Why I like The Hunger Games (Pt 3): The love triangle that wasn't

Twilight and Cassandra Clare's Infernal Devices are prime examples of the angst-ridden heroine tormented by her attraction to, and need to choose between two equally compelling alternative potential lovers.  As Candace in Disney's Phineas and Ferb puts it, "Imagine if you had to choose between a bloodthirsty undead walking corpse and a slobbering lupine man-beast as a boyfriend...."  What girl could resist that?  (To be fair, that is not exactly the choice in Clare's novels.  In those novels, you have two angel-spawn demonfighter boys who are closer than brothers.  Yeah.)  But in spite of the presence of two boys, and of fans who want to belong to "Team Gale" or "Team Peeta," there is no love triangle in The Hunger Games.  Yes, I stand by that assertion.  In fact, the novels sort of subvert the love-triangle trope in Young Adult lit by pointing out the "young" part of the equation--without being condescending or reductive about it.  This is a bold move considering that this stuff does sell to the intended audience, but it is also a clever move, considering that The Hunger Games trilogy is about subversion, as much as it is about anything else.  It practically gives kids a handbook explaining what political subversion is (more on this later...)

So when I say that there's no love triangle in The Hunger Games, I am not ignoring the fact that there are two boys who seem to be more or less in love with the heroine.  Nor am I failing to acknowledge the affection and the sense of obligation that Katniss feels toward each one.  However, I am starting from the premise that when you're talking about a "love triangle," it's not really about him, it's about her.  How is she going to act, whom is she going to choose? The exception might be Marion Zimmer Bradley's portrayal of Lancelot in The Mists of Avalon. In that novel, it really was about Lancelot for the reader, who probably came away wanting Lancelot, and if not Lancelot, it was about Morgaine (Le Fay--remember her?), who wanted Lancelot not to want Gwenhwyfar.  In the usual convention, the two men are there. They compete--and exist--for her pleasure.  Or torment.  Whatever.  The existential dilemma belongs solely to the female, who no doubt ponders it incessantly.  But we already know that Katniss is not the pondering type. So what are those two boys doing there?

First of all, Gale and Peeta exist--as literary devices--in order to evoke the love triangle.  I did have a student in my college-level children's lit course tell me that The Hobbit was a "boy book" because it didn't include a love interest.  So perhaps if it is to be a novel directed towards girls of a certain age, there has to be a love interest or particular love interest in addition to the female protagonist?  I'm going to leave that one up in the air.  It is certainly true that the expectation is out there.  But in The Hunger Games, the purpose of evoking the love triangle seems to be entirely different.  Is there jealousy on the part of the boys?  Yes, but it's understated.  Does Katniss wonder if she is betraying one or the other of them?  It comes up every now and then, but it is not her central focus.  Frankly, it can't be.  There are more important things to worry about.

Katniss's approach to both boys is very practical.  She is also loyal to each one.  Both of these are traits associated with ISTJs, if you were curious!  So in fact, the boys are there to show Katniss's key character traits in their best and most troubling light.  Her inability to "choose" between them is not a product of her feminine weakness and vacillation, or indeed, of her introspection and self-doubt.  Rather, the choice between them is not an immediate need, and since she feels affection of a sort (albeit a sort that is secondary to affection for her sister) for them, and since these boys are boys to whom she feels a sharp loyalty, she resists the choice.  If this were Lord of the Flies--and it might have been--her loyalty to Peeta would have dissolved in the arena.  But it isn't.  And it wasn't.  And that is a significant commentary on human nature by way of Katniss--and might also represent a sort of footnote to Lord of the Flies.

On the other hand, both male characters serve to instruct the reader (if not necessarily Katniss) on some of the deeper issues involved with male-female relationships.  By eschewing the typical roles into which novels place boy and girl, we are able to get a more sophisticated portrait of interpersonal relationships than is common in Young Adult novels (I am not partial to that designation, but a friend has convinced me that "teen literature" is an inferior term).

