{"id":8432,"date":"2010-11-29T08:56:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-29T12:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.christandpopculture.com\/?p=8432"},"modified":"2010-11-29T08:56:00","modified_gmt":"2010-11-29T12:56:00","slug":"catching-fire-team-love-triangle-or-team-dystopian-grit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/christandpopculture\/2010\/11\/catching-fire-team-love-triangle-or-team-dystopian-grit\/","title":{"rendered":"Catching Fire: Team Love Triangle or Team Dystopian Grit?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

This is the second article in our series on Suzanne Collins\u2019s Hunger Games trilogy<\/a>. It\u2019s largely spoiler-free, but those who want to remain completely unspoiled might want to save it until after reading the book. <\/em><\/p>\n

Ah, the adolescent love triangle\u2014in the post-Twilight<\/em> world of YA fiction, we must now pledge our allegiance to Team Edward or Team Jacob, Team Peeta or Team Gale, in spite of the fact that it\u2019s generally clear who will win the heroine\u2019s affections in the end. As a reader who was drawn to the Hunger Games trilogy because of its portrait of civilized barbarism\u2014a televised competition in which children fight to the death\u2014rather than its romantic angle, I feared that Catching Fire<\/em>, the second book in the series, would focus too much on the constant wavering of Katniss\u2019s affections between Gale, her \u201cbest friend,\u201d fellow subsistence hunter, and budding revolutionary; and Peeta, her steady, self-sacrificing fellow competitor in the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games.<\/p>\n

Catching Fire<\/em> does have a lot more going for it than just romance. In between the Seventy-Fourth and the Seventy-Fifth Hunger Games, dissatisfaction has built in Panem. Several districts are on the verge of rebellion against the Capitol, and Katniss finds herself the unwitting symbol of revolution (one of my minor frustrations with the book was just how unwitting Katniss seems to be\u2014her slowness to catch on to certain plot points seems more a matter of convenience for the author than a believable element of her character). Meanwhile, the horror of the Games continues unabated\u2014and, in fact, intensified, as it\u2019s the year of the Quarter Quell, occurring every twenty-five years, in which the Capitol adds some extra sick twist (beyond the usual sacrifice of twenty-four children) to remind the districts of its power over them. Like the first volume in the series, Catching Fire<\/em> moves at a quick and gripping pace.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s that love triangle, which I expected to find problematic. For one thing, it\u2019s hard to imagine how a reader could possibly fall into the Team Gale camp, since Gale has never been fully developed as a character. Katniss constantly tells us how much she likes Gale, but almost always in flashback. He seldom appears within the present-moment narration, and when he does, he\u2019s generally cranky or unconscious. His greatest redeeming feature is that he calls Katniss \u201cCatnip.\u201d Stack this up against the common bond forged by Peeta and Katniss surviving the horrors of the Hunger Games\u2014horrors that Gale can\u2019t begin to comprehend\u2014and there\u2019s really no competition. Peeta is the one who comforts Katniss when she wakes up screaming from a nightmare about the Games, and he\u2019s the one who, upon learning that Katniss\u2019s show of love for him during the Games was at least partly feigned, still treats her with dignity and compassion in spite of his personal disappointment. Plus, Peeta bakes bread and utters lines like, \u201cFrosting: the last defense of the dying.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, it seems as if Suzanne Collins herself wasn\u2019t particularly interested in the love triangle per se. It\u2019s useful for developing some tension in Katniss\u2019s and Peeta\u2019s relationship, but Collins as an author doesn\u2019t seem committed to depicting Gale as much of a threat. Is this authorial laziness? Perhaps. I like to think, though, that Collins, through the love triangle, has some bigger goals in mind\u2014goals that are connected to the series\u2019 gritty political side. Yes, that\u2019s right\u2014I have to admit that the romance plot may not be a distraction from the dystopian drive of the series, but rather an integral part of it.<\/p>\n

In Catching Fire<\/em>, Katniss begins to realize that she will have to carry on her pretense of being madly in love with Peeta\u2014a pretense begun when he confessed his love (genuine, as it turned out) on camera during the Games\u2014even to the point of marrying him, in order to appease the Capitol\u2019s President, who suspects that Katniss\u2019s actions during the Games might be motivated not by youthful infatuation but rather by deliberate rebellion against the Capitol. Katniss reflects, \u201cOne of the few freedoms we have in District 12 is the right to marry who we want or not marry at all. And now even that has been taken away from me.\u201d In fact, one of the first things we learned about Katniss in The Hunger Games<\/em> is that she planned never to marry: if she did marry, there would likely be children, and children would be entered in the lottery each year for the Hunger Games. Better not to bring children into a world where they could be forced into such atrocity.<\/p>\n

Pause. Rewind a few centuries, from fictional Panem to North America, as it was once known. Specifically, the United States\u2014then, not entirely united\u2014in the year 1861, when a former slave named Harriet Jacobs published a narrative called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl<\/em>. Jacobs\u2019s narrative, like Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s novel Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> a decade earlier, was primarily written to elicit the sympathies of northern white women on behalf of the abolitionist cause. In Incidents<\/em>, Jacobs reminds her free readers of the emotional burdens connected to marriage and motherhood for a slave. When a free black man proposes marriage to her, and her master refuses consent, Jacobs writes,<\/p>\n

\u201cEven if he could have obtained permission to marry me . . . the marriage would give him no power to protect me from my master. It would have made him miserable to witness the insults I should have been subjected to. And then, if we had children, I knew they must \u2018follow the condition of the mother.\u2019 What a terrible blight that would be on the heart of a free, intelligent father! For his sake, I felt that I ought not to link his fate with my own unhappy destiny.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What Jacobs captured so brilliantly was that the very experiences held as the epitome of virtuous nineteenth-century femininity\u2014marriage and motherhood\u2014were denied her. Was she also denied basic human dignity and personhood? Yes, and she does mention these things. But she knew that there were readers who would be more effectively moved by the reminder that she, a slave, did not have the freedom to love.<\/p>\n

In Catching Fire<\/em>, as well as in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl<\/em>, romance becomes a political issue. Peeta, in particular, is able to use his \u201cstar-crossed lover\u201d ethos to whip the superficial, melodrama-addicted Capitol audience into a frenzy of dissatisfaction with the Games. Even Katniss, though she resents the President\u2019s mandate concerning her relationship with Peeta, realizes that that same romance can be the most powerful weapon in her anti-Capitol arsenal. One of the intriguing things about the Hunger Games trilogy is that, though Katniss wants the freedom to marry or not marry, it\u2019s also clear that romance is never a purely individual choice.<\/p>\n

Romance in literature, at its best, can be used as a powerful symbol to suggest what is wrong with the world. Of course, it can also represent what is, in spite of everything humans can do to mess it up, right with the world. There\u2019s a reason that God chose marriage between Christ and the Church as the symbol of ultimate, eschatological hope (personally, I would have chosen frolicking puppies instead, but that\u2019s just me and C. S. Lewis). Will romance also symbolize hope in the Hunger Games trilogy? For that, you\u2019ll have to wait for the review of Mockingjay<\/em>. Until then, I\u2019ll unabashedly proclaim my Team Peeta allegiance.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The second installment of the Hunger Games trilogy deals with romance as a possible symbolic hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1236,"featured_media":8463,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-headline","category-literature"],"yoast_head":"\nCatching Fire: Team Love Triangle or Team Dystopian Grit?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The second installment of the Hunger Games trilogy deals with romance as a possible symbolic hope.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/christandpopculture\/2010\/11\/catching-fire-team-love-triangle-or-team-dystopian-grit\/\" \/>\n<meta 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