On the Divided Soul and the Joy of Loving Good Books 

Each one of us as human beings ails from an inner fracture—be it wide, or narrow, or ever-shifting—between our sense of duty and our sense of desire. Christians believe that this fracturing took place in our first father and mother, Adam and Eve: when they disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, they ruptured the perfect union of what is and what ought to be for all of the human race in this earthly realm. Because literature captures the human condition, fictional characters and poetic voices reflect this fracturing of the human soul. Christians also believe that the perfect reunion of desire and duty is found in Christ, who embodies both perfect duty and perfect desire. In reflecting the design of the created world and the Creator who made it, literature not only echoes the fracturing of our souls but also gestures toward this transcendent consummation where duty and desire completely align again. 

This is the argument Heidi White makes in The Divided Soul: Duty and Desire in Literature and Life. The concept of the divided soul offers the sort of rubric that, once seen, cannot be unseen. White not only sees but compellingly depicts the way this fracturing plays out from Genesis to the Gospels to numerous works of great literature.  

The Divided Soul is foremost a work of literary criticism. The works given extensive treatment in the book include Virgil’s Aeneid, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, and Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, but there are many more. However, the book is more than a work of literary criticism. It effortlessly weaves personal memoir, literary analysis, and theological insights into a seamless whole.  

I’ve had the pleasure of being a guest several times on the Close Reads Podcast that White cohosts, a program that takes listeners on (as the title suggests) long, close reads over a series of episodes that cover a great book. As a guest, I got to hear in real time as White applied spontaneous but studied observations about the divided soul as it applied to various works under discussion. To pick up this book and read an extended, well-crafted version of this argument (the writing is magnificent) after watching it develop over the years is, for lack of a better word, a delight. 

White establishes her qualifications for writing this book not merely as a voracious reader (which she is) nor as a classical educator (which she also is) but as someone with a “lifetime of experience as a divided soul.” White’s poignant but circumspect narrative of her own life as a divided soul is interspersed throughout the book, like effective punctuation marks that aren’t the meaning of the text but give the text order and emphasis.  Admittedly, I am partial to memoir—but I’m also partial to effective punctuation. (Few should aspire to write Finnegans Wake.) 

And despite being about so many great books, the central “text” of this book is the Christian faith itself. To be clear, most of the pages in The Divided Soul are concerned with literary analysis, but that analysis is offered entirely through the lens of the great story of creation, the fall, and the redemption made possible through Christ’s incarnation, sacrifice, and resurrection—in other words, the dividing of the soul and the only healing of that division. The “eternal longing,” as White puts it, that characterizes the fallen soul (both in real life and in literature) is the condition of our temporary selves, “but our permanent, heavenly selves will be reunited.” And that ultimate union occurs in Christ’s incarnation.  

According to White, the connection between that truth and the truths of literature is this: 

Christ became flesh and dwelled among us, restoring the unity of the fractured life of the world. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection heals the wounds of the divided soul, which means that if we want to be whole, we must look to Him. For that reason, this book assumes a way of seeing all stories in literature and life through a kind of spiritual vision. 

The passage above comes from the introduction and is echoed in the final chapter. Thus, the centrality of the incarnate Christ to the body of great literature is the concept that bookends all the literary and life analysis in between. 

But this isn’t simply forcing Christian truth onto literary texts. Rather, as White explains, she is identifying a “universal pattern woven into the fabric of reality, discoverable everywhere in literature and life.” This is a view often stated by Christian practitioners and theorists in various fields. But it is a view I have seldom seen made so convincingly because it is seldom made so unforcefully, so gracefully, as in these pages. Many can believe a certain truth, as White does, and many can attempt to demonstrate such truth, as White does. But few are willing to let the subject under study reveal that truth on its own, not by the heavy hand of the critic, but rather by simply unveiling what is already there, allowing the layers of life that cover the eternal mysteries to peel away by gentle guidance. This is what happens in these pages.  

The literary works covered are arranged thematically in chapters covering topics such as duty in the divided soul, desire in the divided soul, marriage and comedy, death and tragedy, the true myth, and more. This thematic organization is most effective for the argument. Yet so many works are covered that, upon completing the book, I found myself wishing for an index of authors and titles, because this is the sort of volume one might wish to consult again and again as a reader (or rereader) of the great works discussed. This is but a minor complaint, however, with one other neutral observation: that at times the book is heavy on plot summary, even when in service to the analysis. I found myself skimming some of these sections, eager to get on to the commentary and at times even more eager to get to the parts where White reflects on her own life, which she does so honestly and tenderly. 

