The Hunger Games, Spartacus , and Other Family Stories: Sentimental Revolution in Contemporary Young-Adult Fiction

Abstract

The Hunger Games, Spartacus, and Other Family Stories: Sentimental Revolution in Contemporary Young-Adult Fiction David Aitchison It is already commonplace among scholars that Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy (2008–10) tells a kind of Spartacus story: one influenced by historical accounts of the gladiator, who, in 73 BCE, led a slave revolt against the Roman Empire, and by modern interpretations of his life, primarily Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 big-screen epic Spartacus.1 Interviews with Collins are typically cited to corroborate this connection. In one, from 2011, she made explicit her debt to Spartacus’s life narrative, pointing out how protagonist Katniss Everdeen “follows the same arc from slave to gladiator to rebel” (Dominus n.p.). In another, from 2009, she described having researched “not only the historical Spartacus and the popular media about him, but many of the historical gladiators from pre-Christian times,” which led her to schematize the “three things always present” in what she calls the “gladiator paradigm: (1) a ruthless government that (2) forces people to fight to the death, and (3) uses these fights to the death as a form of popular entertainment” (Blasingame 727). Not insignificantly, this paradigm has long been subject to rival interpretations, perhaps best exemplified in the play between two definitive Spartacus novels of modern times, Arthur Koestler’s indictment of communist idealism, The Gladiators (1939), and Howard Fast’s sympathetic lament for failed communist revolution, Spartacus (1951). Though arguably written for a different audience, the Hunger Games trilogy takes its place in this tradition of fictions contesting the political and ethical virtues of the gladiator. To say that Collins is suspicious of the pleasure afforded by the gladiator paradigm is to acknowledge that there is debate over the allegorical dimensions of the arena as a social space—that is, over the ethics of what individuals, in relation to one another, feel compelled to do in order to [End Page 254] survive. A very different kind of Spartacus story, for instance, has evolved recently in the movement between Ridley Scott’s blockbuster Gladiator (2000) and cable channel Starz’s Spartacus (2010–13), neither of which puts pressure on the differential between self-interest and self-sacrifice as the Hunger Games novels do. While the Starz series echoes a number of plot elements from Gladiator,2 Gladiator paid homage to Douglas’s Spartacus,3 a film in turn based on Fast’s novel. Notably, though tempering the revolutionary optimism of the original, Douglas’s adaptation still tells a leftist story in which the divisiveness of the arena is countered by an unwavering solidarity—brought home in the well-known “I am Spartacus” scene, where the captured rebels would sooner die defying the Romans than betray the cause. Keeping Spartacus (1951) and Spartacus (1960) in mind, we do well to remember that gladiator fictions are sometimes driven by a desire to care for, rather than punish, bodies politic. For some critics, admittedly, works like The Hunger Games are less about probing political reality and more about capturing the universal tumult of adolescence. Laura Miller, for example, finds Collins’s trilogy “intelligible” only when considered “as a fever-dream allegory of the adolescent social experience”: more precisely, “it’s not about persuading the reader to stop something terrible from happening—it’s about what’s happening, right this minute, in the stormy psyche of the adolescent reader” (n.p.). The shortcoming of this diagnosis is that it makes little room for any outward turn of the young reader’s imagination. Consider, for example, the moment when teenager Katniss volunteers on behalf of her younger sister to take part in the Hunger Games, a state-enforced fight to the death between twelve- to eighteen-year-old representatives from districts subjugated and exploited by the centralized power of the Capitol. By Miller’s account, Collins’s readers relate to what Katniss feels without grasping the painfully political nature of her feelings. By my account, we do these readers a disservice unless we acknowledge that they are poised more properly to work through the stormy stuff not of psyche, as such, but of political consciousness. Not all of the trilogy’s...