by Leah Wilson
When Tris and Tobias are arrested at Candor in Insurgent and given the truth serum, they both must admit secrets that they’ve kept from everyone else, including a few they’ve kept from each other. Tobias must admit the truth about the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father, that he chose Dauntless rather than Abnegation in order to get away from his father, and that the decision was actually born out of cowardice rather than bravery. Later, after beating his father to prove he isn’t a coward, Tobias eventually begins to come to terms with this truth. By being forced to be honest with everyone, he can finally begin to be honest with himself about how his father’s abuse has affected him. Although he initially intends to reset his mother’s memories at the end of Allegiant, he chooses to confront her honestly instead, admitting that he betrayed her because he’s as afraid of her as he was of his father. He risks a great deal of emotional pain if she chooses the factionless and her crusade over him. He knows she might not make the choice that he wants—that she doesn’t want to hear that she is becoming like Marcus, the man who caused both of them so much pain—but he also holds out hope that they can reconcile and that he can reestablish his relationship with her. He’s honest and he gives her a choice, and his bravery is rewarded when she chooses him.
As a true Divergent, Tris is in a different situation. She has the power to resist the truth serum, and she does. She struggles against it, trying to keep herself from telling everyone what happened to Will, but holding the information inside only intensifies the guilt that she feels for her actions. When asked about her regrets, she feels she can’t hide anymore. She looks at Tobias and Christina and realizes she has to tell them the truth. She must admit that she shot Will during the attack on Abnegation. This admission is exceptionally hard for her, but not because she is feeling guilty and mourning Will’s death. In fact, only by being honest and giving voice to what happened will she be able to move past her guilt and accept what she did. Instead, being honest about what happened is hard because, once the truth is out, Tris will feel bare. Everyone will be able to see Tris as she really is, not just as she wants them to see her, and she worries that her friends, especially Christina, will not be able to forgive her.
People are defined by their actions. Tobias has worked hard to appear strong and to keep the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father a secret so people will not think he is a coward, just as Tris has worked hard to prove not only to others but to herself that she is strong and brave, and to keep from focusing on the fact that she was willing to die for Tobias but never considered it when it came to Will. They both hold on to their secrets, wearing them like armor. Being honest and admitting these parts of themselves in front of people they know (and people they don’t know) helps them be honest with themselves, confront their fears of rejection and inadequacy, and move on.
SELFLESSNESS AND BRAVERY AREN’T ALL THAT DIFFERENT
In the beginning of the series, Tris rejects her parents’ values and beliefs. It’s clear in the very beginning of Divergent, in the way Tris talks about Abnegation, that she doesn’t believe in the ideals the faction represents. She finds selflessness stifling. Those feelings of rebellion are made tangible, and as a result more permanent, when she chooses to leave Abnegation and become Dauntless at the Choosing Ceremony. Once a member of Dauntless, Tris tells Tobias that she feels selfish and brave, linking the two together. But she’s wrong. Selflessness and bravery are entwined, something she gradually comes to understand over the course of the series.
For Tris, her mother’s death in Divergent is the ultimate act of selfless bravery. Natalie Prior saves Tris from drowning, intending to get them both to safety and to join Tris’ father and brother. However, when they are cornered by two groups of Dauntless, Natalie makes a split-second decision. She tells Tris to run and to meet up with her brother and father, and she tells her to be brave. Then she fires at the Dauntless in order to keep their focus on her, allowing Tris to escape. Natalie Prior knows that she is going to die. She knows that in order for Tris to escape she must sacrifice herself. But unlike Al’s suicide earlier in the novel, Natalie’s death is brave. She’s calm and determined, and she sacrifices herself without expecting praise. She dies for Tris without hesitation because she loves her daughter no matter what and because she knows this is the only option that ensures Tris will live.
After her parents’ deaths, Tris struggles with the concept of selflessness and sacrifice and what each means to her. She feels guilty for leaving her parents, and she wants to honor them by making their sacrifice for her mean something. She even wants to follow in their footsteps, essentially making them proud by sacrificing herself for the greater good. That’s what drives her to turn herself in to Jeanine in Insurgent despite promising Tobias that she wouldn’t. She thinks that she is being selfless, and in a way she is, but she’s being reckless rather than brave. She’s sacrificing herself because she can and because she feels guilty about her parents’ deaths. Her sacrifice is not out of necessity. She had other options. She could have worked with Tobias and their allies in order to stop Jeanine rather than just resigning herself to death. Tris realizes this once she is facing her own execution and she’s injected with what she thinks is a death serum. This is a crucial turning point for her character. She realizes that she values her own life and that she can be selfless and brave without sacrificing herself. She wants to honor her parents and their sacrifice by living and by helping people without violence.
