The following is the introductory chapter of what I had hoped, in 2015, would become an entire book on the psychology and behavioral neuroscience underlying Veronica Roth's Divergent series. Three factors converged, resulting in that project never getting off the ground.
- First, the Allegiant book disappointed a lot of readers; personally, I liked the ending, but hated the genetics after being so enthralled with the psychology and neuroscience of Divergent and Insurgent.
- Second, the movie-makers clearly overplayed their hand thinking they could squeeze four books out of the series and deviated so far from the source material that the third installment, Allegiant, was barely recognizable as Roth's book, and was a box-office flop. The result was that the fourth installment, Ascendant, was never made. The fizzling out of the movie franchise would make if much harder to market any sort of scholarly book on the series and made it less likely that Divergent would join the Harry Potter and The Hunger Games as topics of study in universities.
- Third, I became enraptured by "Robert Galbraith's" detective series, Cormoran Strike, and began focusing most of my blogging and analysis on that. A quick look at this blog will show about 99% of my writing is on that series.
Still, if Suzanne Collins and Veronica Roth can go back and revisit stuff they wrote in the mid twenty-teens, so can I. The impending publication of The Sixth Faction, an alternative-universe retelling of the story in which Tris chooses a different Faction, has Divergent-fangirls and made me interested in at least sharing the first chapter of my aborted book. Who knows, The Sixth Faction may be so brilliant it ignites an entire new generation of Factioneers, and the book could be marketable again.
A lot has changed in the 11 years since I wrote this, for both me and Veronica Roth. She is no longer a straight-out-of-college first-time writer, but a seasoned author with many other volumes published. My own career diversified in ways I never thought possible in 2015. I took early retirement from my professorship in 2023 and now run my own behavior analysis business. And the teenager with whom I read dystopias recently had a child of her own. The numerical footnotes below are original to the piece; I have added some new notes in red print and with asterisks.
Chapter 1: Converging Worlds and Diverging Interests: How this book came to be.
Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped. -Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Have you ever wondered why the Erudite chose an open eye for their faction symbol? Or why Christina wanted to make Tris noticeable, not pretty? Why Abnegation clothes smell like soap or if wearing eyeglasses and blue clothing actually influences intelligence? Veronica Roth began her dystopian novel Divergent as an undergraduate student and has acknowledged the influence of her psychology coursework on her fiction. Her first volume has grown into a best-selling trilogy, supplemental short stories and a popular movie series that earned her the third spot on the Forbes 2014 Top-Paid Authors list. It’s no longer unusual to see young adult fiction among the top-selling books in the world; it is unusual to see one written by such a young adult.
The spark of the Divergent series was part of the inferno ignited by the runaway success of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games. By 2015, dystopia aficionados had plenty of options. Even those who restricted themselves to the “Women-Authored Dystopian Trilogies Featuring Strong Girl Protagonists and an Attractive Love Interest or Two” subgenre could select Lauren Oliver’s Delirium, Allie Condie’s Matched, Marie Lu’s Legend, Lauren DeStephano’s The Chemical Garden, and Joelle Charbonneau’s The Testing, among others. None of these other series match the commercial success of Roth’s: 10 million books as of Jan 2014, plus a movie series that, like Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games, was considered to have enough selling power to justify splitting the final book into two films*. What made the Tris and Four’s story stand out from a very crowded pack? As a professor of psychology, I found reading Divergent to be a bit like standing in front of an Abnegation mirror, a rare glimpse at something familiar. I recognized key elements of my own discipline and, like Tris, I found myself wanting to linger over the reflection, to see more.
Scholars are only now starting to appreciate the Hunger Games series as literature, much as they had done with Harry Potter a few years earlier. Schools like American University and Macalester College now offer Hunger Games courses. Salem Press is devoting a volume of its Critical Insights series to Collins’ trilogy, granting it a place alongside other literary giants like Moby Dick, Jane Eyre and Brave New World. Thus far, Divergent has not attracted the same level of academic attention, with mentions in scholarly publications typically limited to its role as part of the larger dystopia craze (e.g., Alexander & Black, 2015; Basu, 2013, Scholes & Ostensen, 2013).
