The Metamorphosis of Katniss Everdeen: The Hunger Games, Myth, and Femininity

While Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy explicitly includes Greco-Roman references, this essay argues that the trilogy also implicitly invokes the myths of Artemis and of Philomela. In obliquely referencing these mythic women, The Hunger Games provides its protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, with different possible paths of femininity that she can follow. By showing how both of these forms of femininity keep Katniss focused on vengeance, The Hunger Games points to the dangers of reproducing beliefs inherited from the past. Katniss’s ultimate rejection of both of these inherited types of femininity allows her to break free from her past and to change her society.