1 Introduction
Suzanne Collins，an American television writer and novelist，is best known as the author of The New York Times best selling series The Underland Chronicles and The Hunger Games trilogy. She started her career as a writer for children’s television shows in 1991. And then she worked on several television shows for Nickelodeon, including Clarissa Explains It All, The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo, Little Bear, and Oswald. She was also the head writer for Scholastic Entertainment’s Clifford’s Puppy Days. She received a Writers Guild of America nomination in animation for co-writing the critically acclaimed Christmas special, Santa, Baby. The Hunger Games was partly inspired by the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Another inspiration was her father’s career in the Air Force, which gave her insight to poverty, starvation, and the effects of war.
During 2008 and 2010, 1.5 million copies of the first two Hunger Games books were printed in North America alone. As one of the most best-seller novels, The Hunger Games is unanimously acknowledged as the most popular novel for teenagers. It does not merely include lots of exciting plots about the adventures of protesting a dystopian post-apocalyptic nation of Panem and the cruelty of war, more significantly, it explores the deeper layer of feminist from the perspective of Katniss. Suzanne Collins expresses her reflections about the essence of war and its influence upon feminist, which further lead to the discussion of the effects of feminist and the deep thinking of female’s rights. The novel questions how a woman can exert her own power and ability to achieve her own ambitions under the rule of a man’s world and how women can survive without a man. ,源^自!优尔/文-论/文*网[www.youerw.com
Therefore, a study on the characterization of Katniss from perspective of feminist is also of great realistic significance.
2 The Analysis of the Feminism
Generally speaking, feminism is a wide concept for average people. With the development of globalization, people have paid more and more attention to the feminism. However, under the influence of traditional androcentric society for thousands of years, it is difficult for women to strive for the equal rights with men and to completely change women’s humble and androcentric image in society overnight. Tracing back to the emergence and the development of feminism, there will be a very long story to share.
According to Hawkesworth (2006), feminism is a range of political movements, ideologies, and social movements that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve equal political, economic, personal, and social rights for women. Hence, to some extent, feminism means that women and men are in the same level, they both have the rights in education, working, voting and so on. Feminism aims to let the people know the nature of gender inequality.
Tracing back to the history of feminism, we will mainly pide into three periods: The first wave comprised women’s suffrage movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, promoting women’s right to vote. The second wave was associated with the ideas and actions of the women’s liberation movement beginning in the 1960s. The second wave campaigned for legal and social equality for women. The third wave is a continuation of, and a reaction to, the perceived failures of second-wave feminism, beginning in the 1990s.
According to Morris Pam, feminism is a political perception based on two fundamental premises. ‘‘Firstly, gender difference is the foundation of a structural inequality between women and men, by which women suffer systematic social injustice. Secondly, the inequality between the sexes is not the result of biological necessity but is produced by the cultural construction of gender differences. This perception provides feminism with its double agenda: to understand the social and psychic mechanisms that construct and perpetuate gender inequality and then to change them’’ (Morris Pam, 1993:1). 从女权主义角度看《饥饿游戏》女主角的人物特征(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_51752.html