46
Popular Culture Review
yet faced. She had been vulnerable to all these men at one point and they took
advantage when they could, but if she had been stronger, they would not have
become sinners. “Salander had been the perfect solution. She was
defenseless .. . The opportunity makes the thief’ (43, The Girl Who Played with
Fire), “There can be no man that wants you, [as you are]” as Zala Slander’s
(Lisbeth’s father) complained (690, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet *s Nest). In
the minds of these men the girl cannot exist even as an idea unless a man needs
her. If his need takes an ugly shape, then it is her business to change her form as
well. But Lisbeth sees through this kind of recreation and this makes her
dangerous. “You’re just an ordinary asshole who hates women,” (693, The Girl
Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest) she says. Zala sees no harm in being a beast but
is offended by the continued existence of a child who keeps calling him names.
The guileless girl child who inspired his degeneracy will not shut up so she
needs to go. “It is best if you just disappear,” (695, The Girl Who Kicked the
Hornet's Nest) he says, voicing the opinion of all of Lisbeth’s rapists, for in the
male mind in this world her disappearance fixes the problem of their sin.
There is something about the little girl that is untenable. She cannot control
the monsters that hunt her, and because she cannot stop the beasts, they show
their true faces and this is her sin. In this view humans are in essence untamed
wailing beings that need to be controlled in order to be civilized. It is an anxious
view of the human heart, people as criminals and sinners at core who can only
be trusted when they are forced to behave. Those who cannot discipline this
walking wilderness are guilty of failing to provide. It does not matter that the
little girls should be safe in male hands, what matters is that if the girls did not
exist in the first place, the molesters could not molest. Opportunity makes these
girls guilty. It is their shapelessness, and a budding but veiled sexuality, that
allow their captors to project their dirty selves onto the children who may be too
young to tame the beast but are members of society and so are tasked with doing
so. In the hands of male writers this waif becomes the clay upon which they
seem to imprint their most festering sense of selves. Little boys are probably too
like men to be a workable solution, but the little girl is meant to be under male
protection all her life one way or another and so the monster is free to reface her
because he is meant to protect her. Our three transfigured and trashed little girls
stand firm in the end but they are mothers to their masters, in story anyway. And
the men who have shaped these nymphets seemed to have located a visceral
center with which readers and writers seem to relate. She is me, Humbert might
say, but we might say this too. Maybe she is the center of ourselves that we
never feel we protect well enough. The girls are disposable in part because they
have no power and in part because they are only girls for a moment. Once they
change one way or another, what has been done to them goes away as well and
if they can be silenced until then, no one is guilty of a thing. She is a vessel
without insides. So we rework her outsides in order to save ourselves from our
own sordid interiors (and our criminal missteps). We take young female figures
shrift of sexuality and maturity and make them glow with example and metaphor