So what about Gale?  Gale shows the reader that a boy and a girl can be friends... except when they're not.  Okay, maybe they can't be, unless both are asexual.  And Katniss, let's face it, is fairly asexual.  She is completely chaste--without meaning to be.  This is a point that is made explicit in Catching Fire, when she is mocked both by Fennick, the exploited and oversexed, and by Johanna, tree girl.  Gale grows to feel that way for Katniss, but they begin as rivals, then hunting buddies with an almost brother-sister thing.  He is already grown up--in a way--when they meet, and as she grows up, he sees her differently.  It's a little creepy when you think of it--and isn't there something like this in Twilight?  But he's not really on her radar.  Because she doesn't have that sort of radar.  She's only 16.  She's not ready to marry.  She may never be ready to marry.  But more on that in a minute.  The complexities here are when romantic awareness and attraction enter into a male-female friendship, and when the two friends have different intentions or goals.  Gale's and Katniss's goals are very different, though Gale assumes they see eye-to-eye.  And don't underestimate the "challenge"--Katniss is, for Gale, close and yet unattainable, and as he is something of a charmer, well... he's a pretty realistic character himself.

Peeta, on the other hand, is hers to lose from the beginning.  Literally.  But he won't go away.  He represents a courtly lover.  He has been content to watch and admire her from afar.  But sometimes, in such circumstances, interaction is necessary.  Or forced.  Or in this case, potentially deadly.  So maybe not a terribly realistic scenario... and yet...  Lizzie doesn't like Mr. Darcy very much, but he grows on her.  Their love begins as animosity and blooms into a love that is like friendship.  And this is a trope in its own right--and one that Jane Austen even mocks on occasion as she employs it.  Lizzie is no coquette, and neither is Katniss.  But both experience complex feelings ranging from resentment to affection that are difficult to understand.  And perhaps because it is a contemporary representation rather than an 18th Century courtship, or a novel with all of the conventions of the novel--like, say, dialogue--that I have come to expect as a contemporary reader, I find Katniss's evolving non-relationship with Peeta more realistic.  As futuristic alternate-reality dystopian adventure novel relationships that mean life-or-death go.  Treading lightly to avoid hurting someone is a common--and complex situation.  Casting off the person because you just can't deal with their affections--also realistic.  And having the person persist.  And persist.  And persist.  Well, that can happen, too.  And if their love is unconditional, and is willing to wait and let you be who you are--then, wow.

Brokenness is real, too.  And Katniss, Peeta, and Gale are each, at one point or another, studies in brokenness.  And how relationships can heal--or else, can heighten--that brokenness.

Finally, the love triangle isn't a love triangle because it's not all about sex.  After all, it wasn't an issue that Lancelot was in love with Guinevere until they consummated their desire.  Before that, it was courtly and proper.  So when teen novels have "love triangles," even when the love is supposedly chaste, it's all about sex.  Specifically, it's about when SHE is going to have sex and WITH WHOM.  Because we all know the boys are ready and willing, right?  Well, maybe not specifically.  Rather, it's like sex is this inevitable... ahem... black hole that the heroine is drawn toward (wait, shouldn't that be the guy?  never mind...) and the reader is dragged along for the ride because all of this is dreadfully important.  Even Regina Doman's Shadow of the Bear captures this notion that sex is inevitable, if for the purpose of presenting a chaste model.  And well, yes.  It does feel that way to a teenager sometimes.  And sometimes to a young adult.  And sometimes to a single adult in a bar.  Every road leads to sex--but when?  and with whom?  Enter the love triangle.  But that is something that is largely a construction--albeit an old construction.  Paolo and Francesca.  Lancelot and Guinevere.  Tristan and Isolde.  But The Hunger Games acknowledges that the love triangle and the inevitability of sex are constructs by completely failing to play along.

And why is it not about sex?  It could have been.  Anyone who has read my posts about Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series knows that I have no problem with sex.  I don't object to reading about it, even in fairly graphic terms, and I'm fine with writing about it.  Just don't get me started about Fifty Shades of Gray, because it won't be pretty....

