Since we all have the time of Haymitch's games on our minds, I thought now would be a good time to bring up again my longstanding theory that Katniss's mother was disowned by her parents but not primarily (or even at all) because she married someone from the Seam. I think it's because she and Katniss's father were involved in rebellious activities.
Here are my clues:
She was Maysilee's friend. She got her canary after she died, inheriting the symbol of a warning in the form of a songbird.
Haymitch's victory frightened Show. If the Capitol's control was strong at the time, Haymitch's forcefield trick would have been just good tv. The fact that Snow came down so hard on Snow suggests there were threats of rebellion before Haymitch even went into the arena.
When Gale is whipped, Haymitch says they used to take people who got whipped to Katniss's mother. Specifically, he says, "She's the one we took them to," which seems to imply it was just her, not her whole family.
After treating Gale, she briefly speaks to Haymitch about "before." They understand each other so easily with just a few words despite us seeing hardly any interaction between them before. It feels like they have more of a shared history than what Katniss knows.
Speaking of what Katniss knows, she considers this interaction and wonders what they are talking about but decides she's too upset to ask right then. She never thinks about asking again, but the whole thing suggests that there is a lot more to the story of D12 in Haymitch and her parents' youth.
Katniss remembers her mom getting angry at her dad for teaching her "The Hanging Tree." Little Katniss had cried because her mom yelling was so out of the norm. Katniss assumes that her mom didn't like her little girl learning such a dark song, but we know better. Her dad sang a rebels' song, and her mom got scared of him teaching it to her daughter.
I think both of Katniss's parents were involved in rebellion to some degree when they were young. The Capitol came down hard on Haymitch and his whole district to snuff it out. It scared Katniss's maternal grandparents who maybe told her to cut ties with her Seam boy or else, or maybe they just cut her off for her own deeds irrespective of her romantic interest.
Writing this because @lasthaysileeshipper brought up that there is a connection with how fandom views of Mrs. Everdeen and her mental illness coincide with misogyny and I have thoughts.
First I want to say that this is a topic that often gets personalized. Many people experienced their own childhood neglect/abuse and as we carry ourselves into fiction, that leads to intense feelings when seeing it played out. However, there is also a lot that gets said about Mrs. Everdeen (even by well-intentioned people who don't hate her) that carries an implicit bias against women, mothers, and those with mental illness. I hope that this leads to reflection rather than blame, and if you have anything to say I'm open to respectful discussion.
Katniss's Mother: The One the Fandom Made into Medea
You've heard about the Madonna/Whore complex, now I propose Mary/Medea: a fictional mother must be an absolute perfect selfless saint whose identity revolves solely around her children, or else be a selfish abusive demon with no redeeming qualities whatsoever
tumblr post by @gingerpolyglot
If you've been in the Hunger Games fandom for a minute, you've seen the hate and criticism directed at Mrs. Everdeen. She's been called a bad mother, weak, neglectful, incapable, the "worst" character in the series, and more. If you've read the series then you know why: after the death of her husband, Mrs. Everdeen "didn't do anything but sit propped up in a chair or, more often, huddled under the blankets on her bed, eyes fixed on some point in the distance." And while she did "slowly" return to a state where she was able to complete activities of daily living, it was "months" of "neglect," where Katniss was feeding her family; foraging and hunting in the woods; and trading at the Hob. Anyone can see how this, following the death of their father, is incredibly traumatizing for Katniss and Prim. It's a position that no child should be in, which is why we have families, communities, and social services to protect children when their parent is unable to care for them and hopefully, get help for the parent, too. For the Everdeens in Panem, however, none of these existed. At least none that would truly help them, as Katniss fears going to The Home where children are physically abused. All of this left a deep wound on Katniss and we can assume Prim as well.
But, rather than critiquing Panem for dangerous work conditions that killed Mr. Everdeen, or the scarcity of food, or the social divides which isolated Mrs. Everdeen after her marriage to Mr. Everdeen, or the lack of social services, the blame has often been laid directly at the feet of Mrs. Everdeen who exhibits symptoms of catatonia. This is a feature that can be part of other disorders (rather than a diagnosis itself) and can be found in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, brief psychotic disorder, and depression (and though not in the DSM-5, there's also some evidence of it also appearing in those with PTSD). From the DSM-5, Mrs. Everdeen meets criteria to have catatonia specified with another disorder (likely depression) by having three of the following symptoms:
Stupor: "she didn't do anything but sit propped up in a chair, more often, huddled under the blankets of her bed, eyes fixed on some point in the distance."
