Divergent Thinking

by Leah Wilson

  It isn’t until she’s stopped living with her parents and being dependent on them that Tris learns anything about who Andrew and Natalie are as people, beyond their roles in her life as her father and mother. The further away Tris moves from childhood, the more complex her understanding of Natalie in particular becomes.

  Adulthood is a role taken up at age sixteen in the faction system, when everyone has to choose which faction they belong in. For Tris, choosing to remain in Abnegation would still be a choice and would involve becoming an adult in the eyes of her parents—she imagines being able to talk to them at the dinner table, something she was never supposed to do as a child.

  While none of us lives in a system quite like that of the five factions, there are rites of passage from childhood to adulthood in most societies, and some of them bear quite a strong resemblance to that of the Divergent novels. In Amish society, when teenagers turn sixteen they enter a period called Rumspringa. This is their opportunity to experience life outside the world they’ve grown up in, which like Tris’ is one where pride is strongly discouraged and simple, community-centric lives are considered the best possible lifestyle. Amish teens on Rumspringa can try smoking, drinking, and hanging out with other kids their age.

  Before they’re sixteen, Amish children don’t make any kind of oath to their church. Therefore, if they decide that life in the wider world is a much better fit for them—that they are more, say, Dauntless or Erudite than they are Abnegation—then their family ties remain intact. While it’s pretty likely that parents of a teenager who leaves the Amish society feel dismayed by the choice their child has made, there’s no culturally ingrained encouragement of rejection the way there is among the factions, of putting that choice of lifestyle above blood in importance.

  Despite the comparatively lenient repercussions of choosing to leave, almost no Amish sixteen-year-olds go. The vast majority of them return to their families once they’ve had their taste of outside life, take their oaths to the church, and settle down. However, if they take the oath and then leave later on, they’re shunned.

  If Rumspringa is kinder than the Choosing Ceremony, shunning restores the balance by being much harsher. Shunning involves being forever an outsider. All family ties cease to exist: you no longer have a mother, or a father, or any siblings from your old life. If there’s an equivalent to be found in the Divergent series, it’s closer to being factionless than anything else.

  Thinking about Veronica Roth’s novels in terms of these Amish customs helps us understand that, in our real lives, changing factions and relinquishing any kind of family loyalty would be a huge step—one that would almost never be chosen by those offered it. If we look at the Choosing Ceremony as metaphorical, though, it broadens our ability to apply its lessons to our own lives.

  It’s quite common, especially in the United States, for young people to move away from home to live on campus when they start college. While homesickness and second-guessing are by no means rare emotions to go through, comparing this experience with that of faction transfers works best on a symbolic, heightened level. The fictional concept of the factions works as a barrier between our lives and the story, a filter through which we can explore ideas without having them cut too close to home. This heightened, more metaphorical kind of storytelling isn’t universally employed in the novels on the subject of families—Tobias’ family, in particular, gets a much more grounded and realistic treatment than many other facets of the books—but in Tris’ story, it’s used to great effect.

  The dramatic, theatrical concept of the Choosing Ceremony gives outward shape to the very interior process that people of Tris and Tobias’ age go through when they break away from the child-selves that were guided by their parents and begin to make choices on their own. By staging this developmentally necessary breaking away in such a grandiose way, with a ritual self-inflicted bloodletting in front of family and community instead of simply speaking or writing, Roth highlights just how difficult and emotionally complicated the process feels, however invisible it might be in most real lives.

  In Insurgent and Allegiant we start to see the positive payoff that becoming an autonomous individual ultimately has for a person’s relationship with their parents. Tragically, for Tris this positivity takes the shape of understanding who her parents were, rather than learning who they are, since her chance to have an adult bond with her parents is lost when they die violently.

  Despite this, her journey of coming to love and accept them as separate individuals with personalities and histories of their own, rather than solely as her caregivers, remains. Only through the dissolution of the family unit they had before—daughter, son, father, mother—through Tris and Caleb’s choosing factions for themselves can they ever even start to know each other as individual equals—Tris, Caleb, Andrew, Natalie. From the very first moments following Caleb’s choice of Erudite, Tris begins to understand her family as having personal, private realities that don’t necessarily match who she previously thought they were. This realization comes through especially strongly in Divergent with Natalie, even though Natalie interacts with Tris only a few brief times between Tris’ Choosing Ceremony and Natalie’s death. Even in those short interactions, Tris comes to see that her mother has facets and depths that Tris never began to imagine when their relationship was that of a dependent child and caregiving mother. That first dynamic had to reach its natural end as Tris grew up before the new iteration could take its place.

  Tobias has a very different experience of family life than Tris. Though complicated and fraught at times, her relationship with her parents is fundamentally a healthy one—they protect her when she needs it most, helping her to escape execution and to infiltrate the Dauntless compound at the cost of their own lives. Though Caleb betrays her, he does so as her equal, after they’ve both become distinct adults. By contrast, Tobias is betrayed from a very early age by people whose moral obligation is to protect him.

