attributable to the Twilight phenomenon, but it's definitely true that in the two and
a half years since .... itself She has a quasi-Marxist revelation about one of her.
HUNGER PANGS Last suminer's giddy midnight release parties for a book called Mockingjay, attended by hundreds of people, marked the conclusion of the dystopian trilogy of young-
HUNTING FOR THE PERFEGT HEROINE BY SARAH SELTZER ILLUSTRATIONS BY KRISTINA ROWELL
adult books known as The Hunger Games series. These days, heated discussion about the casting for the forthcoming screen adaptation of the trilogy pepper Entertainment Weekly and other industry chroniclers. With its popularity, its readability, its bow-wielding heroine, Katniss Everdeen, and its unflinchingly political tale-telling, the series has been posited as both a successor and an alternative to that previous YA juggernaut. Twilight. Katniss herself has been
It's not strictly accurate to say that the success of The Hunger Games series is attributable to the Twilight phenomenon, but it's definitely true that in the two and a half years since Suzanne CoUins's books made the scene, they've been praised as much for what they don't portray—sparkly, supernatural stalker boyfriends, glorified abstinence, skipping college to be impregnated with vampire spawn—as what they do. But as the même pitting the two series against each other continues to blossom in coverage of their broadening franchises, it's worth asking whether the Team Bella vs. Team Katniss argument is a faulty dichotomy, a projection from grown-ups concerntrolling Twilight-mania. It's true that the two series, whose first books were published three years apart, do have surface similarities. (The first book in Collins's series. The Hunger Games, now even arrives with a blurb from Twilight scribe Stephenie Meyer on the cover.) Both have a teenage female narrator who catapults readers through her story at a breathless pace, with an occasional twist of wry humor. Both of those narrators are embroiled in a love triangle, each caught between two young male suitors; and in both, the accompanying canoodling stays firmly at first base until the final book in the series. Both heroines get bruised, burned, and threatened, and must be rescued by (and rescue) their love interests at regular intervals. And both series revel in gore. The violent birth of Bella's vampire baby in the final Twilight book is memorably disgusting, while Collins's books—called by the New York Times Magazine "war stories for kids"—serve up a new round of ultraviolence every few pages. Finally, both series count adults among their most devoted and vocal fans. The Twilight books famously spawned groups of Edward-obsessed thirty- and fortysomethings who read along with their daughters and were made just as breathless by the series' sullen, undead heartthrob. A 2010 essay in the New York Times Book Review > >
endlessly championed over Twilight's besotted Bella Swan, plague of the feminist imagination and Mary Sue extraordinaire. SUMMER.11 I ISSUE N O . 5 1
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A 2010 ESSAY IN THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW POSITED THE NUMBER OF NEW YORK LITERATI OBSESSED WITH THE HUNGER GAMES AS AN URRERGRUST ANSWER TO SO-GALLED TWILIGHT MOMS. posited the number of New York literati obsessed with The Hunger Games as an upper-crust answer to these so-called Twilight moms. But all of these traits, to a certain extent, are characteristic of YAfiction.And the similarities between the Twilight and The Hunger Games series pretty much stop there. In fact, in many ways the books are opposites; While one vividly captures romantic pining, another taps into anti-authoritarian rage. While the one-note refrain in Twilight is lust and desire to the exclusion of the world, the teen heroine in The Hunger Games has to step up and confront that world in all its ugliness. And so Katniss Everdeen's value as a feminist heroine—her engagement with her surroundings, and her ultimate decision to stand up for more people than herself^also explains why she's far more than the newmodel Bella Swan. Like many a i6-year-old, Katniss trusts no one over 30, and in her case she has ample reason. The world of The Hunger Games is an unforgettably dark one. In the vague future. North America is renamed "Panem" and divided into districts controlled by a wealthy and powerful "Capitol." A constant scarcity of food keeps Panem's citizens from rising up. As a reminder of their subjugation, each district takes part in an annual tradition called "the reaping," at which the government selects teen tributes to fight in the aptly named Hunger Games, a televised, days-long death match in an enormous arena. The sole survivor wins. To make it worse, Panem's Capitol provides its deprived citizens with extra grain when they submit their children's names to the reaping more than once. As in our society, therefore the poorest are far more likely to fight and die while others watch from a safe distance.
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Katniss volunteers for the games only so her more vulnerable younger sister won't have to compete, and her desire to win the contest and protect her family gradually grows into a public defiance of both the games and the Capitol itself. Over the course of the series' three books, she finds herself not only the unwitting center of the action in the deadly arena, but the emblem of a revolutionary impulse that sweeps all of Panem. And in the series' final book, Mockingjay, Katniss begins to suspect that nobody who wields weapons in Panem is without fault—including herself
But does that automatically make her a feminist heroine? In September 2OIO, Salon's Laura Miller made the provocative argument that though Katniss is unquestionably more "empowered" than Twilight's Bella on the surface, she's also a character with less articulated desires. One thing you can say about Bella Swan, though: She knows what she wants. For the two hooks leading up to Mockingjay, Katniss acts decisively and often effectively, but only when she's hacked into a corner... What does Katniss realty want? it's hard to say.
