ABSTRACT
As Katniss Everdeen fights the oppressive government of Panem in Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy, she also works to sort out her feelings for the two significant men in her life, Gale Hawthorne, her best friend and hunting partner, and Peeta Melark, a fellow District Twelve resident and 74th Hunger Games co-victor. At the end of the trilogy, we learn that Katniss has married Peeta, had two children with him, and retired from public life rather than take a more active role in shaping Panem. This essay came about in part due to the reactions of some of my friends to the Trilogy’s conclusion. They were disturbed that Collins’s strong, independent feminist heroine had succumbed to the “marriage plot,” in which female characters become fully adult through matrimony and motherhood rather than through developing an identity that is not primarily located within the domestic sphere. Because the institutions of marriage and motherhood are still heavily influenced by patriarchy, female characters whose adult identities revolve around being wives and mothers are shorn of agency. Indeed, my friends’ feelings echoed those of critic Katherine Broad, who felt that “the series’ conclusion in an epic heroine defaulting to a safe, stable, and highly insular heterosexual reproductive union” so much like the “social and sexual status quo of our world” (125) raises questions about just what the revolution has changed. As a result of my friends’ reactions to Collins’s ending, I questioned whether or not Katniss’s choice represented a need to retreat from everything associated with the horrors of the Hunger Games and the subsequent war to overthrow Panem’s rulers, or if it might be the result of deeper and often invisible forces that have been molding Katniss all her life. Using Michel Foucault’s theories about power, I elucidate what might have shaped Katniss’s choice in order to explain why it is instructive to Collins’s teen female readers.