Frankly, it was quite restrained of Collins not to have The Hunger Games include rape.  After all, there's cannibalism in past Hunger Games.  I'm trying to think if there's something that could be considered symbolic rape in the way tributes were killed in The Hunger Games, and I don't think so... although somewhere, at some academic conference or in some academic journal, some graduate student or terribly, terribly clever professor (who doesn't actually read children's literature, but is smugly dabbling because Hunger Games is a popular culture phenomenon) has made exactly that argument--possibly involving a dark mine shaft or Peeta's oven.  But folks--it's Simply. Not. There. Not even there as it is in Lord of the Flies.  Not even like that.  But it could have been.  The "career tributes" might have raped their victims first, and the Capitol might have liked the extra entertainment.  And then the books really would have been sordid, as some people still believe them to be.  And I will never, ever read Hunger Games fan fics.

Sex is not on Katniss's radar because hers is a hard life, and there are more things to think about than sex.  It is not on her radar because her own survival and the survival of her family are uppermost in her mind.  She can't take on the responsibility of a new family--her own family--because her current responsibilities prevent it.  She can't conceive of having children because she already has dependents, and also because children are the Capitol's means of control.  So not having children would be her act of self-preservation--her means of not allowing herself to be hurt by the political situation in which she lives.  So not having children is, quite literally, an act of subversion, though Katniss is not able to articulate it as such.

And sex, to her, is not recreational--it is procreative.  The union of man and woman produces children.  Period.  And quite definitely only happens within marriage.  Even Peeta's bluff presents sex as happening within marriage.

Sex--especially recreational sex--is (implicitly) the province of the Capitol, along with all things glittery and corrupt.  It is in the Capitol that sexual exploitation occurs--to others.  Katniss is not corruptible, because her loyalties are too solid to allow for infiltration.  Even when she is caught up in the Capitol glam, and made to seem a sex symbol of sorts, it is not really sex that she projects.  She is almost too good to be true--except for her complete lack of awareness of her own virtue.  All she sees is what is in front of her, and that something is survival--always.

So to borrow a quote from Miss Piggy in The Muppet Takes Manhatten, "But what about the huggies?"  There are moments on the train.  With Peeta.  They do sleep together.  And it is never sexualized in any way.  They sleep together in a completely chaste manner--suggesting, perhaps, that a boy and a girl can sleep together in a completely chaste manner.  Even when he loves her, and wants her.  In fact, their nighttime interaction even suggests that man and wife--or an engaged couple--or two pretending to be man and wife--can be chaste.  And there is so much more that is unifying and life-affirming in their embraces, to borrow the language of Theology of the Body, than there would be in the sexual act.

And so the novels, which represent sex, marriage, and procreation as things to be feared in certian contexts, do, after all, find their way to affirmation of life--and to a much more profound place than the center of a love triangle.

Why I like The Hunger Games (Pt 2): Katniss

Starting with the main character is as good a place as any, and is perhaps an obvious place to start.  But let me say that I'm not in love with Katniss.  I don't relate to her particularly well, and I think that the first-person, present-tense narrative keeps the reader at arm's length in a counter-intuitive sort of way, preventing the reader from getting in her head.  But all of this is why the construction of her character is so intriguing to me.

First, her personality.  I have this one figured out.  She's an ISTJ to my INFP.  From Wikipedia:

ISTJs are faithful, logical, organized, sensible, and earnest traditionalists who enjoy keeping their lives and environments well-regulated. Typically reserved and serious individuals, they earn success through their thoroughness and extraordinary dependability. They are capable of shutting out distractions in order to take a practical, logical approach to their endeavors, and are able to make the tough decisions that other types avoid. Realistic and responsible, ISTJs are often seen as worker bees striving steadily toward their goals. They take special joy in maintaining institutions and are often highly religious. Despite their dependability and good intentions, however, ISTJs can experience difficulty in understanding and responding to the emotional needs of others. 

Although they often focus on their internal world, ISTJs prefer dealing with the present and the factual. They are detail-oriented and weigh various options when making decisions, although they generally stick to the conventional. ISTJs are well-prepared for eventualities and have a good understanding of most situations. They believe in practical objectives, and they value traditions and loyalty.

If I am slightly uncomfortable with analyzing a character according to the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, I am buoyed by Freudian analyses of characters, and by the very fact that, in this particular case, it makes so much sense!

