Katniss Motherhood

Motherhood, whether explored as an abstract concept or a concrete form, affects everyone and everything. Suzanne Collins’ trilogy The Hunger Games includes the protagonist Katniss Everdeen’s mother being emotionally and psychologically absent after the death of her husband leading Katniss to become the sole provider of her family, this forces her to resent her mother as she is not a survivor like Katniss is. The absence of Katniss’ parents is the catalyst that shapes the novels and subconsciously leads her to victory.

The introductory chapter of The Hunger Games reflects the protective mother nature of Mrs Everdeen, before she became unstable, to keep Katniss safe as the hierarchy in Panem puts District 12 at the bottom. ‘When I was younger,

Good hunting partners are hard to find” (p. 10). Katniss isn’t jealous if Gale gets married because she likes him romantically but because he is a fellow hunter in the woods who also provides for his family. ‘Because if it had become known that my mother could no longer care for us, the district would have taken us away from her and placed us in the community home.’ (p.31). Barry states that feminist critics ‘Challenge representations of women as ‘Other’ as ‘lack’ as part of ‘nature’[…] Examine power relations […] seeing reading as a political act and showing the extent of patriarchy […] (Barry, p.128). Katniss’ mother is unable to look after her family as she is suffering from depression after the death of her husband, the traditional role of women was seen as a mother and a wife but she is neither as she is unable to cope, in the novel she is unnamed and in the film she is merely titled ‘Mrs Everdeen’ like she is not a person of her own accord but merely the widow of someone. Furthermore The Hunger Games defamiliarises gender, Post structuralism’s Queer Theory states that identities are not fixed ‘[…] some of the power and

When a person says the word ‘mother’ the word is a sign that indicates the meaning/the image/the sound. Saussure ‘emphasised that the meanings given to words are completely arbitrary’ (Barry, p.40). ‘Meaning is always attributed to the object or idea by the human mind’ (Barry, p.42). The world runs on signs that if ‘the meaning of any one of these words would be altered if any one of the others were removed from the chain’ (Barry. P.41). the meaning of the word would be