Some readers and critics have been quick to dismiss Roth’s work as little more than a Hunger Games knock-off. In a random sample of 20 of the 50 “most helpful” Amazon customer reviews of Divergent, 75% compared it Collins’ trilogy, most unfavorably, with phrases like “carbon copy” and “coattail effect” abounding. In a New York Times review, Dominus wrote, “With Divergent, Roth adds to a genre that has crossed over from having a vague cultural moment to being a full-bore trend.” In its review of Insurgent, the A.V. club called the series “the Hunger Games’ little cousin, through and through,” Yet, as of September 2015, Divergent had actually edged out its bigger cousin for the top spot on a Goodreads Best Young Adult Dystopia readers’ poll, with Insurgent in third place. I don’t believe that millions of readers are foolish enough to fall for a pale imitation. There must be something unique in the Five Faction City to attract them.
I propose that Divergent is more than just part of a trend and, like Hunger Games and Harry Potter, deserves attention from serious readers. Many scholars have noted J.K. Rowling’s artful use of a variety of literary traditions, notably traditional Christian imagery and literary alchemy (see collected works of John Granger, among others) to enrich and unify the Harry Potter world. Collins deftly weaves modern reality TV with the classic Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur and the “Bread and Circuses” of ancient Rome to give us the country of Panem. Roth, in contrast, builds her dystopian Chicago on a scaffold of modern psychology, not surprising given her combined creative writing and psychology studies at Northwestern University. The behavioral science themes aren’t limited to Jeanine lecturing her underlings about Tris’s brain scan. They form the very infrastructure of the Divergent trilogy, shaping it into a work more nuanced than the typical action-adventure/love story. This gives Roth’s narrative an intellectual cohesiveness that captures the readers’ enthusiasm and distinguishes the series from among the rest.
Understanding a few basics from Psychology 101 helps us appreciate Divergent as more than a dystopian book series, an action-adventure film franchise or a passionate, and ultimately tragic love story. It helps us understand what makes Roth’s world tick. It answers questions like, why were the majority of Tris’s initiate classmates from Candor? Why were the Erudite the first to question Abnegation’s control of the government? Why did the normally weak-willed Al defy Eric and help Christina up from the railing? Why did most of the former Dauntless wind up living in the Hancock tower, and why did some of Peter’s antisocial traits re-emerge after the memory serum?
My fascination with Divergent that ultimately blossomed into this book came from an unexpected intersection between my family and professional lives. Books were an important part of my childhood. My father read to me nightly, sharing the books he himself had enjoyed as a boy: Old Mother West Wind, Miss Minerva, Doctor Doolittle. I plowed through an entire trunk of Bobbsey Twins that had belonged to my mother. My 1970’s-era elementary school teachers, not nearly as concerned about prepping us for standardized tests as today’s teachers have to be, typically devoted part of the afternoon to reading chapter books aloud. Mrs. Bryant, the librarian, captivated the first graders with Rufus M. and Did You Carry the Flag Today Charley? In third grade, Mrs. Walker introduced us to Little House in the Big Woods. In fifth grade, Mrs. Criswell set us into gales of laughter with The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, and reduced us to tears with Where the Read Fern Grows.
Looking back, it may have been one of Mrs. Criswell’s selections that sparked my interest in neuroscience. As the daughter of two biologists, I was already predisposed to science. Mrs. Criswell read a book that became one of my all-time favorites: A Wrinkle in Time. I remember crouching in my wooden desk bristling with anticipation as Meg Murray, with her untidy hair and unfashionable glasses--but, as far as I know, no lightning scar on her forehead—prepared for her first encounter with IT, the mysterious enslaver of the dark planet of Camazotz. Like Meg, we were finally going to learn who or what IT was. Mrs. Criswell flipped the page and fixed us with her eyes, leaving us in suspense for a second or two longer, then stage-whispered, “IT was a brain!” There was a chorus of “ewwww’s” as she went on with the story.
Yes, the book villain was an evil, disembodied brain, pulsating on a dais, and forcing an entire planet to live, breathe and think in perfect, terrifying unity. Although I didn’t know the term at the time, Camazotz was my first glimpse at a dystopia, a world where a small boy can be tortured for failing to bounce his ball in time with the others and catching a cold can get you euthanized. This was surprisingly dark stuff for an elementary school book, and all because of one slightly overgrown brain. I was hooked. I think I read the book on my own at least two more times before the school year ended.