  Marcus is a violent bully and Evelyn makes the mistake of believing his violence is largely confined to his relationship with her—that Tobias will be spared the worst of it. Tobias, who is afraid of so little that his fearlessness is remarkable even among the Dauntless, is absolutely terrified of his father when he’s young.

  When Tobias publicly beats Marcus, an external observer might expect his childhood fear to be resolved by the act. But Tobias is far from a place of genuine emotional healing; striking and dominating Marcus instead morphs Tobias’ fear from its childhood form into the more adult terror of becoming just like the man who frightened and abused him for so long. Tobias’ awareness of his own fear of inheriting Marcus’ darkness, and the self-control he deliberately exerts in order to actively avoid that path of development, suggests that it’s not a likely outcome—but it’s very easy to understand why Tobias is so frightened of it.

  The depiction of familial abuse in the Divergent series is chillingly realistic—in a story otherwise dealing with the world through heightened sci-fi metaphors, the abuse Tobias suffers is shocking in its banal ugliness. He’s scared of small spaces because he remembers being locked in them in his childhood. He knows he can’t be Candor because of how many times he’s lied to explain away the marks of his father’s violence. He feels he is too broken from the abuse he’s endured to ever belong in Amity.

  Tris may not be used to demonstrative physical affection, but she doesn’t flinch from it in automatic self-defense against an expected blow, as Tobias’ instincts tell him to. The narrative of his own Choosing Ceremony, detailed in the short story The Transfer, breaks away from the first-step-to-adulthood pattern of the sixteen-year-olds the reader meets in Divergent and reads instead like the story of an abused youth running away from home.

  Here, again, the concept of factions allows for a barrier between what the characters go through and what would be likely in a real-world equivalent of the situation. Fleeing as Tobias does would, in the real world, potentially entail conditions like those faced by the facti
onless—homelessness and poverty—rather than the opportunity that Tobias has of becoming a member of Dauntless. Natalie’s flight from a violent home, told through her letters in Allegiant, is more in line with the reality of what someone in their midteens who has to get out, and get out now, might expect to face.

  By the time Allegiant begins, the darker aspects of family bonds have been well and truly showcased: the violence between Tobias and Marcus, first in Tobias’ childhood and then in his public retaliation; Tobias and Evelyn’s brittle lack of trust in one another; and Caleb’s betrayal of Tris. Which is why it’s so remarkable that family becomes such a driving, positive force in the third novel. By demonstrating so many of the harder, more difficult aspects of what family can be, the series has paid the dues needed to then show that the immense, life-altering effect family can have on us is not necessarily one of pain but can also be one of great healing.

  Sibling relationships play a complex role in the narrative of Allegiant, as families as a whole move to a more central place in the story. Tobias notes of Caleb and Tris’ matching bruises—from when Tris lashed out violently in retaliation for the emotional hurt Caleb’s betrayal caused her—that “this is what happens when siblings collide—they injure each other in the same way.” But the mirror imaging that siblings in the novel display extends beyond bruises.

  This mirroring isn’t a brand-new idea when Allegiant begins—Cara has already stepped into the void left by her brother Will’s death. But the theme becomes more pronounced in Allegiant, with Tori leaving the narrative and George almost immediately replacing her in the cast of adult Dauntless characters.

  The Tori–George trade-off is especially worth talking about because it heavily foreshadows what will eventually occur when Tris takes Caleb’s place on the final mission. Tori has long thought George dead, and it’s as if her own death is the price the story demands before he can become part of the living cast. Tris is faced with the prospect of her own brother’s death, but unlike Tori and George, there’s no metaphor at play here. To rescue her brother from death, Tris must choose to die in his place.

  The heart of Allegiant’s emotionally wrenching climax is made up of two themes, the first of which is sacrifice. Tris and Evelyn both relinquish something they have fought hard for—for Tris, life, and for Evelyn, power—in order to give someone in their family an opportunity to have a future. Caleb’s future is a straight-up reprieve from death, and for Tobias, it’s the chance to begin healing from his traumatic childhood and build the beginnings of a relationship with Evelyn.

  Soon after Tobias is reunited with his mother, he and Peter discuss Peter’s decision to wipe his own memory rather than live with the decisions he’s made. “You could just do the work, you know,” Tobias tells him, and it’s this same approach that lies ahead for Evelyn and her son. It’s not a happy ending between them, but instead a promising beginning. A chance for the two of them to “do the work”—to build the first truly healthy parental relationship of Tobias’ life, and give him a chance to heal from his monstrous childhood.

  The second theme of the climax is motherly affirmation. After three novels and several side stories chronicling Tris’ and Tobias’ journeys through adolescence toward adulthood, the ultimate test for each of them involves coming face-to-face with his or her mother, and hope that these mothers will be proud, accepting, and affirming of the young adults they’ve become. This conclusion speaks to the real-world anxiety that readers have been facing and exploring throughout the series, confronting the fear that if they reject their childhood role within their families and begin to grow up, their parents won’t welcome their new individuality with open arms.

  For Tris, this last quest is back to the heart of the values instilled in her by her parents and her Abnegation upbringing. She had to first reject Abnegation in order to understand it properly and choose it for herself—to understand that sacrifice, rather than being a denial of her own importance and right to exist, instead could be an expression of deep love and protective feeling.

