The Case of the Divergent Trilogy
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Real and Metaphorical Hunger: The Case of the Divergent Trilogy by Cristina Paravano In 1825 Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin boldly declared “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are”. Undoubtedly he would have found Veronica Roth’s best seller trilogy Divergent (Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant 2011-13) extremely appropriate to exemplify his assumption. Roth portrays a dystopian future developing a multifaceted concept of hunger, both real and figurative, and using food as a cultural metaphor. Actually what we eat, but also how and why we eat, reveal our personality and our background, and “tell us much about society, history, cultural change, and humans’ view of themselves” (Bentley 2012: 1), both individually and collectively. The use of food as a means of representing single or collective identities is particularly intriguing in this dystopian saga; the trilogy is set in a post-apocalyptic Chicago whose population is divided into five allegorical factions, according to a number of personal and social characteristics: Abnegation (those who value selflessness above all), Amity (kindness), Candor (honesty), Dauntless (bravery), Erudite (Knowledge). The protagonist is the sixteen-year-old Tris (Beatrice) Prior from Saggi/Ensayos/Essais/Essays 121 N. 13 – 05/2015 Abnegation: her perfectly ordered world starts to collapse and her certainties to waver when she finds out that she is divergent: a dangerous anomaly that has aptitude for more than one faction at the same time, and cannot be clearly categorized. This makes her a natural charismatic leader against the different forms of oppression arising in the course of events. This saga follows the popular trend of novels written for a young adult readership like James Dashner’s The Maze Runner Series (2009-2011) and Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games (2008-2010), which can be ascribed to a wide variety of genres from dystopian, science fiction, fantasy, survivor story to Bildungsroman, action adventure, political and romance (Henthorne 2012: 6). Despite the increasing popularity of young adult fiction, scholars and critics are just beginning to “talk about the aesthetic qualities and political valences of these texts” (Basu, Broad, Hintz 2013: 2). In addition to the analysis of the dystopian characteristics of Roth’s novels, two main lines of criticism have been followed so far in discussing Divergent: on the one hand, the dangers of categorizing people into “pre-existing identity type[s]” (Basu 2013: 20) and its impact on personal identity formation; on the other hand, the concept of girlhood, “an ideologically loaded term in Western culture” (Reid-Walsh 2011: 92). This notion is explored through the magnetic protagonist Tris Prior who, like Katniss Everdeen, contributes “to redefine what it means to be a young woman” (Green-Barteet 2014:35) in the XXI century. As well as featuring two appealing female protagonists, Divergent and Hunger Games have a further fascinating similarity: both the authors use food as a complex “metaphor for cultural, social, political and personal longing” (Despain 2012: 69), and explore the concept of hunger from multiple perspectives. While this aspect has been examined in detail with regard to Collins’s trilogy, it has passed completely unnoticed in Roth’s saga. The present contribution aims at discussing how the issue of hunger, both real and metaphorical, becomes a means of expressing and communicating personal and social identity. On the one hand, each faction is associated to specific kinds of food and eating habits which emphasize their peculiar features; however, also the lack of food is highly significant, as in the case of the factionless, outcasts excluded from every faction, who live their life in extreme poverty and starve. On the other hand, the life of the characters seems to be based on a form of metaphorical hunger, a profound desire which guides their actions: selflessness and altruism for Abnegation, peace and harmony for Amity, honesty and truth for Candor, danger and adventure for Dauntless, knowledge and power for Erudite and revenge against the faction system for the factionless. As will emerge, these two forms of hunger, which are strictly intertwined, effectively contribute to mapping the characters’ personalities and identities as single individuals and as groups. 