I feel the same way about Katniss Everdeen, and I’ve often wondered if she was named after one of my earlier heroines-Thomas Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene, who is equally adaptable, independent and courageous.
Collins’ trilogy is so famous and so ubiquitous and so delicious to read, that I think she often doesn’t get the credit she deserves for her vision of future dystopia from past inequality. The thirteen districts (from the original colonies), ruled by the excesses and vicious ennui of the parisitic oligarchy of the Capital are as much propetic satire as they are fiction -a fact caught on by Stephen Colbert when he adopts the Hunger Games Ring Master Persona to satirize our current political circus.
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I saw this same thing, in Eowyn and also, surprisingly, in Arwen. Both from the Lord of the Rings. Yes, the books were not about these females' experiences except as an interesting side line glimpse but they are there. Yes, Eowyn was a female warrior but Arwen gave up immortality in order to share just a few years with a man she loved and while she understood that she would out live him by hundreds if not at minimum a thousand years.
Yes, Katniss is my female heroine also and when I read the books I was in my 50s.
It's not only teenage girls, or young adults, who can be heroines. We All Can. Doing what's right, resisting what's wrong, and understanding the difference is all it takes. Many of us, people of every gender aspect, of all educational ranks, among all religions, in every nation are doing that every day. We write our own stories on our hearts.
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I’m not sure if you made it to Mockingjay, but she actually becomes a person who tosses away her convictions like they don’t matter in favor of putting her romantic life center stage, only to resolve her love triangle in the most arbitrary and perplexing way possible. She becomes a cliche of the “fickle woman,” as the book goes on to punish its fans for the investment they made in the series. I’d hold up Hermoine or half a dozen women from A Song of Ice and Fire as the kind of strong characters worth aspiring to be.
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The Hunger Games had a certain integrity, but, in general, the young adult genre offers the wrong lessons for female empowerment. Almost all of these stories peddle a fantasy of female power rooted in the supernatural. There's a reason that women and girls are fascinated by stories about witches Amazons, and magic. It's because they aren't offered realistic models for achieving power through using their brains (study math; major in science), their wealth (forget that underpaid nonprofit job; go for the bucks), or their leadership ability (speak up; run for office). Of course, much of society doesn't want women to think, to get rich, or to lead, but that's all the more reason that popular entertainment directed toward girls should buck the trend.
Katniss Everdeen is a fantasy, but Emma Gonzalez is real. If you want to talk about female rage in the service of change, don't let the former distract you from the latter.
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Well, admittedly I’m ancient, but when I was in HS, my crowd was all about Ellison, Salinger, Kafka, and Tom Wolfe William Burroughs or Isaac Asimov, in addition to the Dickens, Cather and Austin we read as part of our English curriculum. We’d even give Sontag or Sarte a go if we really wanted to show off to each other. Not that there wasn’t crap out there (what was Edgar Rice Burroughs if not proto-YA), but we weren’t looking for a tv show in book form. That the Paper or Record would print criticism that places Ms. Collins’ turgid prose in even the same paragraph with Orwell, just shows how low the paper has sunk.
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Wow!!!! I always admired her kind of bleak attitude, but you are so heavy into this character I got goosebumps!
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After reading the first book, I declared that Katniss was one of my favorite characters of all books, of all types. I loved her grit, courage and determination.
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