The Divided Soul: Duty and Desire in Literature and Life
By Heidi White.
Goldberry, 2025.
Hardcover, 238 pages. $29.00.
Reviewed by Gary Hartenburg.
Heidi White’s debut book, The Divided Soul: Duty and Desire in Literature and Life, unites a memoir in fragments with a syllabus of literary works on the question of how to harmonize our duties and desires. A partial list of the works on White’s syllabus includes the Aeneid; the parable of the prodigal son; Hippolytus, by Euripides; Anna Karenina; Henry IV, Part 1; Pygmalion; Kristin Lavransdatter; Les Misérables; The End of the Affair (the only work discussed in two places); and the poem Autumn, by Rilke. Most chapters in The Divided Soul consist of White’s explanations of how these works help us understand the conflict between duties and desires. These explanations constitute the majority of the book, but its potency lies in the interplay of those accounts and the fragments of her life’s story.
Division, dilemma, and conflict stand in the way of harmony, unity, and happiness, a point White announces in the introduction (“Stories as Icons: How Literature Reflects the Divided Soul”). Great stories “dwell upon the mystery of one immense dilemma”; they concern a “primal division,” which is also a “primary and underlying division” as well as an “aching division.” Such division results from an old and “senseless separation” and is experienced in life as “tension between duty and desire.” The division is so deep and violent that White describes it in tectonic terms—the divided soul is “fractured along the fault line of duty and desire”—and militaristic ones—we are “at war with ourselves.”
The division specifically between duty and desire is the one that White keeps clearly in view throughout the book. She acknowledges that this is not the only conflict; there can be conflicts between two desires and between two duties; for example, hunger and health, family and homeland. The conflicts between duty and desire often arise from the disordering or distorting of either duty or desire, or both. The conflicts are the focus of most chapters, for example, in chapter 5 (“The Turning of the Wheel: Death and Tragedy”), which contains White’s account of Anna Karenina: “The novel takes us inside the interior worlds of Anna, her husband, Karenin, and her lover, Vronsky, exploring the division between duty and desire that destroys them all.” According to White, we ourselves instigate conflict in many ways; the conflicts are not the result of circumstance. Sometimes conflicts “arise” because we avoid duties or cannot overcome obstacles to attain what we desire. The shirking of duty indicates that these conflicts will not be solely internal but will also be external—between men and women, in families, and among citizens.
The good news is that the reconciliation of duty and desire is possible, largely because of the priority of goodness and its attendant order over wickedness and its corruption. One of White’s starting points is that “both duty and desire are intrinsically good,” and she expresses the intrinsic goodness with metaphors of depth and age. Disordered desire, for example, lies on a “deeper desire” that is nonetheless “sincere” for being deeper, and “underneath all the false images lies a right longing.” The metaphor of age is tied to the biblical account of the fall—given in some detail in the introduction—which succeeded a time when “duties and desires were wholly unified” and “altogether unified,” a time in which Eve’s soul possessed an original “internal cohesion” and when “duty and desire united in harmony.” In light of this intrinsic goodness, The Divided Soul refuses to be a treatise on how to eliminate either duty or desire.
If not eliminate, then what? In the first half of the book, the emphasis is on harmonization: “Duty must harmonize the dissonance in the desiring soul.” In chapter 7, White introduces the practice of submerging desire in duty. But how to understand that? The image ready to hand at many places in The Divided Soul is baptism, which symbolizes death by water and resurrection through coming up out of it. Still in chapter 6, we do not have articulated baptism imagery, but White hints at it by stating that Henry IV’s speech “stirs deep waters.” Later, in her recapitulation of The End of the Affair, White reminds readers of Sarah’s early baptism and its continuing postmortem effects, points which she did not mention in her first analysis of that novel in chapter 2. And in her treatment of Eustace Clarence Scrubb in chapter 11, she glosses the finale of his undragoning: “the Lion immerses Eustace in the cleansing waters, and he emerges a boy again. This is, of course, Eustace’s true conversion, when he is baptized into a new and truly human life.” In plain language, desires must be baptized not by lions but by duty, and in her exposition of Galahad in chapter 7, she imagines him as someone who “completes the quest because his desires are as pure and noble as his duties.” As Galahad reveals, “Our true duty is to keep Christ’s commandments, and our true desire is to unite with Him in an eternal paradise.” (Frodo’s quest similarly reveals the necessity of “the unity of desire-and-duty.”) But “to be one with God means we must be at one with ourselves,” so the freedom from internal and external conflicts comes from uniting oneself to the Father, which is the goal of human life.
