The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo from a Marxist point of view
The theory of Marxism essentially is situated in the realm of economics. Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels suggest that the history of countries have been moulded by the struggle of the working class to achieve a myth of equality and fairness. The history of the world has been one of dynamic change from the principles of aristocracy and feudalism to capitalism and socialism. Capitalism is an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. Capitalism reproduces itself and keeps the exploited working class from rising up and overthrowing a system designed to exploit and alienate them not through the brutality of totalitarianism but rather by institutional naturalization (the quality of being brought into conformity with nature) (WordNet3.0) of the process via religion, the legal system, the educational system, and the government.
Throughout Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo social class and their economic struggle is a huge factor in how their life plays out. Lisbeth Salander essentially represents the working class proletariat. Though she works for a security company as one of their best personal detectives she has been categorized as socially incompetent from the age of 12 when she murdered her father, and has required a guardian since. By alienating the working class it only serves to highlight their struggle to gain power. However, a crucial element that Stieg Larsson integrates into his novel is the mental strength of his Goth punked-out cyber genius. Like many of the working class girls in the novel, Salander is exposed to sexual violence when she is raped by her new guardian in order to receive money. However her mental strength, bordering on psychopathic, enables her to seek revenge on