So what does this mean?  In terms of the narrative voice, the emphasis in the ISTJ description on "the present and the factual" in conjunction with focus on the individual's "internal world" justifies the slightly irritating first person, present tense narration.  In fact, it's a little too neatly packaged. In terms of audience engagement, and I can only speak for myself, we have a character who is opposite from me in every possible way--except introversion.  So having figured out intuitively (INFP) why I can't find myself in the character, suddenly I can see it in concrete terms. Katniss resists introspection.  An INFP would reflect back--almost incessantly.  Katniss lives in her mind, but in the moment.  For whatever reason--personality or circumstances--she easily leaves the past behind (at least, when she is operating from her conscious mind--and trauma notwithstanding).  She is living in the moment--because she has to.  And because she lives in the moment, she survives--or, because she is a survivor, she knows to live in the moment.

Katniss is not a reader.  Literacy does not figure prominently into The Hunger Games (more on this later), but even in its absence, literacy is conspicuous.  In the children's/young adult genre, female characters are readers.  In the development of female characters, there seems to be an unspoken, unwritten, but understood rule that girls need smart characters who read to teach them that reading and being smart are okay.  The exceptional, very bright, slightly odd, female reader is such a commonplace motif as to make claims to the exceptionality of such a character hollow.  Consider, for example, the very mundane female protagonist of Cassandra Clare's Infernal Devices series.  Every now and then, the narrative shows Tessa with a book to remind the reader that her literacy is one of her distinguishing features, when otherwise, she is pretty bland.  So Katniss's very difference from these supposedly extraordinary female characters is refreshing.

So why do I like Katniss?

Although I am not particularly engaged by being able to relate to Katniss's personality--so different from my own--my own personality type causes me to read empathetically (I'm hammering the Meyers-Briggs, but it's sort of fun from a "rhetoric of reading" standpoint, because it can explain, to an extent, why certain readers engage with texts and characters the way we do!)  So I am sympathetic to Katniss's circumstances, and more sympathetic to her manipulation by those around her, when that comes to light in Catching Fire.  In fact, it was while reading Catching Fire that I really started to like the books and Katniss's character.

It is easy to understand Katniss's motivations, given what the reader knows about her character and her circumstances.  She is exactly what she should be, given what the reader knows.  And as a reader, I don't like to be unfairly manipulated by an author into feeling something I don't want to feel (as in The Giver), or thinking something that is untrue.  Katniss is satisfyingly well-constructed as a character.  And above all, what is predictable are her convictions.  There is a moment in book 3 when she votes in favor of "one last Hunger Games," and I wonder, as a reader, if this is an inconsistency in her character.  But then, I wonder whether that vote is sincere given the subsequent turn of events.

It her predictability (another ISTJ quality) as enacted in the novels that makes her vulnerable to manipulation--and having one's values subject one to manipulation is something an INFP can understand.  So there's a connection after all.  As a person of action rather than contemplation, Katniss acts from her convictions.  When she acts, she makes it count, as in volunteering for Prim in the Hunger Games, or survival in the games themselves.  Haymitch recognizes this trait throughout, and uses it for various purposes--most notably the revolutionary propaganda in book 3.

But finally, I come back to that narrative voice.  When the author's choice of a technique is so obvious as to register as a little bit wrong, there should be a definite reason for drawing attention to that choice.  I learned this from Robert Browning's verse, though Robert Frost has moments as well (Something there is that doesn't love a wall - one of the clunkiest lines in iambic pentameter).  As she moves through the events of the three novels, Katniss resists contemplation, even as she tries to work out what's happening to her.  She focuses on details rather than abstract concepts.  The narrative reinforces the sense of moving forward rather than looking backward, and does not give the reader advantages over the character's self-awareness, or lack thereof.  Rather, the reader experiences how baffling it is to be living one's own coming-of-age.  I can't speak to how it would have been to read this as a young adult.  I likely would have been more frustrated by the lack of introspection, because I wanted to figure out what was happening, or what had happened, and theorize about it.  I still do.  But looking at The Hunger Games, I can read the narrative, and live with the character, and think--yeah, it was exactly like that.  So at the end of the day, Katniss's narrative feels authentic.  And so does she.