By the end of Allegiant, Tris finally reconciles what it means to be both selfless and brave when Caleb volunteers to set off the memory serum in the Weapons Lab, even though he knows it will result in his death. He feels guilty about participating in Tris’ torture, and as a result, he is willing to die so that she will finally forgive him. Because of everything she’s been through, however, Tris knows that his sacrifice won’t be brave; Caleb is making this choice out of guilt and shame. His sacrifice will be cowardly. He will surely die, because, unlike her, Caleb isn’t Divergent and won’t be able to resist the serum. Tris, though, has a chance. If she can resist the serum, there is a chance that she could do this and live. She knows that the plan itself is necessary—there are no other options. They need to get into the Weapons Lab. She also loves Caleb, despite everything he did and despite the fact that he hasn’t been strong and brave. In fact, Tris is stronger and braver than her brother is, and that’s why she makes the sacrifice for him. Because she now knows that true bravery is selfless, but it is also kind: “That self-sacrifice should be done from necessity, not without exhausting all other options. That it should be done for people who need your strength because they don’t have enough of their own” (Allegiant).
BE BRAVE
Tris has always wanted to be brave—to prove to herself and to others that she is more than what she appears. The trials Tris went through in Dauntless initiation, things like standing still while knives spun toward her face and jumping off a roof, required her to act in spite of her fear. But it’s the kind of bravery she exhibits in the small moments of her life that is more powerful. It’s when Tris makes her decisions apart from faction loyalties, when she moves beyond the faction archetypes and is true to herself, that she’s truly brave.
That is a huge part of her struggle throughout the series—coming to terms with her own identity. She never felt like she belonged in Abnegation, then she’s tested and finds out that she is Divergent and doesn’t really belong to any faction. Without being able to define herself by a faction or a value, Tris needs to learn to define herself on her own terms—not as Abnegation, or as Dauntless, or even as Divergent. She’s more than Beatrice Prior, Tris, daughter of Andrew and Natalie, sister to Caleb, former Stiff, with six fears. She’s more than the girl Tobias loves. All of these things are pieces of her identity, but they don’t define her. By the time she reaches her death, at the end of Allegiant, she’s found a way to honor all these parts of herself, these influences, while maintaining a distinct identity that is just hers. She
’s learned the same thing that Tobias is forced to recognize, when he must figure out how to move on without her—that “there are so many ways to be brave in this world” (Allegiant).
It’s easy to see bravery in the big moments, whether in Divergent’s world or our own. The fourteen-year-old who pulled two men out of the river before they drowned was brave. The high school baseball team who lifted a sedan in order to save a woman trapped inside was brave. The sixteen-year-old who went out on thin ice in order to pull another boy out of the freezing water was brave.
But there are ordinary acts of bravery all around us: a young man who enlists in the military after graduating high school because he believes in defending our country’s freedoms, a young woman who leaves an abusive relationship, a girl in third grade who stands up for another girl when she’s picked on by their classmates, a boy in seventh grade who tells the principal that a friend has brought a weapon to school, a transgender teen who tells his parents who he really is on the inside.
True bravery is doing the right thing even if you’re afraid, being kind in the face of cruelty, pursuing knowledge no matter what you might find, being honest, putting others before yourself, and staying true to who you are.
Teenagers in our society sometimes end up with a bad rap. Adults think they’re selfish and entitled or rude or even silly. I hear all the time from adults that young adult novels aren’t realistic, not because of the paranormal or fantasy elements, but because a teenage girl wouldn’t be able to save the world.
I think they’re wrong. There are teenagers out there who are like Tris and Tobias. They might make mistakes, but they’re intelligent and honest and kind and selfless.
They’re brave.
Elizabeth Norris briefly taught high school English and history before trading the Southern California beaches and sunshine for Manhattan’s recent snowpocalyptic winter. She harbors dangerous addictions to guacamole, red velvet cupcakes, sushi, and Argo Tea, fortunately not all together. While she wishes she could honestly say she’d be Dauntless, she’s probably not as tough as she thinks she is. She’d choose Erudite but manage not to be evil about it. Her novels, Unraveling and Unbreakable, are the story of one girl’s fight to save her family, her world, and the one boy she never saw coming.
We hear a lot about fear in Divergent. It’s the human weakness that Tris’ chosen faction opposes, and much of the trilogy’s first book is Tris learning about her response to fear and how to overcome it, or at least how to act in spite of it. For all we and Tris learn when it comes to controlling fear, however, we don’t learn very much about fear itself: where it comes from, what makes overcoming it possible, and why doing so is easier for some people than for others. Blythe Woolston picks up that task here, bringing together one of Divergent’s main preoccupations, fear, with one of Allegiant’s, human biology.
FEAR AND THE DAUNTLESS GIRL
BLYTHE WOOLSTON
This is a scare tactic. I will land safely at the bottom. That knowledge is the only thing that helps me step onto the ledge.
—Divergent
As Tris stands on the ledge over a gaping hole so deep and full of shadow it seems bottomless, she is confronted with some very potent triggers for fear: height, darkness, the unknown. Even more powerfully, she has witnessed another person, a girl like herself, fall and die. There is no doubt that death is only a tiny misstep away.
Tris experiences a healthy reaction to this real danger: her heart races, her muscles tense, her stomach lurches, and she gets goose bumps. Those symptoms of fear are familiar because we have all experienced them. Scientists call this the “fight-or-flight” response because these physiological changes make us ready to rumble—or run—for our lives.