Not long thereafter, I wound up visiting my dad’s office at the university where he taught biology. As I sat on a laboratory stool, spinning in boredom, I spied it: a human brain floating in fixative in a big glass jar on the shelf. I asked him to get it down for me and spent the rest of the time staring through the glass at the wrinkled grey orb. I was never fully able to shake the notion that my father had IT in a jar in his lab; maybe that’s when I started thinking that one day I might, too.
Fast forward about 25 years. I wasn’t the only one to be bitten by the neuroscience bug in the 1970’s the field grew exponentially[1] in the last third of the 20th century. By 2000, I had acquired a bachelor’s degree in biology, master’s and doctorates in biological psychology, a husband, two kids, and a professorship at a small women’s college. Though the primary focus of my job was teaching, I had a respectable program of scholarship, doing basic research with Mary Baldwin College undergraduates in sexual differentiation, answering question about how steroid hormones affect the brain and lead to sex- and gender-typical behaviors. I earned tenure and promotion to associate professor**. I was on my way to a rewarding, but somewhat predictable small-college career in psychology and neuroscience.
My early years as a faculty member overlapped with my early years as a parent. I passed on my father’s legacy of reading to my own children: Anne of Green Gables series, all the Narnia books, Wrinkle and its sequels, and of course, Harry Potter. It was the dawn of the 21st century; how could we not read Harry Potter? I began the series with my six-year-old daughter about 2002. By the time Order of the Phoenix made its debut, she was begging to go to the midnight release party. By the time Half-Blood Prince was published, I had started the series over, reading the early books to my son to my five-year old son in tandem with the later ones with my daughter. I will always be grateful that my initial exposure to Harry and friends was alongside my children. There is something about seeing a child’s response to those books that brings a little extra magic into an already magical world.
Harry Potter ushered in a new age of young adult literature, and a new generation of old adults who weren’t ashamed to read it. In my day, teens weren’t inclined to share reading material with their parents; no one wanted to see their mom or dad poring through Judy Blume’s Forever or V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic. But when my daughter brought home The Hunger Games, I had a hard time keeping myself from ripping it out of her hands; by Mockingjay, we had to purchase two copies because neither of us could wait. I never expected the pleasure reading I was doing with my kids to intersect with my professional life. Sure, I enjoyed chatting about the books with my college students and with other adults. But formal scholarship? I was a behavioral neuroendocrinologist. The thought of me writing professionally about young adult literature seemed like a vision from Professor Trelawney’s crystal ball.
Fortunately, in the age of the internet, it is easier than ever to connect to people who share your interests. Among the many Harry Potter websites I frequented was The Hogwarts Professor,*** (www.hogwartsprofessor.com) where Potter enthusiasts like John Granger and Elizabeth Baird-Hardy routine shared “Thoughts for the Serious Reader.” I eventually joined the "Faculty" there and started blogging regularly. The site grew along with the number of young adult mega-books; discussion expanded to include Twilight, The Hunger Games, and evidentially, Divergent. Shortly after Insurgent was published in 2012, John Granger declared “Beatrice Prior week,” with a series of brilliant posts detailing how Divergent was a natural cultural heir of the other major bestsellers we had covered. He made a statement bound to get my attention: “Psychology looms at least as large as theology[2].” Divergent presented an opportunity for my professional training to contribute to the discussion in a much more specific way than it had previously.
I fell in love with Divergent at least as fast as Four fell for Tris, but my reading experience was different from the one I had with Harry Potter and the Hunger Games. I was reading an author of same generation as my own students, who would have been in my psychology classes had she chosen to attend Mary Baldwin instead of Northwestern. She probably would have been one of whose hand shot up to ask, “Like in Harry Potter?” the instant I mentioned mandrakes in Drugs and Behavior class, or nodded enthusiastically when I used Peeta’s hijacking as an example of classical conditioning. I began to see Roth’s books not only as great reads I could share with my children and discuss on Hogwarts Professor. I began to view them with the same critical eye I might give my own student’s thesis, reading with eager anticipation of new and creative uses of what I taught in my classes, while also maintaining a watchful eye for misconceptions or errors.