Mutism-same quote as above: she didn't do anything. No speech and Katniss doesn't report her making any noise. While not the books, the movies portrayed this as Katniss begging her mother to "say something" while she does not.
Negativism ("opposition or no response to instructions or external stimuli"). "No amount of pleading from Prim seemed to affect her."
Catatonia is a serious condition that requires hospitalization, psycho-pharmaceuticals, and once the catatonia is passed, therapy, to prevent a relapse. If left untreated, catatonia can lead to death or injury.
Here is the first point where misogyny comes into play of how the fandom responds to Mrs. Everdeen. I have seen her condition described as "grief" or "depression" but not what the text indicates it is: depression with catatonic features. The list above has links to the URMC's Department of Psychology with training videos on catatonia symptoms. I'd encourage you to watch it, because that is the level of mental illness Mrs. Everdeen was stuck in. It was not regular grief or a moderate depression. Katniss, who has no diagnostic language, says her mother was "locked in some dark world" during this time.
Women's symptoms are downplayed in the medical field because they're "emotional," "dramatic," and "hysterical." Here, we often see the fandom do the same. Even those who don't express outright hatred for her character will soften the truth of what she was facing with her catatonia. Again, it's "when her husband died" and "grief" and "depression." All of those are certainly hard, but they often retain some amount of functioning when given enough motivation and coping skills. But Mrs. Everdeen did not have any functioning. It was literally impossible for her to do anything in that period of time because of her catatonia. She says "I couldn't help...I was ill" and a large portion of the fandom simply doesn't believe her.
And on the more hostile side, I have seen people say they "don't care" about Mrs. Everdeen's mental illness. Apparently, being a mother means that Mrs. Everdeen should have fought through this catatonic depression. That the power of love or the innate protectiveness that all good mothers have would make Mrs. Everdeen's brain chemicals start working and snap her out of this catatonia. However, despite what you see in the movies, that's not how serious mental illness works, especially without support. It's not a matter of love or will power. Mothers can and do experience serious mental illness that make them unable, for various periods of time, to care for their children. Sometimes, motherhood even causes this or exacerbates it. Motherhood does not give anyone the ability to turn off mental illness.
This was (as far as we know) Mrs. Everdeen's first experience with serious mental illness in a place where there are no social services, no therapists, no psychiatrists, no spiritual leaders. Additionally, no family, friends, or neighbors came to support the family, either. No one thought to check in on them or cared about any signs of their condition. Doing anything for the first time leads to mistakes and this first experience was by all definition a crisis of which she hadn't been prepared nor given any support beyond what her two children could offer. A position that Katniss and Prim shouldn't have had to deal with.
This also leads into the other time that people look at and say, "I can forgive Mrs. Everdeen when her husband died, but when she didn't go back to Twelve with Katniss, that was it. She became unforgivable."
Let's back up: Mrs. Everdeen has lost her husband, seen her oldest daughter enter two Hunger Games, watched her home be bombed and burned, survived another bombing, was a nurse during a war, and then her youngest daughter was blown up at the age of 13. Rather than going into a catatonic depression, she "buries her grief in her work." When Katniss is taken back to District 12, she's given a letter from her mother, which she doesn't read initially and never says what was in. Haymitch says, "You know why she can't come back" to which Katniss's narration says "Because between my father and Prim and the ashes, the place is too painful to bear."
Mrs. Everdeen has a history of catatonic depression. This means that she is at a higher risk of relapsing. She knows that her husband's death triggered this mental illness and that she is once again experiencing the loss of one of the people she loves most, her young daughter. She also knows that when she was in a catatonic depression, she traumatized her surviving daughter. Additionally, Panem has just finished a war. Therapists are rare in Panem, even more to find a surviving one and let's be honest—how many of them are good? Katniss and Peeta are prioritized for treatment due to their fame and their history of violence toward others. While Mrs. Everdeen has connections, it's unlikely she would be prioritized for treatment and additionally, there are likely many people with acute mental health needs after the war.
