Divergent Thinking (4 page)

A less action-oriented example of an expectations-defying character is Jo March. Almost the first thing we learn about her is that she's a tomboy and likes to defy convention. She's the boldest of the four girls in
Little Women
, so definitely Dauntless. But she's also a reader and a writer, and she's
very
proud of the fact—so she's got some Erudite tendencies, too. Over the course of the story, she shows examples of all five factions, as she learns about forgiveness, selflessness, peaceful acceptance, and writing a book that is true and honest to her heart. Jo March is Divergent.

Enough literature. Let's talk about The Avengers. Because not every hero can be
everything
all on their own. Sometimes heroes need buddies to round them out.

The Avengers are a heroic team. Their group works because it's balanced; it includes examples of all five factions in individuals. Tony Stark: Erudite, because
obviously.
Captain America: Candor, because of truth, justice, and the American way. Thor: Amity, because he keeps trying to make peace with Loki and Loki keeps taking advantage of him. (Also, Amity's symbol at the Choosing Ceremony is Earth, and Thor is a little thick.) The Hulk: Dauntless, because he is all emotion and impulse. (Also, HULK SMASH!) Agent Coulson: Abnegation, of course. He's the administrative arm of S.H.I.E.L.D., a behind-the-scenes sort of fellow, but most of all, he sacrifices himself for the team.

Constructing a balanced team isn't an exact science. The other team members—Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Nick Fury—also go into making the Avengers function. It's not as simple as “equal parts Amity, Dauntless, etc.” (And you might have a different opinion for which Avenger should represent which faction.) But thanks to the individual talents and strengths of its members, the team as a whole is Divergent.

Being a part of a balanced team can make the individuals more balanced, too. Over the course of the movie, I think most of the Avengers have to become a little more Divergent. (One of the reasons I like that movie so much is that each character has their own Growth Moment.) Being superheroes, they're all a bit Dauntless. Bruce Banner has to make peace with his anger so he can control becoming the Hulk. Black Widow is a very different type of Erudite than Tony Stark, being both canny and shifty, but she also has a moment of real self-honesty when she talks about the “red in her ledger.”

The biggest change, however, comes to Tony Stark, who is arguably (as in, I will make this argument with anyone) the film's main hero in two ways: 1) even though saving the world takes the whole team, it's Stark that does That Thing At The End, and 2) in order to do it, he is the character who makes the biggest transformation.

He starts out a textbook Erudite—too smart for his own good, and smart aleck to go with it. Billionaire genius playboy. He even lives in a tower full of gadgets and tech like the Erudite in Chicago. Throughout the movie, the other Avengers challenge him about his lack of honesty, empathy, and selflessness, and he deflects them with wisecracks. But in the pivotal big bad boss fight, it isn't being smarter than everyone else that allows him to save the world. It's being brave and selfless. Iron Man doesn't start out the film as Divergent, but he ends it that way.

In
Divergent
, I don't think it's an accident that Tris' friends and allies at Dauntless are faction transfers—besides the fact that the newbies would stick together. They are a divergent group: Christina is from Candor, Will from Erudite, Tobias/Four from Abnegation. (Amity is underrepresented, but as I said before, it's not an exact science.)

Tris is identified as Divergent by the aptitude test very early on, but she has to keep it a secret. Obviously, it influences her at the Choosing Ceremony, and she waffles between factions—and symbolically, between the facets of her personality. But she doesn't really
own
it until the end of the first book. Still, even before that, it's when she shows her Divergence that Tris has her most heroic moments. Taking Al's place in front of the target was an act of bravery, but also of empathy and self-sacrifice. Tris is clever enough to work out what Erudite is really doing with the serums they inject into the Dauntless, and later, to create a plan for getting back into Dauntless headquarters to stop the simulation. She's also brave enough to enact that plan, but in the process she must also lead Caleb, her father, and Marcus, talking them through the hard parts of jumping from a moving train (onto a roof, no less). That takes empathy, an Abnegation trait, as well as leadership.

Not that Tris is perfectly Divergent. There's not much of Amity in her. She is not big on peace or forgiveness. Honesty isn't her strongest virtue, either. And while she is very smart, Tris acknowledges the Abnegation part of herself more than she does the Erudite.

However, in the climactic confrontation with the simulation-controlled Tobias, it really is all three of her Divergent aspects that allow her to save him, and herself: cleverness to come up with an action drastic enough to reach him, self-sacrifice to put the gun into his hand, and a hell of a lot of bravery to trust her plan would work.

DIVERGENCE IN ACTION

In
Allegiant
, the whole faction rug gets ripped out from under us. Instead of factions, our heroes are struggling with questions of individual identity. But never has being Divergent been more important. Not because of genetic purity or superperson status, but because the old paradigm has been erased, and being just one thing is no longer an option. Decisions and alliances are no longer confined to what a faction demands. That can be overwhelming if you're used to a limited number of choices.

But the Divergent have always—at least privately—had more choices, because their Divergence allows them to adapt. A Divergent hero can weigh her options. She can use brains or brawn, be honest or be crafty, compromise for peace or stick to her guns.