Roth has often spoken of her fascination with psychology. On her publisher’s website, she singles out “personality, brain chemistry, and group dynamics” as special interests In a 2011 blog post, she mentions exposure therapy, Milgram’s infamous obedience-to-authority experiments and the popular Myers-Briggs personality test as elements that inspired Divergent. Finally, in a 2013 interview with John Granger, she acknowledged “consuming” and “internalizing” many psychological principles during her college coursework, then stated, “Sometimes things—concepts, characters, stories, information, beliefs—take root in us and they become a part of our identities, and when a person writes, I think their identity bleeds into that writing, whether they intend it to or not.”
Psychology did more than bleed into Divergent; it became its lifeblood, as is apparent even in the title. To a psychologist, “divergent” brings to mind the concept of “divergent thinking,” a term coined by J.P. Guilford to describe an imaginative, multi-directional cognitive strategy, the opposite of “convergent” or linear thinking. If you ask a convergent thinker what you could use a coffee mug for, you would get a straightforward answer: drink coffee from it. A divergent thinker will come up with multiple uses beyond the obvious: you can store pencils in it, trace circles around its rim, prop up a window pane with it, or bash in an enemy’s head with it. Writing this book is an exercise in divergent thinking for me, because I will be using my Ph.D. in psychology in ways I never anticipated.
Please join me on what I hope will be an exciting train ride through the Factions of Chicago, as we examine the behavioral science within Roth’s dystopian world, and increase our understanding of both. We will explore how Ms. Roth’s roots as a psychology student sprouted into her dystopian trilogy, and gave her story-telling the cohesion needed to rise to the top of its initiate class. We will see how Ms. Roth’s admitted “obsession” with personality testing formed the foundation for the five Factions of Divergent, and what that means for the appeal and believability of her characters. We will learn cutting-edge neuroscience along with Tris in Insurgent, as she examines her brain scans in Jeanine’s laboratory. We will ponder what Milgram’s study tells us about the difficulty of living up to the ideals of the Dauntless Manifesto and witness how at least three Factions misuse the tools of psychology as part of their initiation rites. And yes, I will occasionally get out my professorial red pen to highlight places where the science within the narrative falls short, as with some of the behavioral genetics of Allegiant.
Just as Divergent changed me as a reader, it changed me as a professor. I recognized many psychological themes in the books that I knew only superficially, so I had to go learn more. Over the past three years, I’ve dashed off to the library more times than Hermione, but I now know more about the Big Five personality factors and Gallup’s test for self-awareness than I ever would have had I stayed in my birth faction of behavioral neuroscience. I became more interested in how this new wave of young adult fiction is affecting its readers, young and old, which has opened up a new line of research on reading and empathy. That has led to contacts with other scholars in the field, rewarding collaborations with teachers who want to understand the psychological effects of their curricular choices, and publication in English as well as psychology journals. Perhaps most importantly, it has reminded me how science and literature relate to and enrich each other. Like Roth’s Chicago, modern universities can be too quick to divide into factions--STEM versus humanities or liberal arts versus pre-professional majors—and force our students to choose a cauldron and never look back. But we are all Divergent, and we are healthier when we allow our minds to develop with flexibility. And there is no better tool to stretch those neurons than to dive into a great book with the tools to understand it.
References:
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/12408.Best_Young_Adult_Dystopian_Novels
http://www.avclub.com/article/the-second-book-of-the-bestselling-divergent-serie-79161
http://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2015/07/22/why-are-there-so-many-young-adult-writers-on-the-top-earning-authors-list/
Alexander, J., & Black, R. (2015). The Darker Side of the Sorting Hat: Representations of Educational Testing in Dystopian Young Adult Fiction. Children's Literature, 43(1), 208-234.
Basu, B. (2013). What Faction Are You In? The Pleasure of Being Sorted in Veronica Roth’s Divergent. In Basu, B., Broad, K.R., and Hintz, C. (Eds.), Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers, (p. 19-34). New York: Routledge.
Scholes, J., & Ostenson, J. (2013). Understanding the Appeal of Dystopian Young Adult Fiction. The ALAN Review, 40(2) 11-20.
[1] The Society for Neuroscience met for the first time in 1971; about 1300 scientists and students attended. By 1990, the start of the “Decade of the Brain,” attendance had ballooned to over 12,000. In 2014, it was over 25,000.
[2] If you have read Granger’s books on Harry Potter and Twilight, you know how much theology he gleans from what he reads. This was quite an endorsement
Anyone wanting a look at my contemporary writings on the original Divergent series, see here.
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