“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” (post 3) by Stieg Larsson: Not The Author’s Intended Title

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (original title in Swedish: Män som hatar kvinnor, (“Men Who Hate Women” ) is a psychological thriller novel by Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson (1954–2004). It was published posthumously in 2005, translated into English in 2008, and became an international bestseller” (1).

When character Michael Blomkvist says Lisbeth Salander is weird, and possibly on the autistic spectrum, he is reacting to the persona she had adopted to deter men who hate women, and he is also trying to stifle his own feelings of being attracted to her. By the end of the novel, when Lisbeth is convinced that he does not hate her and would not abuse her, she has fallen in love with him, as might any character with basically normal psychology.

The novel’s simplest and clearest statement of her true psychology is this: “Salander worked in a trancelike state” (2, p. 606), which is the psychology of most novelists when they are most involved in writing a novel, and also of the title character of that famous multiple personality novel, Trilby, who was a tone deaf young woman, hypnotized by Svengali to develop the alternate personality of a singing superstar (3). Various great, normal novelists—for example, Stephen King—have explicitly said that they enter a trancelike state when they write.

1.Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_with_the_Dragon_Tattoo

2. Stieg Larsson. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo [2005]. Trans. Reg Keeland. New York, Vintage Books, 2011.

3. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilby_(novel)