The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Essay

Thinking of Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, David Copperfield, Pippi Longstocking, Mowgli in The Jungle Book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, many of the most powerful characters in our best-loved stories are orphaned, adopted, fostered or found. For many years and centuries abandoned children and orphans have been a prominent motif in literature. We can find them in modern children's literature as well as in old folk tales. The origins of the orphan hero reach far back in history with religious bible stories like Moses or the realms of mythology and folk tales. In the Roman tale of Romulus and Remus we see orphaned twins raised and nurtured by a female wolf, later adopted by a herdsman and in the end rising to become the founders of

However, it was in the 19th century that the orphan hero rose to prominence in literature and became an established archetypical protagonist. Due to high mortality rates at that century orphans were commonplace: 'On 1 January 1852, 40,557 children were in workhouses in England and Wales: of these approximately 52 per cent, 21,038, were orphans or deserted children.’ This visible large number of orphans during that era, coupled with its role in literature, brought a disruptive and dramatic element into society and lead to attention of many great authors- George Eliot, Rudyars Kipling, the Bronte sisters, and William Makepeace Thackeray, who are all authors that adjusted their heroes to what the majority of the aimed population would be able to identify themselves with. Another famous orphan's hero author was Charles Dickens, whose novels David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations each told a told the story of a poverty-stricken, boy orphan rising through the ranks of society, against the odds, to gain fortune and success. In comparison to the heroic stories of myth and fairytale, these Victorian authors however wrote stories, which explored the harsh realism of the