Divergent Thinking (2 page)

Other people, whether our parents, our factions, our government, or the tests they design and administer, can try to influence us. They can tell us what they think we should believe, and who they think we should be. They can try to teach and guide us. But what we learn from them—what we do with the information we receive from them about the world and its truths—is up to us. Bureau director David gives Tris her mother's journal, no doubt thinking it will lead Tris to believe in the Bureau's cause. She brings the Bureau down instead. Edith Prior's video was supposed to encourage the city to protect the Divergent and treat them as special, but it only ends up leading Jeanine and her predecessor Norton to kill them.

I'd suggest that, by the end of
Allegiant,
Divergence comes to mean more than just awareness within simulations or having an aptitude for more than one faction. It also suggests awareness, in the real world, of our ability to choose, no matter what our genes say. Of our ability to become, as Tobias says in
Divergent,
“brave, and selfless,
and
smart,
and
kind,
and
honest.” Of our ability to think and act independent of influence, whether that influence comes in a serum or from the ones we love.

What does all this contemplation of control and awareness have to do with the book you're holding?

The Divergent trilogy, like any book, is an invitation. It's an invitation to think, and to feel, and to experience. But while a book offers us a story to respond to, it can't control what that response is any more than a video or a “damaged”gene can. Because the way you read a book—the way you react to events and characters, the conclusions you draw—depends on you: your history, your interests, your values.

The Divergent trilogy provides a wealth of ideas for readers to respond to.
Divergent Thinking
collects the responses of more than a dozen of those readers, all of whom also happen to be YA writers themselves. Each came to Tris' story with his or her own influences and experiences, and each came away with—and shares here—something different.

The same faction system led Rosemary Clement-Moore to think about why we enjoy stories that sort us into categories, Jennifer Lynn Barnes to think of a particular way psychologists classify personality, and Julia Karr to think about the inherent dangers a system like the one in the Divergent trilogy presents.

Blythe Woolston came away from the books thinking about fear, while Elizabeth Norris thought about bravery.

Maria V. Snyder and her sixteen-year-old daughter Jenna couldn't read about the Choosing Ceremony without thinking of Jenna's own upcoming choice: of colleges.

The trilogy's setting led Chicago-resident V. Arrow to wonder how the series' landmarks would map onto her city's real ones.

There are plenty more ways to look at the Divergent trilogy than the ones you'll read here—as many as there are people who've read it, I suspect. Still, reading what this particular set of readers saw in the trilogy made my experience of the books significantly richer. It made me a little more aware of what the Divergent trilogy had to offer, and led me to engage both with the story and my own world in new ways.

In fact, you could say that reading these essays made my reading of the trilogy a little more, well,
divergent.

Leah Wilson
December 2013

       
You can't talk about the Divergent trilogy without talking about the faction system (and don't worry, we'll be talking about the faction system plenty). The tension between factions
—
in particular, Erudite and Abnegation
—
is the chief source of conflict in
Divergent,
and that tension is only compounded by the introduction, in
Insurgent,
of the factionless as a united, antifaction force. In
Allegiant
's
biggest reveal, we discover that the philosophies on which the factions were built are integral to the reason Tris' city even exists.

           
So that's where we start this collection: with Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, and Erudite, and with Rosemary Clement-Moore's consideration of our human obsession with sorting ourselves and others, both in history and in literature.

Personality Types and the Elements of Heroism

R
OSEMARY
C
LEMENT
-M
OORE

What's your sign?

It's a pickup line so old that dinosaurs used it to hook up down at the Tar Pit Lounge.

Back in the day, in the time between matchmakers and
Match.com
, people had to go places
in person
when they wanted to meet a potential date. One had to actually start a conversation. Verbally. Face-to-face. It's a feat that the bravest Dauntless might find paralyzing.

Asking someone's astrological sign as a conversational opener would be a great time-saver, relationship-wise, if the date of your birth were any kind of reliable predictor of personality or compatibility. Instead, it really says more about the asker: Ironic hipster? Geriatric pickup artist in a retirement community? Time traveler from the 1970s?

(If you're wondering, I am a Capricorn. According to astrologists, this means I'm industrious, hardworking, ambitious, pragmatic, and tend to be conventional and possibly egotistical. In reality, I am all about “work smarter, not harder,” I write fantasy novels, and, at the moment, my hair is dyed blue.)

Even people who
don't
check their horoscope daily sometimes use zodiac signs as a sort of psychological shorthand to describe people—including themselves. Back in college, my BFF (science major, D&D player, fellow Capricorn) explained why two of our social circle couldn't get along: “They're both Leos. It's their way or the highway.” (My BFF likes to classify things. Of course she does. She's a scientist, which is a classification in itself.)

As far as our oil-and-water friends were concerned, it was certainly true that each of them liked things the way she liked them. And both
were
born under the Leo sign. Coincidence? Almost definitely.

The difference between being born in a faction or born under a zodiac sign is that while you can't choose your birthdate, you can choose your faction. Or at least you can pick from a limited range of options. Even if you're secretly Divergent, you still have only five choices—six, if you count factionless, which is viewed as a fate worse than death. So, basically, you can be Candor, Amity, Abnegation, Erudite, Dauntless, or screwed.

