"Willful Woman" and "Cool Girl": Gender in Wuthering Heights and The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games and Wuthering Heights are two vastly different novels set in two distinct cultures, yet their female protagonists have much in common. Both Catherine Earnshaw and Katniss Everdeen throw off their respective societies' notions of available gender roles by performing a mix of masculinity and femininity. This paper focuses on the ways in which these characters' gender presentation can be considered radical in the worlds of their novels, and concludes by exploring how women in the real world can also throw off limited notions of femininity.