Violence and Uxory

I just read “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and while I frankly enjoyed the novel it won’t be in my top ten reads this year, for although I loved Larsson’s depiction of strong and in charge female characters well enough even to pick up the next book, I felt the depictions of violence against women to be far too much. Well, perhaps just too much for my sensitivities, I also skipped the graphic novel I mention here and here because of its violence.

I will say I did at least appreciate Larsson’s feminist outrage over violence against women, so much so that I think the woman in my “Constrain-ment Complete” story, which I wrote just after I finished his book, ended up a little bit over the top. I don’t know, however, if Larsson’s outrage was infectious through his good writing, or if I was merely traumatized by the horrific depictions.

Apropos of the subject I also recently happened across UCLA psychologist Rena L. Repetti’s essay, Searching for the Roots of Marital Conflict in Uxorcides and Uxorious Husbands, which appears in “Couples in Conflict” (Pennsylvania State, 2001). Where Larsson dealt largely with the grotesqueries of psychotic men who ‘just hate women’, the reality is most often such violence occurs in the context of an intimate relationship (not that this is any better, indeed it may be worse) and Repetti is not the first to suggest such relationship violence may have its roots in a failure to meet expected levels of cooperation on an everyday level — a failure that simply escalates.

But, Repetti ends with a very good point: in addition to closely scrutinizing these violent men’s psychology and their relationships, someone should perhaps also look closely at the functional dynamics of uxorious men, men who cooperate in comparable extreme, to see how things work by positive contrast.

Which brings me back to Larsson, because it’s clear he was also offering a similar juxtaposition via his somewhat uxorious male lead character, but since in my case he’s preaching to the choir, when I read his next book I fully intend to skip over the violence parts in favor of the parts I like.