Gender Conventions and the Use of Violence in Crime Fiction through Lisbeth Salander
| Autor | Maria del Mar Delgado Ricci |
| Páginas | 259-280 |
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GENDER CONVENTIONS AND THE USE
OF VIOLENCE IN CRIME FICTION THROUGH
LISBETH SALANDER
Maria del Mar Delgado Ricci
Along with media and theories, literary fiction –the criminal novel
as it’s what holds us here– has been and is another way to approach
violence, perhaps one of the ways that can be understood
not only as entertainment or simple fiction, but also
as a subterfuge, a resource or a strategy [...] allows us
to face and thus help to understand, to think
the unthinkable: human violence, and which,
at the outset, seems even more unthinkable,
that is the violence of women.
–María José Agra Romero (2015, p. 20)
Current societies seem to be doomed by the same ideas around men and
women that ruled in the past: on one hand, gender conventions about
men, their physical and emotional strength linked to economic power,
and women as natural carers, brought into the world to give birth and
embrace anyone with love and tender words. Although the world doesn’t
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Maria del Mar Delgado Ricci
work like that anymore, women still see themselves constantly fighting
against stereotyped constructions, to be able to get equal treatment and
life opportunities as men in every sense.
The imposition of stereotypes around gender have survived in time
and become part of the changes humanity have gone throughout its exis-
tence. The construction of new ways of government and social structures
as republics or democracies, for example, meant to boost every citizen’s
life quality no matter gender since the Ancient times, has been less im-
proving and noticed by women than it has been for men. Women haven’t
been able to enjoy the same kind of rights within governmental structures
and even when daring to face any type of gender repretions, developing
important roles in the construction of those new societies, leading big
project and even wars, they have been hardly known by the later genera-
tions. And this continued to be the same during the following centuries.
Whilst women used to work in factories alongside of their husbands
during the eighteenth century, towards the 1900’s “men increasingly
commuted to their place of work –the factory, shop or office. Wives,
daughters and sisters were left at home all day to oversee the domestic
duties that were increasingly carried out by servants” (Hughes, 2019,
par. 1). American and British crime fiction were born within these social
patterns; gender conventions that, by the end of the nineteenth-century,
mostly affected and framed the common citizen’s daily life.
This new writing brought to life the most renowned masculine fi-
gures of all times: Edgar Allan Poe’s Sr. August C. Dupin and Arthur
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, both within stories that represented
societies and responded to the Victorian reader’s need for excitement.
Like is said by Sharon J. Kobritz in Why Mystery and Detective Fiction
was a Natural Outgrowth of the Victorian Period: “love for puzzles and
maze, and their desire to learn more about modern scientific methods
[…] made mystery and detective fiction so popular” (2002, p. 16). Classic
crime fiction gave to the working class a literary genre that noticed them
and a hero to rely on, exposing social and cultural dynamics, building
itself around the exaltation of masculinity and then reinforcing gender
divisions as consequence.
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