While Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy explicitly includes Greco-Roman references, this essay argues that the trilogy also implicitly invokes the myths of Artemis and of Philomela. In obliquely referencing these mythic women, The Hunger Games provides its protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, with different possible paths of femininity that she can follow. By showing how both of these forms of femininity keep Katniss focused on vengeance, The Hunger Games points to the dangers of reproducing beliefs inherited from the past. Katniss’s ultimate rejection of both of these inherited types of femininity allows her to break free from her past and to change her society.

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Writers of fiction capitalize upon dress’s potential as an agent of deception, using clothing as a means through which characters control their identity to perpetuate lies. Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze(1725) contains this type of heroine, and the novella shows dress can provide women with power that they can find in few other arenas. This novella constructs lying and dress as potent related tools that allow the protagonist to achieve her desires by creating untruths that pass for realities. In so doing, Fantominacapitalizes upon two related phenomena: the cultural perception of women’s status as innately deceptive and the pervasive accusation that clothing hides the truth. This essay discusses how Fantominacelebrates deception by using clothing as visual rhetoric. To do so, it first sets out the popular association of dress with deception, paying particular attention to the hoop petticoat. A discussion of the ways in which Haywood’s heroine employs dress as visual rhetoric follows, establishing how Fantominacelebrates lying as a useful strategy for women.

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In this chapter, Kathryn Strong Hansen asserts that the Artemis Fowl series fails to consider race and gender directly, while it simultaneously offers readers essentialist readings of race and gender. Thus, this series, which has the potential for creating characters with intersectional identities, reinforces current hegemonic structures of race and gender, ultimately eliding race and racialized differences.