After the revelations in
Allegiant
, it's worth pointing out that Divergence is not merely a genetic factor. Tris might be Divergent in biology, but Tobias is Divergent in action. The five faction symbols tattooed on his back show he understands the need for balance between the factions and their guiding principles. All through the series he doesn't just evidence bravery or selflessness. He demonstrates intelligence and kindness. He learns honesty and peace.

Divergence, whether it's in your genes, your upbringing, or the process of learning, is what allows you to make individual choices. It allows for bravery, honesty, reconciliation, wisdom, and sacrifice whenever each, or all, are necessary.

Over our lifetimes, we choose factions over and over again. We leave one behind and choose another. We have the freedom of concentric or overlapping circles of friends and family. We don't have to pick one path, one trait, one ideal, and close our minds to all others. We can be Divergent. And we definitely should.

       
Rosemary Clement-Moore
is the author of a bunch of awesome books like
The Splendor Falls, Texas Gothic,
and
Spirit and Dust,
which have been recommended by the ALA Best Books for Teens, the TAYSHAS reading list, and her mother's book club. She's a water sign, an introvert, her patronus is an otter, and New!Kirk is her Enterprise Captain. Besides internet quizzes, she is addicted to coffee, books, knitting, and the Discovery Channel. She lives in Fort Worth, Texas, with a miniature yeti disguised as a Pomeranian.

___________________

¹
I am taking my life in my hands to make this joke. No one who has seen what happens when you poke a badger would ever underestimate a Hufflepuff—a perfect example of the dangers of labels and stereotypes.

²
My aforementioned BFF is one of the most moral people I know, but back in our tabletop-role-playing-game days, she loved playing the evil-genius characters. And she was frighteningly good at it.

³
This practice is still in use as an alternative medicine.

⁴
Pretty much anything that was wrong with you required a surgeon to drain off some of your blood to get rid of the excess bile or phlegm or whatever was making you ill. And even after science had disproven the idea of humors, all the way to the mid-1800s, bloodletting was a common treatment for just about everything from fever to upset stomach, and particularly for psychological problems.

⁵
I was going to say, “It's all in fun!” and then I remembered how serious people get about their favorite Doctor.

⁶
If you want to learn more about these traits, a Google search will turn up plenty.

⁷
Types are based on personality rather than the unchangeable factor of your birthdate, obviously. Still, this is probably not what Ms. Briggs and Ms. Myers had in mind.

⁸
I admit some bias here. I had a friend who was totally Candor—talented, funny, wickedly smart, and brutally honest. She truly believed that if someone was hurt by her opinion, it was because they were too sensitive. To be fair, she would have called me an Amity wimp who would rather keep the peace than be completely honest. And she wouldn't have been entirely wrong. So it's all a matter of degrees.

⁹
There's a pretty dead-on real-world example of this in Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister in the 1930s. In order to preserve peace, he allowed Hitler's Germany to stomp over a good part of Europe until it became clear that Adolph wasn't going to stop unless someone made him.

       
There are a lot of ways to sort people, and as we saw in Rosemary's essay, these methods often have a lot in common, even going back thousands of years. Jennifer Lynn Barnes, YA novelist and PhD in psychology, maps the Divergent trilogy's factions onto another real-life method for describing our personalities, this one favored by modern psychologists: the Five Factor Model, otherwise known as the Big Five.

J
ENNIFER
L
YNN
B
ARNES

Veronica Roth has stated
that she got the idea for
Divergent
while studying exposure therapy in Psych 101, but the psychology underlying the world of
Divergent
and threaded throughout the series goes far beyond studies on what it means to confront and overcome our fears. Psychology can explain the significance of the five factions, what it really means to be Divergent, and why, as readers, we're faced with the same challenges that Tris confronts: to look beyond the simulation, to carve out an identity, to find the place where we belong.

In our case, the
simulation
is the book itself. When I'm not writing young adult novels, I study the science of fiction and the question of why we get so invested in fictional stories. Why, psychologists ask, do we invest so much time and spend so much money on things that we know are not real? And why is it that
knowing
that Tris and Four aren't real doesn't render her death painless for us as readers? Why would we ever cry real tears for people we know are make-believe?

One answer that scientists have come up with to this question is that fictional stories are simulations—and, yes, they do use that exact word. Even though we
know
these fictional stories are not real, we
feel
like they are. As Tris comments inside her fear landscape, “Simulations aren't real; they pose no real threat to me, so logically, I shouldn't be afraid of them.” And yet, despite knowing that the simulation isn't real, Tris' reactions to it are, as she puts it, “visceral” (
Divergent
). So, too, are our reactions as readers.

My goal for this essay is to dig beneath the surface of the simulation, with an eye to what the psychological sciences can tell us about the books. Like Tris, we can't just turn off our emotions in response to something that
seems
so real, but we
can
use our awareness of the simulation to ask why the world Veronica Roth has built is so compelling. The answer, I am going to argue, is that the faction system challenges us as readers to ask the same questions that plague Tris throughout the series: