The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  Like Gretel, Pippi Longstocking, and Lisbeth Salander before her, Katniss gorges on rich food, yet her hunger never ceases. “I’m starving,” she says, right after eating prodigious amounts of “goose liver and puffy bread.” At one of the banquets, she “shovels” lamb stew into her mouth and takes big gulps of orange juice. At another she eats herself sick in an orgy of dining comparable to Hansel and Gretel’s feast outside and inside the witch’s house. Her fantasies about food resemble the inventories we find in both the Grimms’ fairy tale and Salander’s grocery lists: “The chicken in creamy orange sauce. The cakes and pudding. Bread with butter. Noodles in green sauce. The lamb and dried plum stew.” Katniss admits to eating that stew “by the bucketful,” even though “it doesn’t show,” in ways that point to classic bulimic behaviors. The emphasis on orality is not at all unusual, given the sociocultural climate of Panem, but it is a reminder of how the appetites of male tricksters are transformed and remade in their female counterparts, turning into disorders rather than signs of vitality. Katniss, like Gretel, moves from the primary orality manifested in a country where there are only two options: the famine conditions of the district in which she lives or the decadent feasts of the ruling class, who prove to be true bulimics, constantly vomiting in order to return to the trough with appetite renewed.

  The presence of mockingjays reminds us that orality yields at times, even in Panem, to aurality. Mockingjays, we learn, are a hybrid of female mockingbirds and male jabberjays, genetically altered birds bred to memorize human conversations. Created by pure accident, mockingjays can replicate both human voices and bird whistles. They possess the gift of mimicking human songs: “And they could recreate songs. Not just a few notes, but whole songs with multiple verses.” These magical avian creatures become an emblem of revolutionary possibility and of civic solidarity. But beyond that, they also keep poetry alive in Panem. Suzanne Collins described them as zoological doubles of Katniss:

  So here we have her arriving in the arena in the first book, not only equipped as someone who can keep herself alive in this environment—and then once she gets the bow and arrows, can be lethal—but she’s also somebody who already thinks outside the box because they just haven’t been paying attention to District 12. So in that way, too, Katniss is the mockingjay. She is the thing that should never have been created, that the Capitol never intended to happen. In the same way they just let the jabberjays go and thought, “We don’t have to worry about them,” they thought, “We don’t have to worry about District 12.” And this new creature evolved, which is the mockingjay, which is Katniss.30

  Suzanne Collins, then, invented a heroine who “should never have been created,” according to those in authority. She is sui generis, and although she did not appear out of thin air, she evolved in unexpected ways, suddenly emerging out of obscurity into celebrity through the Hunger Games.

  Katniss has inherited the gift of song from her father. In response to the request of a fellow combatant, dying on the forest floor, Katniss produces a “mountain air,” and, “almost eerily,” the mockingjays take up the song. In a rare moment of utopian plenitude during the Hunger Games, Katniss sings a few notes from Rue’s song and listens as the mockingjays repeat the melody: “Then the whole world comes alive with the sound.” The “lovely, unearthly harmony” produced by the birds leads Katniss, “mesmerized by the beauty of the song,” to close her eyes and listen. It will be her task not only to win the Hunger Games but also to restore beauty and civility to a land devastated by both natural disasters and human failures, a land that has created the Avox, a person whose tongue has been cut and who can no longer make sounds or speak. Collins, who alludes frequently to the ancient world with names (Seneca and Caesar) and with rituals (gladiatorial games and annual tributes), was no doubt familiar with the horrors of Philomela’s punishment for speaking out.

  Suzanne Collins’s Katniss combines Lisbeth’s survival skills with a passionate social mission, but she lacks the hipster sexual confidence and self-consciousness of her older Swedish counterpart. As many commentators have pointed out, she is modeled on Artemis, goddess of the hunt, carrying the same silver bow and arrows. Like the goddess, she too is protector of the young and volunteers to take her sister’s place when her name is chosen at the Reaping. Virginal and unaware of her own sexual allure, she has been described as that “rare thing” in pop culture: “a complex female character with courage, brains and a quest of her own.”31 Lisbeth’s emotional deficits and surplus sexual energy are balanced by Katniss’s compassionate intensity and sexual innocence.

  Like Gretel’s exercises in dissimulation, Katniss’s snares, ruses, and strategies lead her to poetry, to a display of how the melodious consolations of imagination are not imaginary consolations. Throughout the games, we learn about the value of wits—the “wits to survive”—as well as about the importance of “outsmarting” others, remaining nimble and agile in order to defeat those with superior physical strength. Peeta, too, knows how to “spin out lies,” and the paired allies use their intelligence wisely to defeat the twenty-two other Tributes. More important, Katniss outfoxes not just the other Tributes but even the Gamemakers, and ultimately the Capitol. She will become not only a survivor but also, in the sequels to The Hunger Games, a mockingjay, a symbol of revolutionary hope and an agent of rebellion and change.

  The authors of books for young audiences are uncannily inventive when it comes to constructing new forms of female heroism. Sometimes it seems as if they are tapping into a rich vein of boldness and defiance in their own dispositions, willing to accept the label of YA author even when they are taking on projects as ambitious as, say, rewriting Milton’s Paradise Lost. That’s the challenge that Philip Pullman had in mind when he set out to reimagine Genesis and Milton’s version of the Fall in the trilogy His Dark Materials (1995–2000). The first installment was a book that Hollywood eagerly snapped up and turned into a 2007 film starring Dakota Blue Richards, Daniel Craig, and Nicole Kidman. The BBC made a second, less successful, run on the material with a series made in 2020.

  “There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book,” Pullman observed in his acceptance speech for the Carnegie Medal.32 Rewriting Genesis may be one of those projects, and child readers, unschooled in theological matters, are likely to be less resistant to the idea of a new Eve, a heroine who leads the way to a form of redemption that replaces religious orthodoxies with secular humanism. They are also less likely to be shocked by a work that sees God as a tyrant to be killed off, the Church as an instrument of persecution, and a heroine whose mission it is to defeat both. Curiosity, knowledge, kindness, and tolerance supplant outdated belief systems. And children, Pullman correctly intuited, are less interested in “Thou shalt not” than in “Once upon a time,” preferring the tug of story to the authority of commandments.

  Rewriting the Fall as an emancipatory moment in the history of the human race, Pullman gives us a heroine who is a double of Eve in her capacious curiosity and who is also forever pushing at boundaries and crossing them, challenging the rigid thinking of the adults around her. Lyra Belacqua, or Lyra Silvertongue, has a name that binds her with both deception and art—she is a chronic liar, a consummate storyteller, and her narrative art produces “a stream of pleasure rising upwards in her breast like the bubbles in champagne.” She may lack the lyre as musical instrument, but she can produce poetry as reader and exegete when she wields the truth-seeking instrument known as the alethiometer, a device that enables her to discover the path to true heroism:

  The one thing that drew [Lyra] out of her boredom and irritation was the alethiometer. She read it every day, sometimes with Farder Coram and sometimes on her own, and she found that she could sink more and more readily into the calm state in which the symbol meanings clarified themselves, and those great mountain ranges touched by sunlight emerged into vision.33

  For Pullman, wisdom is the sum
mum bonum, and it comes less from the Good Book than from reading books of every kind. That view, of course, risks turning writers into gods, and Pullman concedes as much when he tells us, on his website, that he is “a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.”34

  Lyra does not partake of the gastronomical excesses found in The Hunger Games and in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Still, she shape-shifts in audacious ways, trying out new identities to protect herself and also for the sheer love of invention and experimenting with new personalities. In Bolvangar, she is Lizzie Brookes and pretends to be meek and stupid; in the Land of the Dead she becomes the child of a duke and duchess; and at one point she aligns herself with that “fabulous monster” that Lewis Carroll called Alice. And the author who created her makes her, of course, a double of Eve. Joining the ranks of postmodern adolescent girl tricksters, she must struggle to survive in a world of cruelly ambitious parents who fail to protect her. At the same time, she undertakes an epic redemptive journey that transforms her into a savior figure who lays the foundations for nothing less than a new social and spiritual order. Does Pullman dare to install a rival to Christianity, with a savior who now enshrines knowledge as sacred and allows it to guide us, with free choice as the default setting? Who but Eve, who instinctively took a bite of the apple, rules in this new Republic of Heaven? “Religion begins in story,” Pullman once declared, and this is unequivocally not the same old story.

  “I write almost always in the third person, and I don’t think the narrator is male or female anyway. They’re both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and skeptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human—they’re sprites.”35 Pullman may have been speaking tongue in cheek, but he raises, once again, a question that cannot but haunt those who look at our entertainments—the books and films that have captured the popular imagination—and wonder whether authors and directors are picking up disturbances in the airwaves or capturing their own fantasies and anxieties, or some strange mix of the two.

  The issue of gender as nonbinary and fluid, as raised by Pullman, becomes even more complicated when we consider how gender-bending has turned mainstream in ways that challenge us to turn from the old-fashioned binary models like Campbell’s to new archetypal figures that are androgynous and gender queer, blurring boundaries and confounding the distinctions we once made. Lisbeth Salander, Katniss Everdeen, and Lyra Belacqua mark a rupture in our understanding of what it means to be a heroine by embracing features traditionally assigned to the mythical hero and trickster. They also offer a final repudiation of Campbell’s notion of heroines as self-contained women who are there to reproduce and replicate, and an answer to his question about the new models available in a world that has offered women the opportunity to enter the labor force. Unlike Scheherazade and Bluebeard’s wife, these women are all experts at getting out of the house. The female trickster has become a smart, sassy feminista and more, charged with sending new messages via literary and cinematic media about women’s rejection of victimization, physical weakness, and household drudgery.36 Girl tricksters in particular seem consistently united in their double mission of remaking the world even as they survive adversity.37 Justice becomes their consuming passion, though they retain many of the appetites of male tricksters.

  Does the arc that takes us from Scheherazade to Lisbeth Salander mark progress? Many in the parade of new heroines in our popular entertainments do nothing but mimic the male action hero.38 Lisbeth Salander is represented as both masculine (or boyish) and muscular.39 Her tattoos, her lovemaking (she initiates and takes control), her technological skills, her decisive actions, and even her way of looking at people deviate sharply from feminine forms of self-representation and behavior. Is Salander just a male fantasy about a sylphlike woman who takes charge?40 Self-contained and operating comfortably as an “independent contractor,” she has been conditioned by her traumatic childhood as well as by her genetic makeup to act more like a man than a woman, thereby operating less as a reformer than as a figure who perpetuates cultural, social, and political norms. Is Stieg Larsson unable to divorce himself from the discourses that he is aiming to critique? Ironically, the androgynous nature of girl tricksters enables male cross-identification, thus further diluting the feminist message in the eyes of some critics.

  If the male trickster occasionally oscillates between female and male, eventually fixing on his own male sexual role and learning to size up his environment, the female trickster has developed a more fluid notion of gender identity and has embraced androgyny in her postmodern incarnations. Her double-faced nature—incarnating paradox, exploiting contradictions, and enacting dualities—enables her to straddle the gender line and to draw on her resilience in the quest for fairness and social justice.

  Still, the future of the female trickster, as envisioned by writers and filmmakers who invented warrior heroines in the struggle for social justice, is by no means secure. And the story of Pygmalion, who was so disgusted by the licentious behavior of the Cypriot women that he lost interest in them and fell in love with a statue that he sculpted from ivory, reminds us that creative impulses are not always fueled by the best of intentions. Is it possible that some of the crusaders, avengers, and saviors in our entertainments today may turn, like Frankenstein, on their creators in unexpected ways, not so much to engineer a happy ending for themselves as to use their wits and cunning in the service of newfound ambitions that are more like arrogant power grabs than altruistic actions?

  Reinventing Eve

  What is in the future of the female trickster, and how will she evolve? Does she run the risk of turning into an antiheroine, an outlaw force that turns toxic, using her brainpower to take charge and undermine in dark, devious ways? Now that heroines have found their way into new arenas of action, will villainy, too, assume new faces and features? In Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), a robot named Ava (gesturing in gender-fluid ways to both Adam and Eve) becomes a triumphant survivor who writes a new script in a posthuman world, where she has been constructed as the perfect woman. The film’s title elides the “deus” in the phrase “deus ex machina,” reminding us that the god who makes a stagey last-minute arrival in dramatic productions may be absent from the happily-ever-after engineered in this particular story.

  The film’s title also hints at a new order of beings: cyborgs, automata, and robots that may be embodiments of men or women but that are also, as machines, gender neutral even if they have reproductive organs modeled on those of humans. The term “robot” was coined in Karel Cˇapek’s 1920 play RUR (an acronym for Rossum’s Universal Robots). The Czech word robota means “forced labor,” and the robots in Cˇapek’s work, slaves made from artificial flesh and blood, rebel against their makers and destroy them. Automata have been around for centuries, first as amusing toys—dancing ladies, clockwork flutists, Vaucanson’s Duck, and a chess-playing Mechanical Turk. These seemingly frivolous contraptions quickly turned sinister as they became more sophisticated, for how long would it be before machines replicated human behavior and took over? The German filmmaker Fritz Lang had already dramatized that anxiety in his 1927 film Metropolis, in which a robot named Maria incites workers to rebel against a factory owner and unleash the power of natural forces to destroy those who exploit their labor. How close are we coming to a Technological Singularity, an intelligence explosion in which machines build more powerful versions of their own capacities and escape our control?

  Ex Machina takes its cue from the seductive female automata found in literary works ranging from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1816)—the inspiration for Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny—to Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s title figure in his novel L’Ève future. In Alex Garland’s film, Caleb, a low-level coder, wins a contest run by the head of the company that employs him. The company founder, Nathan (a name echoing Nathaniel, the protagonist of Hoffmann’s story), has created, among other things
, a search engine called Blue Book (that name evokes both the designation for notes of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lectures dictated in the 1930s as well as the fairy tale “Bluebeard”). Caleb flies to Nathan’s retreat, situated in a remote, Edenic setting, where the founder of Blue Book is working on an artificial-intelligence project for which he has recruited Caleb to measure his success in creating a robot that will pass the Turing test (a challenge designed by the father of computer science to determine whether a machine exhibits intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human). Nathan has engaged Caleb for his version of the challenge: “The real test is to show you that she is a robot and then see if you still feel she has consciousness.”

  Ex Machina, 2014 Courtesy of Photofest

  In an ironic twist, Nathan’s genius has been to create a machine capable of outwitting not just Caleb but also its creator, for Ava has become a being with “self-awareness, imagination, manipulation, sexuality, empathy.” What does Ava do after she has killed her creator but don skin and outer garments, marking her emergence into consciousness, even as her surface appearance of air muscles and electroactive polymers conceals technological circuitry. And where do we last see Ava, after she has escaped confinement and entered the human world? Where else but at an urban crossroads, as a professional woman dressed flawlessly and ready to take on the corporate world. She becomes a female incarnation of Hermes, god of merchants and thieves, lord of the crossroads. Ava’s intelligence is no longer artificial but rather very real. A cyborg who is also something of a cipher, we can still bet that this new twenty-first-century heroine is unlikely to worry about anyone’s survival but her own. And her social mission will most likely be limited to destroying those who try to control her circuitry. Ava is the new antiheroine, there to remind us that the heroine of the future may not possess the resilience, compassion, and resourcefulness that we have seen in heroines from times past.41