  Throughout Allegiant, Natalie reappears as one of the cast of characters, but the reader now gets a chance to know a teenage Natalie, through her own words, rather than just as the enigmatic maternal figure she’d been before. As tough, defiant, and selfless as her daughter will later prove to be, the teenaged Natalie’s journey into the adult mother present in Divergent offers a glimpse at the kind of adult Tobias might someday grow into: shaped, maybe scarred, by a traumatic childhood homelife and subsequent escape, but not irrevocably prevented from whole and compassionate adult life by the experience.

  When Natalie speaks to Tris again as Tris dies, telling her, “My dear child, you’ve done so well,” the “my” is a hugely important inclusion—Tris will always be her child, even now that Tris is no longer a child. Their reunion is not only that of a mother speaking to a daughter, but also that of a young woman dedicated to making life better for others speaking to the heir to her legacy. Through Tris’ journey out of childhood and into her own identity, she’s become her mother’s equal when they finally meet again.

  When Evelyn and Tobias meet in Allegiant’s climax, it’s their deep, complicated emotional dynamic as mother and son, rather than any equal footing they have as individuals, that ultimately fuels their negotiations. Evelyn’s internal processes and motivations are never given to the reader, but it’s clear from her actions that her love for her son has long sat uncomfortably with her ambitions. Marcus has this internal schism as well but doesn’t seem to suffer any crisis of conscience as a result of the clash between his domineering, aggressive nature and his duty of care to Tobias as a parent—he simply treats his family with the violence and cruelty his personality tends toward.

  After three books’ worth of bleakly realistic narrative about an abusive and emotionally neglectful household, Evelyn’s choosing Tobias so absolutely over her hard-won power temporarily shifts their relationship from the literal to the symbolic, allowing their reunion to be the living mirror image of Tris and Natalie’s afterlife embrace. But, in counterpoint to this heightened, thematic climax, the epilogue several years later gives us the more realistic version, offering us the chance to close the story both on the more symbolic level where so much of the Divergent series functions and also the grittier one where Tobias’ story has played out.

  Because the tone of the storytelling in Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant, along with the Tobias-centric side stories, can differ greatly depending on whether the subject in a given scene is science-fiction bioterrorism or a teenager trying to heal after escaping a violently abusive parent, it’s almost surprising how coherently and consistently the themes of family rejection and then acceptance run through the story. Tris’ arc, beginning as it does before her Choosing Ceremony, demonstrates how family plays a fundamental role in her emotional hero’s journey. Tobias’ struggle to work out what it means to be an adult, and to be Evelyn’s child, when he has no blueprint to follow in playing those roles, is a different but equally important kind of heroism. As Tobias notes just before Allegiant’s epilogue, there are so many ways to be brave in this world.

  At the end of the hero’s journey, the hero returns home with the prize they’ve attained. In Tris’ case, the return is ideological, as she comes to embrace the morality taught to her by her parents, even when faced with the ultimate test of resolve. For Tobias the return is physical, and he becomes a key part of the rebuilding of Chicago. He becomes a better version of his parents, working diligently in the field of politics to fairly attain power, rather than using the violence and manipulation his mother and father employed. Both Tris and Tobias learn to be the best person they can be from their parents, either by positive example or by surviving their failings. Thanks to their families, both Tris and Tobias discover what things in the world are worth dedicating their lives to, whatever form that sacrifice might take.

  Mary Borsellino is old-school Dauntless, the kind who gets her bruises stepping between bullies and the vu
lnerable. She certainly has enough tattoos to get along with the Dauntless, and visits Chicago often enough to know she’s pretty fond of riding its trains! She writes dark fantasy YA novels and short stories of all kinds, loves writing Smart Pop essays, is a quiet but flamboyant extrovert and/or a noisy but thoughtful introvert, and works in the charitable sector in Melbourne, Australia.

  You could argue that the first two books of the Divergent trilogy are one big lie. Everything Tris knows—and therefore everything we know—about her world turns out to be wrong (or at least enormously deceptive). She and everyone she knows are living in a giant science experiment, constantly monitored and frequently manipulated to better suit the experimenters’ goals.

  The origins of Tris’ city might be the biggest example of a lie revealed in the Divergent trilogy, but it’s far from the only one. Debra Driza looks at secrets and lies in Tris’ world, and whether Candor might not have had it right the whole time.

  SECRETS AND LIES

  DEBRA DRIZA

  “The cruelest lies are often told in silence.”

  —Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque

  “Lies, lies, lies, yeah (they’re gonna get you)”

  —in the slightly less formal words of the Thompson Twins

  When I was a fledgling writer, still several years away from publication, I decided to get serious about this writing business. So, I did what any Super Serious Writer Type worth her weight in crumpled, tear-stained paper would do: I bought a magical storytelling pen. Okay, that’s a lie—I mean, if I did have a magical storytelling pen, I certainly wouldn’t be flaunting it to the entire world. Trust me, writers would KILL for that kind of precious.