Thus, another bit of good news is that the reconciliation of duty and desire turns out to encompass both the attempt to become happy and to know our fathers.
White does not give readers a theory of how to bring about harmony and unity. There is no formula or recipe. Instead, she offers a variety of ways of getting started. One might begin with attention to one’s duties, for “duty must harmonize the dissonance in the desiring soul” and it “fortif[ies] us to reject our baser appetites in favor of joy, which is desire’s true object. . . . Duty transforms desire from tyrant to a guide.” But one might just as well start with virtue, either the virtue of chastity, which harmonizes duty and desire between the genders, or the virtue of fidelity, which is “a potent antidote for the diseases of disordered desire that plague us.” We might also choose to contemplate images such as Odysseus, who is “an icon of harmonious desire” and has a “spirit tempered to endure” (Odyssey 5.239–249), for “it is not duty that motivates Odysseus—it is desire.” With no specific starting point singled out, White’s admonition seems to be, “Start where you are.”
Suppose then that one has decided to set about submerging profane desire in the waters of duty. What happens next is to some degree outside one’s control inasmuch as it depends on what White calls “recognition,” which is both passive and active. It is passive inasmuch as it is a matter of opening one’s eyes and mind to what there is to be seen and cognized, and it is active inasmuch as it is a matter of identifying what one sees and thinks with the notions of good and bad that one somehow already possesses.
White leans on such recognition in both theoretical and practical contexts. The latter are more numerous, though the former also involve recognition, as, for example, a fact of moral psychology that “deep down we intrinsically recognize that duty and desire belong together.” Recognition is also at work in the interpretation of literary works, as when “we recognize that both poems . . . present perspectives that work.” In the practical world of White’s memoir, unlike her sophomoric approach to romance, “a unified soul would have recognized another woman’s prior claim as a compelling obstacle to the object of desire”; that is, a person not subject to the division between duty and desire would have noticed and considered that the college boy with whom she was in love was already spoken for and would have somehow rightly judged that to be a kind of fidelity that ought to be respected rather than undermined. And of her later life White confesses, “What I did not know at the time was that God was carrying my mother and I, just as He is now carrying my children. Much pain would have been avoided if I had recognized that earlier.” In the practical worlds of the literature White analyzes, recognition is likewise crucial. A turning point in Henry IV is Hal’s “recognition that his recent actions conflict with his true nature and a realization of what must be done to recover himself.” In Jane Eyre, “Jane recognizes her divided soul and in [Helen’s] actions she finds a model of virtue to imitate.” In That Hideous Strength, Jane Studdock “recognizes for the first time that she is a person under authority, that the terms of marriage are absolute, and that her spiritual state cannot be extricated from the holy sacrament.” The instances of recognition that White identifies for readers are as numerous as they are spontaneous: there seems to be not so much a clear explanation for them as a deep appreciation of them.
If one cannot guarantee that such recognition will take place, either in oneself or in others, the spontaneity must be a matter of providence. White argues that we must read books that will form our character properly, but was it chance that her grandfather’s bequest included the copy of Anne of Green Gables that saved her life? So much depends on a book taken from the shelf, pages turned with wetted finger to read, “Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow . . . .”
One hopes there are more books to come from White, and though wanting them to be more meaningful than The Divided Soul would seem an enormous burden to place on an author, the reader nonetheless senses that there will be more books from White and that she will find a way to render her first her least.
Gary Hartenburg is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Honors College at Houston Christian University.
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