“The Dandelion in the Spring”: Utopia as Romance in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games Trilogy

Publication year
2013
Pages
117–130
Comment

even as readers are raving about the ways Katniss can inspire young female readers by modeling a strong and competent heroine, a closer reading suggests that her character also imparts a very different message, one that tells girls the importance of growing up to find satisfaction in heterosexual love and the nuclear family. For all its attention to Katniss’s rebellion, The Hunger Games trilogy is, significantly, a love story, tracing Katniss’s fluctuating desires for two boys who fight alongside her. (117-118)

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She complains that Peeta’s public declaration of love has turned her “into some kind of fool in front of the entire country” and fears “he made me look weak!” (Hunger, 135). But while Katniss associates romance with vulnerability, their love story turns out to be an immeasurable aid. As expected, the crowd goes wild over their tale, increasing their appeal to sponsors who send them aid like food, water, and medicine in the arena. Their appeal to the audience is also an appeal to the reader—romance makes a good story. The citizens of Panem are glued to their TV screens watching Katniss’s romance unfold just as the reader eagerly turns the pages of the book wondering how the budding triangle will resolve. (119)

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In considering the ways romance is figured as strategic and then as sincere, I confess that throughout much of my first reading of the trilogy, I hoped Katniss would refuse the fictionalization of her life and the narrative of her love for Peeta that had been created without her consent. I thought she would wind up with Gale, not only because I agreed with People magazine’s assertion that the “boy back home” was “Katniss’s real soulmate,” but because I thought choosing Gale meant choosing her own path and rejecting the stories constructed about her. My surprise and disappointment that Katniss (spoiler alert) winds up with Peeta forced me to confront the ways I had willfully mis-read the novels. Gale is the revolutionary figure, the one who rails against the Capitol, seeks to initiate change, and actually does things besides get injured and pine for Katniss. But subsequent readings revealed to me the myriad ways in which the novels set up Peeta to be the “right” choice for Katniss. In working through the logic that informs the resolution of the courtship drama, I came to better understand the novels’ conception of change. What I missed in my first, hopeful reading is the extent to which the novels present Gale as the necessary but ultimately undesirable underside of revolutionary politics. Instead, Collins supports Peeta, loyal lover who dreams of a quiet and private home life as the end goal of utopia and the reason for social change. (120)

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That Peeta is associated with utopian gentleness and Katniss with dystopian violence, upsetting stereotypical gender associations, should not lead us to think that their gender roles are truly reversed or that the text offers more open examples of gender possibilities. The potential disruption of traditional gender roles in making Katniss the savior and Peeta the one who needs saving is superficial rather than substantive; after all, the good girl is supposed to help others, not be helped herself. (126)