Making Fun of the Make-believe: How The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest Takes Revenge on the Discourse of Power
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Abstract
This study investigates the courtroom section in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest to explore how the discourse of power is exploited to privilege some and exclude others, and to explain how such institutionalised power can be mimicked, ridiculed and ultimately made irrelevant through cunning courtroom strategies and shifty postmodern theories. The results reveal that scientific knowledge is essentialised and monopolised by the state through practices that brand the female protagonist as insane and deprive her of the most basic form of legal rights. In addition, sanity and insanity alike are shown to be mere representations of the imaginary as they are both mimicable; the sane can act insane and vice versa. Their truth value, consequently, becomes indistinct and unjustifiable. Essentially, the truth that the trial has set out to justify remains as elusive at the end as it was at the beginning of the novel.
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