1. DIGESTING EMOTIONS Saggi/Ensayos/Essais/Essays 122 N. 13 – 05/2015 “Do you habitually have a sensitive stomach, Beatrice?” (Divergent, 359) Jeanine Matthews, the cruel leader of Erudite, pretends to be worried about the sensitivity of Tris’s stomach but her question hides her real concern: understanding why the results of Tris’s psychological tests (called simulations) have not been recorded: I don’t know how they [the simulations] work,” I say, “but the liquid I was injected with made me sick to my stomach. Maybe my simulation administrator was distracted because he was worried I would throw up, and he forgot to record it. I got sick after the aptitude test too. (Divergent, 359) Her question is rather provocative: Jeanine is testing Tris’s honesty since she is quite certain that her results have been deleted in order to hide her divergence; yet it is extremely interesting since it calls attention to the function of the stomach in the story. It is only in Divergent that the term ‘stomach’ recurs 63 times (39 in Insurgent and 24 in Allegiant) and in most cases it refers to Tris’s stomach. It has a number of functions: on the one hand it is conceived as the bodily part that Tris needs to train for fighting “Suddenly he presses a hand to my stomach.[…] ‘Never forget to keep tension here’” (Divergent, 84), her instructor reminds her; or a target to hit in a fight: “I duck and drive my fist into her stomach, right over her bellybutton” (Divergent, 172). It is no coincidence that many characters die of an injury to the stomach like the pitiless Jeanine Matthews, stabbed in her stomach, or two friends of Tris’s who are shot by a fatal bullet in that part of the body. On the other hand, the stomach is assigned a fundamental role in Tris’s mental and emotional experience, even replacing the mind in some situations: “‘Why?’ The question forms in my stomach and launches from my throat like a moan” (Insurgent, 364). This makes its function as the principal organ of digestion only secondary in the story, since meal times are more often moments devoted to deep reflection than to mere nourishment: “I move my peas around with my fork, and my thoughts drift back to the aptitude tests. When Tori warned me that being Divergent was dangerous” (Divergent, 80). Tris expresses most of her feelings using stomach related metaphors, which seem to capture the natural connection between this organ and the mind: she is instinctive, she ‘trusts her guts’ more than anything so that her instinct seems to be localized there, in the pit of her stomach. Thus it becomes a locus of thoughts and emotions: when she is scared, her stomach “tightens” (Divergent, 71) or “clenches with fear” (Allegiant, 296). If she is homesick, it is “hollow” (Divergent, 75) (“I ignore the pinch in my stomach that comes every time I think of my mother”, Divergent, 120). Her anger and her violent impulses pass through this organ (“Once I’m dressed and the urge to cry is gone, I feel something hot and violent writhing in my stomach. I want to hurt them”, Divergent, 170), as well as the sense of guilt (“Guilt clutches at my stomach”, Insurgent, 125) and emotional pain, which is somatized in the stomach: “I feel the Saggi/Ensayos/Essais/Essays 123 N. 13 – 05/2015 monster of grief again, writhing in the empty space where my heart and stomach used to be” (Insurgent 46). Tris’s stomach likewise digests also positive emotions like relief (“the knot in my stomach unravels”, Divergent, 91), joy (“I wipe my face with my sleeve, laughing so hard my stomach hurts”, Divergent,156), attraction and desire (“When he touches me, I feel like everywhere his skin meets mine is changed by the connection. It sends a thrill through my stomach. Not just fear. Something else, too. A wanting”, Divergent, 404) Acknowledging that Tris’s stomach is the digester of her feelings and regulator of her emotional health, it is not surprising that her perception of the world is strictly connected with food and eating habits. 2. FACTIONS AND APPETITES 2.1 Life in Abnegation At the beginning of Divergent, the description of a meal introduces us to the life in Abnegation, the faction the protagonist Tris belongs to. This is just the first example of the numerous meals described by Roth in various contexts, ranging from a formal dinner in Abnegation to a break with a muffin in Dauntless: while they mark the tightly well-ordered days of the factions, at the same time they re-create the atmosphere within the groups and reflect the identity of each of them. Meals in Abnegation are a sort of ritualized and disciplined reunion in a patriarchal family: We sit at the table. We always pass food to the right, and no one eats until everyone is served. My father extends his hands to my mother and my brother, and they extend their hands to him and me, and my father gives thanks to God for food and work and friends and family. Not every Abnegation family is religious, but my father says we should try not to see those differences because they will only divide us. (Divergent, 32) Conversation is regulated as in a traditional Victorian family, where parents used to teach “obedience and respect for the elders and [allow] the child to speak only when spoken to” (Thompson 1988: 124): “We aren’t supposed to speak at the dinner table unless our parents ask us a direct question, and they usually don’t.