Divergent Thinking (9 page)

Of course, the hallmark of Amity's home is not what road it lies on, but the fact that it is comprised largely of farmland, which means that it needs to lie outside the boundaries of the metropolitan city center. While the outlying areas of Chicagoland abound with forest preserves, orchards, and other areas of agriculture, Tris doesn't recount passing through any other green spaces on her way to Amity from the other factions or when traveling from the edge of Amity into the fearsome territory outside the fence. Finding a place where Amity might be able to farm and live in space fundamentally different to
the
city interior—but which still fell along I-90 on the Kennedy—meant that the most likely place for Amity's meeting hall would be the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, just off the Catherine Chevalier Woods in Rosemont, a near-suburb of the city.

With 8,137 acres of arable natural space that includes the banks of the Des Plaines River (for the hydroponics Tris sees in use while a refugee at the Amity campground) and a floodplain that lends itself to natural regrowth of prairie vegetation, the Catherine Chevalier Woods seem like a fitting place for Amity to have made their home. However, another possible location is a forest preserve and park only five miles up the road, still along the Kennedy Expressway: Caldwell Woods, named for Billy Caldwell, chief of the Potawatomi Indians. Caldwell is known in local Chicago history for saving the lives of an important Chicago political family during the Fort Dearborn Massacre—an act certainly compatible with Amity's belief in harmony, but perhaps more suited to Abnegation's altruistic selflessness. Because the Catherine Chevalier Woods are larger and closer to O'Hare Airport, however, they seem a more fitting home for the Amity faction than Caldwell Woods.

Before the revelation that Amity was en route to O'Hare Airport, it seemed likely that their compound actually fell on the other side of the city, where Chicago's I-90 leads into Indiana. The methods and tenets of Amity seem in line with the idea of the Amish, who have populations in central and southern Illinois, Iowa, and Indiana, but none in Chicago itself or its immediate surrounding area. It's possible that they are intended to be Quaker or Mennonite in origin as well, but the only Quaker Society of Friends meetinghouses in the city fall on the extreme South Side, far from everywhere else referenced in the series and inaccessible via the train lines the other factions rely on.

So with four out of five factions solidly located, the sticky issue of Dauntless' overhanging trains and “thirty-minute” distance from The Loop via public transit comes back into play. It seems unlikely that it would be on the far South Side, since that would be a broader net of surveillance for the Bureau, with Amity and Abnegation up North; plus, three of the four other factions are accessible by Blue Line or Red Line. If we assume Dauntless headquarters is similarly located, it narrows the field of possibilities to the areas of Chicagoland north of Congress Parkway and the Eisenhower Expressway and west of State Street. Since Tris recounts passing the Abnegation row houses on her way to Dauntless' headquarters when she first leaves the Choosing Ceremony, we also know that Dauntless must be located in the north.

There is another line of trains that runs in this quadrant, on a specialized route to somewhere that Veronica Roth may have, in her own life, seen as a symbol of courage: the Purple Line train runs to Northwestern University, where she wrote
Divergent.

The train doesn't overhang any of the buildings here, but the Northwestern campus does share features with the rest of Dauntless headquarters' setting: the dome of the Dearborn Observatory and the cluster of interconnected buildings are certainly enough space to live, work, and play all in one place. It's entirely possible that Northwestern University is the home of the Dauntless, not because it's a logistical match to the descriptions in the novels—it isn't—but because of what the school may have become emblematic of for Roth back when the idea of the factions and the story of the Divergent trilogy were first conceived. When Roth chose to transfer colleges and enter Northwestern's notoriously rigorous program, when she wrote
Divergent
over winter break and shopped the manuscript during term—her actions took guts. Perhaps, even, a leap of faith, not unlike Beatrice's transformation into Tris with a flying jump onto the roof of her unknown new home.

       
V. Arrow
is the author of Smart Pop's
The Panem Companion
and an essay about Real Person Fanfiction in the Smart Pop anthology
Fic.
She sometimes gives speeches and presentations about related topics at conferences, conventions, and schools. The rest of the time, she blogs a lot about boy band and YA lit topics and writes both original young adult fiction and fanfiction. If she lived in Tris' world, she would probably choose Erudite, minus all of the evil.

________________

¹
Savelli, Lou.“Behavior and Group Dynamics in Gangs.” Gangs Blog
Police Magazine.
31 Aug. 2010. <
http://www.policemag.com/blog/gangs/story/2010/08/gangs-behavior-and-group-dynamics/aspx
>.

²
Savelli, “Behavior and Group Dynamics in Gangs.”

³
Enright, L
.
Chicago's Most Wanted: The Top 10 Book of Murderous Mobsters, Midway Monsters, and Windy City Oddities.
Dulles, VA: Potomac Books Inc., 2005
.

⁴
Roth, Veronica. “A Day In the Land of Divergent.” Veronica Roth Blog. 22 June 2010. <
http://veronicarothbooks.blogspot.com/2010/06/day-in-land-of-divergent.html
>.

⁵
TUBOWHP.
United Blocks of West Humboldt Park.
Retrieved October 31, 2013, from United Blocks of West Humboldt Park: <
http://unitedblocks.blogspot.com
>.

⁶
Judson Jefferies, “From Gang-Bangers to Urban Revolutionaries: The Young Lords of Chicago.”
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society
96 (2003).

       
One of the great things about science fiction is its ability to work in metaphor
—
to take a real-world situation and remake it as something larger than life, rendering it at once both easier to understand and more epic.

           
Take
Divergent
's
Choosing Ceremony. The choice of factions in Tris' world comes at the same age many teenagers in ours are facing an important decision: what to do after high school graduation. In our world, we express our choice through things like applications rather than ritual bloodletting in front of family and friends, but emotionally, the declaration can feel just as serious, and just as public. Will you go to college, the way an Erudite might? Join the military, like the Dauntless?

           
Here, mother and daughter Maria V. Snyder and Jenna Snyder discuss college, career, and what the Divergent trilogy has to say about making life's big choices.

M
ARIA
V. S
NYDER AND
J
ENNA
S
NYDER