But it doesn’t take standing on the brink of an abyss to trigger those responses. A feather duster or pineapple can make a person freak out, freeze, and experience a full-blown state of fight or flight. What turns a pineapple into a source of terror? All you need to do is subtract light.
On a television reality show called Total Blackout, contestants blunder through pitch-dark rooms trying to accomplish a series of simple tasks like petting and identifying animals and inanimate objects. Meanwhile, the television audience gets to watch their struggles revealed via infrared photography. It is pretty funny to see a contestant terrified by the fuzzy pompom on top of a cozy winter hat. It would be a lot less funny to be that contestant, reaching out to touch the unknown, which could be a porcupine, scorpion, or the inside of a human mouth. What we can’t see is scary. A multitude of little blue canary nightlights exist for that very reason.
Fear of the dark, and the unknown in it, is one of an assortment of fears shared by many people. Others include fear of swarms, fear of snakes, and fear of falling. These all appear in the fear landscapes and simulations featured in Divergent. Christina’s wacky fear of moths? That’s a swarm, and swarms are bad news. A single bee sting can make a horse flinch; thousands of bees can kill it. The snake tattooed behind Uriah’s ear? Snakes probably writhe in his fear landscape, and if they do, he has a lot of company. Fear of snakes is not universal, but even people who aren’t afraid of snakes can identify photos of them more quickly than other more mundane things.1 Our ability to see and to assess our surroundings is surprisingly skewed toward “snake detection.” Research on macaque monkeys found far more vision-oriented brain cells dedicated to noticing snakes than anything else—even faces.2 For good reason: snakes can be deadly. And Four’s fear of heights? If you fall from the top of a ten-story tower, you might splatter like an egg on impact.
The connection between these common fears and real dangers is clear, but there are other fears that don’t have such justification. Remember that scary feather duster in the dark room? A person suffering from alektorophobia, the fear of chickens, might be terrified by the sight of that duster in a well-lit room. The same person might find an egg horrifying. Unless you share that phobia, being afraid of an egg may seem ridiculous and incomprehensible.3 It isn’t a rational response. And that’s part of the problem. Alektorophobia, like metrophobia (the fear of poetry) or the disorder nomophobia (the fear of being out of cell-phone contact), is completely irrational. Phobias are specific, persistent, intense fears that an individual knows are excessive or unreasonable. The alektrophobic understands that a live chicken can’t “get” her, much less a feather duster or an egg, but that intellectual knowledge doesn’t banish the emotion of fear. And that is really unfortunate because, while a chicken isn’t a significant danger, fear of chickens can be a genuine threat to health and well-being. In fact, chronic fear, justified or not, causes stress, and stress causes everything from high blood pressure and increased stroke risk to a greater vulnerability to cancer. There are a lot of people who wish they were Dauntless.
And that brings us back to Tris, standing frightened on the ledge—and acting despite that fear. How was she able to do that?
It wasn’t because she was “fearless.” The racing heart and goose bumps prove that. But something else is happening during those moments, and that something else is why she takes a step forward into the unknown: Tris is thinking. During those teeth-chattering seconds on the ledge, she analyzes the situation in a rational way. She weighs the evidence: the death she witnessed was an accident; the jump she is about to take is a test. When she bends her knees and jumps, it is a rational decision. Tris has taken one, two, three moments to process what she knows. And what she knows at that moment is that the fear she feels is all in her head. She is still experiencing the physical and emotional sensations of fear, but because she is able to reason, she can override those signals and choose to jump anyway.
If fear is “all in our heads,” how does it get there?
Before we can answer that question, we need to understand what Tobias in Allegiant describes as “a complicated, mysterious piece of biological machinery”—the brain.
FEAR IS A GIFT FROM OUR ANCESTORS
Evolutionarily speaking, each of us is the concl
usion of a success story. We exist because our ancestors lived at least long enough to reproduce before they drowned in a shipwreck, fell off a cliff, or were lunch for a cave bear. And fear played a role in that success. When it comes to survival, fear is a powerful advantage. It not only drives risk avoidance, it gives us our best shot at surviving when danger is unavoidable.
Charles Darwin, the sharp and observant mind that perceived the possibility of evolution, was very interested in fear. He conducted an experiment using himself as the subject. Here is his description of it:
I put my face close to the thick glass-plate in front of a puff-adder in the Zoological Gardens, with the firm determination of not starting back if the snake struck at me; but, as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity. My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced.4
Why was Darwin so spooked?
It wasn’t because he was a coward. Far from it. Darwin signed on for a voyage around the world aboard a wooden ship less than one hundred feet in length. The Beagle was the sort of ship known as a “coffin brig,” notoriously hard to steer and prone to sinking. Darwin went because he wanted to collect scientific specimens, to slog through South American jungles crawling with snakes and spiders and critters with hungry bellies and sharp teeth. Field science is not a career for the squeamish. Then, after he returned, he published ideas that ran contrary to common belief and made him the target of harsh criticism. Every single one of those decisions required courage. But when he visited the zoo, he couldn’t control his body’s reaction to the striking snake.
