Person:

Hendricks, Heidi

Beloved and bemoaned, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga and Suzanne Collin’s Hunger Games trilogy permeated and persist in our cultural conversations and imaginations. What about these particular narratives enthrall and outrage contemporary audiences transcending age, gender, class, and mores, and what does the pandemic reactivity to their teenaged heroines suggest about American society in this moment in time? Thorough analysis of the narrative structure, protagonists, and core conflicts found in the Twilight saga and the Hunger Games trilogy in the context of psychological, historical, and cultural studies scholarship—specifically in relationship to the work of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell and psychologists C. G. Jung and John Weir Perry—reveals how each narrative functions mythologically. By evoking affect-images, archetypal representations of unconscious energies and information, each narrative leans against the taboos and longings of individual psyches while reflecting the condition and dilemmas of its generative social order’s collective unconscious. From the onset of modernity, affect-images of adolescent girls in Western cultural productions have hosted our preconscious conflicts and disowned anxieties about shifting relational power dynamics—in particular, the changing roles of race, class, sex and gender in defining individual identity and the social order. By functioning mythologically, current heroic affect-images, such as Twilight’s Bella Swan and The Hunger Games’s Katniss Everdeen, reflect core anxieties about modernity’s redefinition of the individual and the female, and illustrate the conflict between biological embodiment and modernity’s release of the individual from pre-determined notions of identity and destiny.