Dystopian literature is full of worlds where the roles are assigned, rigid, and nonnegotiable. In one of the earliest examples,
Brave New World,
before people are even born they are sorted into Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, and assigned jobs like bees in a hive. In Ally Condie's Matched trilogy, teens have everything from their job to their diet to their future spouse picked for them by complicated statistical algorithms. In the Hunger Games trilogy, the twelve (known) districts of Panem are geographical divisions, but their industry and economy affect both the abilities and attitudes of the tributes, so that saying you'd be from District 1 means something radically different than claiming District 12 as your own.

Why do we like books that sort people? When it comes to dystopian series like Divergent, there are multiple answers. One, when you divide people up into factions, districts, ideologies, etc., it's pretty easy to keep them arguing with each other instead of noticing you're taking over the world. Two, as readers, we learn vicariously that the ability to choose for yourself what your role will be, whom you will love, and whom you will (or won't) fight is worth overthrowing the powers that be. And three, stories about enterprising heroes who take down totalitarian regimes make satisfying reading, and often very exciting movies.

But even benign fantasy worlds have their own kind of sorting. J. R. R. Tolkien has Hobbits and Rangers, Elves and Dwarves. And that's just the good guys. J. K. Rowling's world has the four houses of Hogwarts, and Anne McCaffrey's Pern has Holders and Crafters and Dragonriders. World of Warcraft has Horde and Alliance; Dungeons & Dragons has Lawful and Chaotic versions of Good, Evil, and Neutral.

We like to imagine where we would fit into these worlds. We take online quizzes to sort ourselves into Gryffindor or Slytherin or Ravenclaw (does anyone really want to be Hufflepuff?
¹
). In conjunction with the
Catching Fire
movie,
Fandango.com
had a “Which District Are You?” quiz. We choose Horde or Alliance. We create characters that are paladins, thieves, mages, and rogues, and confined to the spells/abilities of their class.

As readers, movie watchers, gamers—let's say, consumers of story media—we enjoy sorting ourselves based on where our sympathies lie, which character captures our emotions, or what type of fantasy world we would want to live in. Even if you wouldn't be a Chaotic Evil Horde Orc in real life, there's a certain charge that comes from declaring yourself the type of person who enjoys playing one.
²

So what's up with that? An Evil Overlord slapping a label on you is bad, but it's okay to do it to yourself?

Yes and no. Freedom of choice is something worth fighting for. So is knowing who you are, and not being afraid to declare it. But to accomplish our goals, declaring a faction should set our course, not our limits. The Divergent series shows both the power of choice and the cautionary example of being restricted to just one thing.

THE REAL WORLD

Sorting is simply something that we humans like to do. We appreciate having a quick handle by which to grasp the people in our lives. We want to know generally what to expect from someone. For those of us who like to analyze things, we like to, well, analyze people and figure out what makes them do the things they do.

The term
psychiatry
wasn't coined until 1808, but people have been theorizing different ways to sort—and through sorting, better understand—people since there have been people to sort. What we think of as astrology (the zodiac signs, etc.) began back in the
B.C.
days with the ancient Babylonian astronomers who mapped the seasonal movement of the stars. To their charts the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans added the idea that personality traits were tied to the stars under which you were born. A guy named Ptolemy wrote it all down in the second century
A.D.,
and Western astrology hasn't changed much since. The Chinese zodiac (year of the Ox, year of the Dragon, etc.) has been around as long or longer. In India, starting about 100
B.C,
the Hindu practice of Ayurveda saw mental and physical health as dependent on keeping five different elements in balance.
³
It sorted people into types based on which of those elements predominated. This idea has a parallel in early Western medicine in the form of the four classical “humors”—substances in the body that, when not in balance, would lead to mental and physical illness.
⁴
Excesses of these humors were connected to specific personality types. For example, too much black bile made you a melancholy person—very detail and task oriented, but hard to please, with a tendency toward depression. Too much blood made you sanguine—good-natured, passionate, and charismatic, but also impulsive and kind of flighty.

A lot of study has gone into the human psyche since those first ancient astrologers assigned traits to people born under the sign of Capricorn or in the year of the Rabbit. Now we know about genetics and environment and brain chemistry and operant conditioning. But people are still people, and philosophers and scientists remain fascinated by what makes us behave the way we do, in all our variety. (
Why
do they want to know why we do the things we do? Because they're scientists and philosophers, of course. That's what their sort does.)

We don't just sort other people, of course. We also sort ourselves. In our modern world, we start picking factions about the same age Tris picks hers, only we don't call them Dauntless and Erudite and Abnegation. We call them band geeks and nerds and preps and jocks. Or at least, that's what we called them when I was in school. The terminology may have changed, but the sorting has not. The trials of initiation and indoctrination for these groups can be as grueling as anything Tris has to face at Dauntless, and the penalty for failure to fit in can be just as brutal.

Of course, the difference (and it's an important one) is that we don't have to stay factionless. We are allowed to change and evolve and to fall off the train then get up and find a new faction. (Or knit our broken bones and try again to be Dauntless.)

SORTS OF SORTING

Maybe the fact that we're not locked into our choices makes sorting more appealing. Who hasn't taken online personality tests, or sorted themselves (or their friends) into Hogwarts houses? Do
you
know which faction you would choose? Of course you do.