Class Division Between Districts and the Capitol

Class Division Between Districts and the Capitol: In The Hunger Games and Catching Fire

Imagine an 11-year-old girl. This girl just lost her grandmother to cancer, was getting bullied by people in her 4th-grade class and had a nonexistent friend group because she was the "new girl". The only comfort she had at the time was her public library down the street from her new house. In this library, her eyes danced across the aisles until it found a new book. The cover was black with a gold circular pin that had a bird on it with an arrow going through the beak. As she started this new adventure into the world of Panem in which the book is set, she found something that she did not have at the time. Strength. Just like Katniss Everdeen, the main character in the novel, the girl could feel the way that survival and courage felt as she devoured the words of the author, Suzanne Collins. This book had a hand in saving this girl's life and making her feel like maybe, she could do anything. And who is this little girl? Me, I am that little girl but this book is not just a savior to me.

It's the same way that others feel around the world as well. Jen Scott Curwood uses an ethnographic approach in the article, "The Hunger Games: Literature, Literacy, and Online Affinity Spaces" to look at how literature and online affinity spaces help children and adolescents appreciate literature and create a discourse about texts they are interested in. According to preliminary research, an affinity space is "locations where groups of people (in this case Hunger Games Fans) are drawn together because of a shared, strong interest or engagement in a shared activity" (Wikipedia.com). One example is the website named 1 Fanfiction.net, which is a website that promotes creative writing, discussions about books, movies, TV shows and the art of roleplaying though forum spaces in the website. People go on websites like this to imagine, write, and comment on the different ways to look at character relationships, endings of these different modes of entertainment and create a community of fans of the same subjects. She "conducted systematic online observations and interview[ed] 20 focal participants" but one participant that she looks deeper into is an Australian 13-year-old boy named Jack (419). Jack is a "mega-fan" of The Hunger Games trilogy. Jack wanted to find other fans of the trilogy, just like I did when I was 11-12 and joined Mockingjay.net. Curwood later states that "online affinity spaces related to young adult literature, youth can engage in activities that promote comprehension, reflection, and imagination" (425). I agree that online communities promote these three things because my experience was almost similar in the way that reading books in middle school were easier to understand and think deeper about when I talked to different people in communities online. I would like to point out though that at 11 going on 12 years old, I did not think of how the trilogy reflects the class division that we have in Baltimore and the United States as a whole.

While researcher Susan Stewart in the journal titled "A Return to Normal" looks at the novel, The Giver, by Louis Lowry through a new historicist and new criticism lens, it is worthwhile to look at other dystopian novels through a Marxist lens like for example, The Hunger Games and Catching Fire. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins can be looked at through a Marxist lens by showcasing the divide between the people who live in the Capitol and the people who are forced to live in the districts. This opposition between the bourgeoisie in the Capitol and the proletariat in the districts are maintained by the illusion of eliminating hunger and promising social mobility with the annual hunger games. Commodifying violence through the games 2 causes competition between the districts when there should be resistance from the Capitol. I wish to expand the plethora of literary readings of young adult and utopian/dystopian novels. Educators today do not realize that adolescents like to read books but are not found of the required reading in classes, especially not books that do not have any correlation with their personal lives. I want to bridge this gap to inform about how looking at a dystopian novel can impact student's comprehension and love of reading through a critical lens of this popular book.