Literary Traditions on Fire: Mimetic Desire and the Role of the Orphaned Heroine in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games Trilogy

Suzanne Collins’s Katniss Everdeen has been widely celebrated as an empowered rebellious girl protagonist due to her androgyny; however, Katniss’s stereotypically masculine traits represent a superficial change and not a revision of historical gender roles. Although Katniss, orphaned in the context of a patriarchal society, does not require saving as traditional girl orphans do, she remains a reactive object instead of an active agent in her story, as supported by three Girardian triangles of mimetic desire. Relative to Peeta, the Capitol, Gale, and District Thirteen, Katniss is an object instead of the subject, undermining her “empowered” narrative role.