If Mrs. Everdeen returned to District 12, she would be likely to do extremely poorly mentally and emotionally, perhaps to the point of becoming catatonic again. People will blame her, calling her weak and neglectful again. But I think what we have to consider is: did Mrs. Everdeen think that staying away would help Katniss? That she identified what would trigger her, and so rather than Katniss having to see her mother in that state again and traumatizing her again, she made the choice to stay away, in hopes that her absence would be the better choice for them.
In the end, we don't know for sure all of her reasoning. This is my hypothesis that this is why she stayed away. But I find that most people don't take Mrs. Everdeen's assessment of herself seriously. They again downplay just how terrible her mental health could become, and by extension, further traumatize Katniss. And maybe you think that her presence, no matter the state, is better than her absence. But you have to admit, Mrs. Everdeen is stuck with no good answer. Either way, she loses.
And so, Mrs. Everdeen is "a bad mother."
Perhaps because Katniss does it herself in CF, people will compare Gale's mother to Katniss's. Hazelle lost her husband in the same mining accident and was pregnant at the time. Yet she went to work as a laundress, she pulled her family together, she is a strong one. And, though the book is not out yet, there have already been many comparisons to how Haymitch's Ma is another one of the "good" mothers after her husband died, because she went to work, not like Mrs. Everdeen. Isn't it tragic that Mrs. Abernathy, one of the good mothers, will be dead by the end of the book she appears in?
And so, the fandom has given its crowns to Hazelle and Mrs. Abernathy. They are "The Good" mothers who have done no wrong toward their children. They are Marys. But Mrs. Everdeen, dirty with mental illness, is "The Bad" mother. She is Medea, the source and cause of Katniss's trauma. Nevermind that Hazelle is such a minor character she only appears in three scenes of the books and that she relied on Gale as much as or more than Mrs. Everdeen relied on Katniss, or that everything we know so far about Mrs. Abernathy is from one released excerpt and one sentence from Haymitch in the original trilogy. But from what we do know, she also relies on her sons to keep their family from starvation, not unlike Mrs. Everdeen with Katniss.
And nevermind that this take also actively negates many good things we do know about Mrs. Everdeen. Like the fact that she did work and earn money/items: she was a healer (and possibly did this even before Mr. Everdeen died). And, by all accounts, that she was an excellent healer, knowing how to treat all kinds of injuries and illnesses and kept a cool head while doing it. And that nearly all interactions we see between herself and Katniss, she is caring for her daughter: drawing and heating her bath, braiding her hair, giving her an excuse to be less affectionate with Peeta, treating her foot, putting her on a diet to build muscle before the Quell, treating her whenever she was in the hospital. Mrs. Everdeen is also the one that Prim wanted to sleep with the night before her first reaping, showing that her younger daughter still saw her as a protective figure. Also, after an entire nation has come to know Katniss and her circle has expanded, Mrs. Everdeen is one of three people Katniss believes truly loves her at that point in time.
And yet, how often is any of this discussed about her? Hardly ever. What is mostly discussed is her neglect, the places she failed and stumbled, pointing the finger and laying the blame, while rarely providing any context around the fact that at the time, she was mentally ill to the point that today she would have been hospitalized. The adjectives given to her are things like weak, frail, useless, and neglectful which are completely based on the worst episode of her life. I wonder how all of us would like the same treatment, for our most shameful period of time to be how people describe us.
Mrs. Everdeen is far from the only character in the series with mental illness. This mostly comes in the form of PTSD and substance use disorder. Characters with the most prominent symptoms include: Katniss, Haymitch, Finnick, Johanna, and Annie (the latter also having some kind of diagnosis that would fall under or feature psychosis). Peeta also has PTSD and his hijacking to contend with, and Coriolanus Snow has traits that align with narcissistic personality disorder.
And yet...why is Mrs. Everdeen's mental illness the most maligned out of all of these characters? Some may say because hers almost lead to Katniss and Prim dying. But President Snow is responsible for the deaths of thousands of children, and Haymitch was also willing to gamble with Katniss's and Peeta's life for the rebellion, two kids who became his family. All of these other characters have actually killed somebody, and Peeta's hijacking also directly led to him strangling Katniss and trying again to kill her in the Capitol.
