told him about her battle with anorexia and that she practiced kickboxing.
After his death, many of Larsson's friends said the character was inspired by an incident in which Larsson, then a teenager, witnessed three of his friends gang-raping an acquaintance of his named Lisbeth, and he did nothing to stop it. Days later, wracked with guilt, he begged her forgiveness, which she refused to grant. The incident, he said, haunted him for years afterward, and in part moved him to create a character with her name who was also a rape survivor. The veracity of this story has since been questioned, after a colleague from Expo magazine reported to Rolling Stone that Larsson had told him he had heard the story secondhand and retold it as his own.
Character profile
Lisbeth Salander has red hair which she dyes raven black. Upon her first appearance in the series, she is described as "a pale, androgynous young woman who has hair as short as a fuse, and a pierced nose and eyebrows".She has a tattoo of a wasp, about long, on her neck, a tattooed loop around the bicep of her left arm, another loop around her left ankle, a Chinese symbol on her hip, and a rose on her left calf. She has a large tattoo of a dragon on her back that runs from her shoulder, down her spine, and ends on her buttocks. This was changed in the English translation to a small dragon on her left shoulder blade. Salander visits a clinic in Genoa between the first and second books, where she had her wasp tattoo removed as she felt it was "too conspicuous and it made her too easy to remember and identify". She also has a breast enlargement, having previously "been flat-chested, as if she had never reached puberty. She thought had looked ridiculous, and she was always uncomfortable showing herself naked".
Salander is a world-class computer hacker. Under the pseudonym "Wasp", she becomes a prominent figure in the international hacker community known as the Hacker Republic. She uses her computer skills as a means to earn a living, doing investigative work for Milton Security. She has an eidetic memory and is skillful at concealing her identity; she possesses passports in different names and disguises herself to travel undetected around Sweden and worldwide.
Salander has a complicated relationship with investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist, which veers back and forth between romance and hostility throughout the series. She also has an on-again/off-again romantic relationship with Miriam "Mimi" Wu.
Personality
The survivor of a traumatic childhood, Salander is highly introverted and asocial, and has difficulty connecting to people and making friends. She is particularly hostile to men who abuse women and takes special pleasure in exposing and punishing them. This is representative of Larsson's personal views and a major theme throughout the entire series. In the series, Blomkvist speculates that Salander might be on the autism spectrum. Her mental state is never definitively described, an ambiguity that many antagonists in the series try to use against her: her sexually abusive public guardian, Nils Bjurman, describes her as "a sick, murderous, insane fucking person", while her one-time jailer Dr. Peter Teleborian describes her as "paranoid", "psychotic", "obsessive", and an "egomaniacal psychopath".On the other hand, Larsson stated that he thought that she might be looked upon as something of an unusual kind of sociopath, due to her traumatic life experiences and inability to conform to social norms.
In the book The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, on the question "Is Salander a psychopath?", Melissa Burkley, Ph.D. and Dr. Stephanie Mullins-Sweatt write: "Although Salander is antagonistic and violent, she doesn't appear to lack a conscience, which is the hallmark trait of a psychopath. While she may not always follow society's rules, she does have her own set of moral principles that abide by a code of right and wrong."
At the end of the third book in the series, Salander is declared sane and competent:
Writers have described Salander as a "fiercely unconventional and darkly kooky antiheroine", a "superhero", a "misfit", and "an androgynous, asocial, bisexually active... loner who makes a living as a computer hacker..." Jennie Punter in Queen's Quarterly wrote that "the diminutive, flat-chested, chain-smoking, tattoo-adorned, anti-social, bisexual, genius computer hacker Lisbeth Salander" has become "one of the most compelling characters in recent popular fiction".
Storyline in books
''Millennium ''series
''The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo''
In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth Salander is introduced as a gifted, but deeply troubled, researcher and computer hacker working for Milton Security. Her boss, Dragan Armansky, commissions her to research disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist at the behest of a wealthy businessman, Henrik Vanger. When Blomkvist finds out that Salander hacked his computer, he hires her to assist him in investigating the disappearance of Vanger's grandniece, Harriet, 40 years earlier. Salander uses her research skills to uncover a series of murders, dating back decades and tied to Harriet's disappearance. During the investigation, Salander and Blomkvist become lovers.The novel reveals Salander was declared legally incompetent as a child and is under the care of legal guardian Holger Palmgren, one of the few people in the world she trusts and cares for. When Palmgren suffers a stroke, the court appoints her a new guardian: Nils Bjurman, a sadist who forces Salander to perform oral sex in return for access to her allowance. In a second sex session at his flat, he violently rapes and sodomizes her, unaware that she is recording his actions with a hidden camera. A few days later, she returns to his flat and, after disabling him with a taser, tapes his mouth and fastens him to his bed with his own bondage equipment, and finally sodomizes him with a huge anal plug. She then explains that she will release the video recording of him raping her if he does not do exactly what she tells him, or if anything happens to her. She demands that he annul her legal incompetence and restore her sole access to her bank account. She tells him that she will visit him when she pleases, and if she ever finds him with a woman, even if she is with him willingly, she will release the tape and destroy his life. Finally, she tattoos the words "I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT, AND A RAPIST" on his abdomen, unlocks his handcuffs, and departs.
Salander eventually uncovers evidence that Harriet's late father, Gottfried, and her brother, Martin, committed the murders. Salander then finds Blomkvist just in time to save him from Martin, who is in the midst of torturing him. She pursues Martin on her motorcycle, but he is killed when he deliberately veers into an oncoming truck. Salander later uses her hacking skills to discover that Harriet Vanger is alive and hiding in Australia, and to get sensitive information about Blomkvist's arch-nemesis, corrupt media magnate Hans-Erik Wennerström. With the information uncovered by Salander, Blomkvist publishes an exposé article and book that ruins Wennerström and transforms Blomkvist's magazine, Millennium, into one of the most respected and profitable in Sweden.
During her investigation of Wennerström, Salander uses her hacking skills and a series of disguises to withdraw billions of Swedish kronor from Wennerström's off-shore accounts. She anonymously reveals the address of Wennerström's final hideout to a lawyer with criminal connections, and Wennerström is murdered three days later, supposedly owing much money to the drug cartels.
At the end of the book, Salander acknowledges to herself that she has fallen in love with Blomkvist. On her way with a Christmas present to tell him so, however, she sees him with his longtime lover, Millennium editor Erika Berger. Heartbroken, Salander dumps the present in the garbage and cuts off all contact with him.