But this is a book for lovers of books. And there are many ways to love a good book. It’s illuminating to do so through the prism of duty and delight. White is the best kind of Christian reader, finding truth wherever it may be found by holding the treasures of literature, whether ancient or modern, whether Christian or not, up to the light of Christ. 

White proved herself most in this respect in the chapter on feminine desire. I admit to approaching this section with some trepidation. Coming from a conservative Baptist background, I have become sensitive of late to the way sex differences and gender roles have become politicized and weaponized in the current culture. In my background, ideas about “masculine” and “feminine” are used to restrict and confine and little else. But White is Eastern Orthodox, and while I know only a little about this tradition, what I do know has assured me that these Christians have an expansive and empowering view of men and women both now and in Christian history and tradition. That expansiveness is, I believe, rooted in an understanding of these categories (and everything else) that transcends the mere literal, physical, and social, and is grounded in the meaning and power of symbols.  

Sure enough, in getting deeply into her analysis in this chapter of the book, White frames the masculine and feminine in terms of their symbolic significance. Addressing feminine desire in her discussion of the Norwegian epic trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter, White points out the parallels between this story and the story of Adam and Eve’s fall. I held my breath for fear she would lose me as she began to explain how Adam and Eve are different because God made man first, out of the ground, and made Eve second, out of Adam’s rib. There are whole Baptist councils and entire journals devoted to repeating this same point in countless novel applications, including how a woman should give directions to a man lost in his car. But this is not White’s concern.  

Instead, she writes that when God made Eve from Adam’s rib, this left “a gap in the masculine self.” She continues, “The divine wound beneath Adam’s heart was Eve’s ground-of-being.”  

At this point, I was still skeptical, waiting for an explanation based on this fact for why a woman shouldn’t be a police officer. But what we get is this:  

On a symbolic level, this is astonishing. Women exist because of a cosmic division of man from himself, and this does not cut both ways. Yes, a woman suffers to give birth to sons and daughters, but that comes later and its ramifications are different. In forming Eve, God himself inflicts the wound in Adam’s flesh even before the fall. When Eve is created, she is complete in herself—but Adam is not. 

… 

The masculine urge to love a woman created from himself is a legacy from Eden. 

Now, as with all symbols, especially cosmic ones, the depths of meaning and possible application for this reading could constitute entire books or graduate courses. But it is this sort of evocation that informs the entire book, one that is assuredly rooted in White’s particular Christian tradition. 

This symbolic literacy (and theology) is probably why the chapter on poetry was the richest one for me. This chapter is titled “Formal Longing,” a heading that points to the truth that we all long for order and structure of some kind. Poetry is “the language of desire,” White remembers some unremembered person saying. She wonders what it is about poetry that “lends itself to longing.” She then observes: 

When I try to answer this question definitely, I find my mind tied up in knots, and then I begin to wonder if the tangling and untangling of knots is itself a profound image for poetry. If the elements of poetry are strands of contemplation, a poem becomes a tapestry that embodies a condensed image of a divided soul. 

She goes on to compare the structural constraints of a poem, its “formal scaffolding”—the lines, the meter, the rhyme, the rhythm, the repetition, whatever its parts—to duty. Such scaffolding provides the moral center we all crave and need (whether we know it or not).  

But, White explains, the form exists to support the meaning and the purpose—the expressed desire. And then comes perhaps the most important sentence in the book: “[T]he Christian moral vision is defined by desire far more than duty.” 

We uphold the forms—keep the commandments, obey the law, follow the rules of a sonnet or villanelle—because that is “how we participate in the life of Christ.” And the “life of Christ is the blessed life, because Christ is our life now and forever.” The purpose of poetry, White says, “is to contemplate mystery.” And this is the purpose of all literature, all art, and all of life. Christ and life in him are the greatest of mysteries.  

But, of course, there are infinite mysteries on this earth and in human souls. The joy of reading good books well is to better ponder and embrace them all. 

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