ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This study investigates the construction of the heroine’s subjectivity in young adult literature, with a specific reference to Suzanne Collins’s well-known The Hunger Games series. The heroine’s subjectivity can be constructed in various ways through the lenses of notions such as race, power, violence, gender, class. However, this study explores the role undertaken by gender in the construction of the heroine’s subjectivity in young adult literature as demonstrated in the selected works. Since 2000 and with the publication of The Hunger Games series, the heroine has emerged from young adult literature in America. The protagonist of The Hunger Games series, Katniss is a heroine in a future dystopian society. Some critics suggest that she is depicted as a subjective, progressive heroine. However, Katniss is influenced by the society to which she each belongs: Pannem. Although the female protagonist is presented as a heroine bestowed with independent and voluntary subjectivity, her subjectivity bears clear marks of the expectations and ideals of the society to which she belongs. In other words, her subjectivity is socially constructed. The examination of the constructed subjectivity of Katniss in The Hunger Games in this study is based on Judith Butler’s theory. Gender has played a key role in the construction of Katniss’s subjectivity, with the heroines’s subjectivity shaped by two components: motherhood and tomboyism. Katniss undergoes a variety of motherhoods and then internalizes the motherhood of Hazle, Gale’s mother as Pannem’s idealized motherhood. Katniss also refuses the stereotypical female appearance and behaviors, thus acquiring a tomboyish character. The motherhood and tomboyism have an effect on Katniss’s constructed subjectivity. Therefore, the subjectivity of a 16-year-old girl, Katniss, is shaped by the expectations and ideals of the society to which she belongs. The heroine’s fictional subjectivity demonstrates that it is constructed under the external influence rather than her subjectivity having been made and formed by the heroine’s will.

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