Katniss Everdeen

“How are women and girls represented in contemporary novels?”
In Suzanne Collins contemporary novel, The Hunger Games, the author represents women and girls in a variety of ways.
Suzanne Collins represents feminine qualities in women and girls in a negative way in her novel, The Hunger Game. Collins uses characterisation to depict feminine qualities as being a drawback. An example of this can be seen in her portrayal of Prim and her mother, who share similar traditional feminine qualities, “My little sister Prim, curled up on her side, cocooned in my mother’s body, their cheeks pressed together”. This description represents these characters as being passive, weak and helpless, which is in stark contrast to Katniss’s qualities, which keep the family alive through poverty. Thus we can see that Suzanne Collins represents feminine qualities in women and girls as being a disadvantage.
In The Hunger Game, Suzanne Collins represents masculine characteristics in women and girls in a positive light. The writer uses descriptive adjectives to show the self-reliant in the main female character, Katniss Everdeen. A clearly example can be shown is when Katniss volunteers for her sister, “I don’t want to cry. When they televise the replay of the reaping tonight, everyone will make note of my tears, and I will be marked as an easy target. A weakling. I will give no one that satisfaction”. In this quote, Katniss doesn’t want to be seems as an easy to cry, soft young woman and people will look down on her and think that they can take her down without any difficulties.