So why is it that Mrs. Everdeen is the most hated? Possibly Snow is the exception, but since TBOSAS, he has equal number of admirers both in terms of his looks and general interest of his character, while Mrs. Everdeen is dismissed at best and hated at worst.
I think this also links back to an implicit bias against the feminine. Haymitch, Finnick, Peeta, Snow—they're all men. Even Peeta, the most feminine of these four, is masculine. Katniss has both masculine and feminine traits, but oftentimes, people see her masculine traits more. Johanna is the same: her brash attitude is more masculine than feminine. Annie is presented as feminine, with Finnick's insistence on protecting her and her fragility and youth and long wavy dark hair. She is presented as the "good" feminine, the kind that must be guarded and coddled. The "good" kind of weakness (this, too, is misogyny).
Mrs. Everdeen, however, is the "bad" feminine. Blond, middle-aged, polite, and entirely lacking power. She is the opposite of Katniss's wild hunter side as the quiet healer, working with plants and seemingly not doing the "dirty" work outdoors, even though she's probably come in contact with every type of bodily fluid as a result of her work. And of course, she's been blemished by the label of "bad mother" nor is she young to garner sympathy and protection.
Mrs. Everdeen's trauma that kickstarted her depression is different than the others. Snow was traumatized by war. The rest are all victors, who had to see and do horrible things to survive. Mrs. Everdeen.....lost her husband. The fact that this is what kicked off her mental illness makes it feminine and flimsy compared to those that came from the Games. It wasn't a metaphor for a soldier that caused her mental illness, but weakening at the loss of a man. Surely a strong woman, another "good" feminine, wouldn't have gotten mentally ill at the loss of her husband (look at Hazelle and Mrs. Abernathy).
Everyone else, even feminine Annie, has masculine trauma. Mrs. Everdeen has feminine trauma. What a crime. How pathetic. She shouldn't have even been mentally ill in the first place.
And so she's been stuck in fandom discussion for fifteen years. The bad mother, the Medea, who not only wasn't strong enough to fight against her mental illness, she did it as a weak, pathetic woman.
I'm going against this call and I will say that I consider Mrs. Everdeen a good mother. Her story is laced with tragedy that challenged her and brought great strain in her relationship with Katniss. But we know that she loved her daughters and always cared for them at the greatest capacity she was able to at any time. She was calm, level-headed, and even rebellious, which was eventually challenged because she became a mother and wanted to protect her children. Even those who sympathize with her rarely say it, so I'll end this with my final conclusion:
Mrs. Everdeen was a good mother. Not a Mary, and not a Medea, but simply a good mother.
More discussion from me because I know it will come up:
Katniss, as the victim of her mother's neglect, is allowed to feel any type of way she wants about what happened to her. However we see through the series that she is able to sympathize with her mother and even forgives her and becomes closer to her through the three books. Katniss's relationship with her mother is complicated (as it should be). There is also a lot of room for growth and healing that I hope happened after the war.
The book never says that Otho Mellark was a bad father but the way it's implied that he allowed Peeta's mok to abuse him makes me think of him as having failed Peeta.
It reminds me of how Katniss was abandoned by her mother to fend for herself after her father died.
I don't know what Otho Mellark's life was like and I understand Katniss's mother was depressed but still, they both failed their children in a large way here. It's heartening to see that, despite this, both Katniss and Peeta ended up together because they both understand what it's like to have a parent fail them and know the value and importance of someone who stays with you, always.
I listened to Donald Sutherland's interview where he said Snow wanted Katniss as a successor and now I'm imagining a fic where Snow meets Katniss at 11 or 12 years old and adopts her.
Hi! I'm looking for some fanfics in the POV of Mrs. Everdeen. I tried searching online but I cant really seem to find any. I'm not really looking for anything in particular. I just think it would be really cool to see how the games were from her perspective. Thank you!
You might check out In The Hollow Of His Hands by MTK4FUN. It's written from Mrs. Everdeen's POV after the war but she mentions the games from her perspective. You can find it here.