Miller is correct to note that Katniss's most intimate aspirations are often shrouded, while Bella has only one desire—Edward—that is amply on display. But to stop the comparison there misses the context of these characters' lives: Bella epitomizes privilege, while Katniss struggles in
a world without it. Katniss is reactive, responding to her life's debilitating constraints (hunger, persecution, and the fear of death), while Bella behaves as if almost nothing—money, family, safety, concern for mortals— matters beyond the fulfillment of her own star-crossed love story. The simplicity of her desire, and Stephenie Meyer's dogged refusal to allow rational logic to enter her heroine's considerations—has an undeniable appeal. Bella enters adulthood without any tradeoffs and tough decisions. Would that we could all do so. In the fourth and final Twilight book. Breaking Dawn, Bella, now undead herself, accepts the continued presence of the human-eating, mercilessly cruel vampire council called the Volturi, just as long as they leave her family alone. These creepy vamps depart, presumably to terrorize others, and Bella lives cloyingly ever after. She even ends up miraculously overcoming her insatiable hunger for her human relatives and stays composed while Grandpa, who smells like dinner, dandles the baby bloodsucker on his knee. It's not a great quest narrative, but Bella is a blank slate upon which, in classic MarySue fashion, readers can project their own wish for a protected life. Katniss, meanwhile, has to make calculated choices while knowing her ending is never destined to be happy, and she eventually realizes that shielding those close to her isn't enough. In the series' second book. Catching Fire, Katniss has moved away from despising those who benefit from the system toward blaming the system itself She has a quasi-Marxist revelation about one of her competitors: "To hate the boy from District l... seems inadequate. It's the Capitol 1 hate for doing this to all of us." She understands that the government is so powerful and so vindictive that her family will always be unsafe, as will everyone else's, as long as the Capitol remains in power. Eventually she evolves even further, from distrusting the Capitol to distrusting the rebels who oppose it by force of arms, too. In the final book, Katniss suffers a crippling loss she'd long hoped to avoid: She cannot insulate her loved ones from the reverberations of total war. This message is far more realistic than Twilight's, but the misery Katniss faces, while compelling, will hardly offer comfort. In fact, it's terrifying.
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TO STAGK THE BOOKS AGAINST EAGH OTHER WITHOUT GONTEXT ASSUMES THAT ALL ROPl> LAR BOOKS FOR YOUNG~ ^' FEMALE READERS MUST GOMRETEINTHESAME OATEGORY-A FALLAGY FEMINISTS WOULD RAIL AGAINST IN THE WORLD OF GROWN-UR LITERATURE. Like other YA heroines, of course, Katniss is sometimes painfully oblivious to her surroundings. Blinded by fury, she sees enemies everywhere and takes too long to grasp the obvious development that a revolution has been fomenting in her name, or that a pair of teenage boys are tripping over themselves to win her scowling favor. So Katniss's personal "empowerment" is limited by the intersectional oppressions of poverty, her obligation to those she loves, and her body's appropriation as a symbol. As a result, her ability to find and articulate her "happily ever after" is always limited by peril—both mortal and moral. But she attempts to find her own personal agency and integrity anyway. So for those readers who struggle to find their own voice beneath the weight of social and familial burdens, Katniss's story is an inspiration, but it's an inspiration grounded in difficult moral and philosophical questions that are very applicable to our own world, and also reminiscent of it. Some critics have noted that the arena where the Hunger Games play out is a powerful symbol specifically because it stands in for that very public battleground of adolescence; the hallways of high school. But teenagers don't merely confront the fact that their particular phase of life is a dystopia. They begin to realize that the world, for people of all ages, is as well. Teens, even the lucky ones, eventually begin to notice the way some people start with more and others have less, the way bad authority, from a corrupt government to an arbitrary teacher, is often obeyed mindlessly. They observe how some people, because of beauty or charm or social privilege, get away with things that others don't. They
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are torn between trying to learn how to game the system themselves and wondering why it has to exist the way it does. Some will hope to live a life Uke Bella's—self-protective at all costs and removed from the unfairness of life. Others will ask, as Katniss does, whether they're the ones who should work to change things for the better, and consider how much they'd be willing to sacrifice to see justice done. Many will make different choices on different days—just as sometimes they'll choose to read books that are silly and escapist, and other times they'll choose to read books that challenge and scare them. And this, more than anything, is why it's too easy to say that the success of The Hunger Games series must be the natural antidote to years of Twilight mania. Because though we may think that one series' message is terrible and the other's commentary astute, what makes us think that young adults are swallowing both with equal credulity? Could it be that they serve very different purposes for different readers? To stack them against each other without context, while tempting, assumes that aU popular books for young female readers with female protagonists must compete in the same category. And that's a fallacy feminists would rail against in the world of grown-up literature—if, say, speculative fiction by Margaret Atwood and paranormal romance by Charlaine Harris were compared to each other, or if we were urged by well-meaning folks to put down the latter and pick up the former. The forthcoming Hunger Games films, a hot topic of discussion on almost every media blog already, are poised to continue the trend of eager adult interest in the fate of this story. Can they be PG-13? Should they be PG-13? Somehow, Hollywood will find a way to please and piss off fans. But for adults who number themselves among those fans. The Hunger Games allows us to get absorbed in a fast-paced, emotionally intense narrative without the shame (and perhaps uncomfortable pleasure) that avidly following Twilight's antifeminist narrative evokes. But let's not project that onto the YA literary landscape and force a binary on voracious young readers who are probably reading both series, and many others in between, and drawing their own conclusions. O SoroK S e t t e r is an associate editor at AlterNet and a freelance writer based in New York City. Find her at sarahmseltzer.com.
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