Sophie's Choice is a 1979 novel by American author William Styron, the author's last novel. It concerns the relationships among three people sharing a boarding house in Brooklyn: Stingo, a young aspiring writer from the South; Jewish scientist Nathan Landau; and the latter's eponymous lover Sophie, a Polish-Catholic survivor of the German Nazi concentration camps, whom Stingo befriends.
Sophie's Choice won the US National Book Award for Fiction in 1980. The novel was the basis of a 1982 film of the same name. It was controversial for the way in which it framed Styron's personal views regarding the Holocaust.
Synopsis Stingo, a novelist who is recalling the summer when he began his first book, has been fired from his low-level reader's job at the publisher McGraw-Hill and has moved into a cheap boarding house in Brooklyn, where he hopes to devote some months to his writing. While working on his novel, he is drawn into the lives of the lovers Nathan Landau and Sophie Zawistowska, fellow boarders at the house, who are involved in an intense and difficult relationship. The beautiful Sophie is Polish, Catholic, and a survivor of the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps and Nathan is Jewish-American and purportedly a genius. Although Nathan claims to be a Harvard graduate and a cellular biologist with a pharmaceutical company, it is revealed that this story is a fabrication. Almost no one—including Sophie and Stingo—knows that Nathan has paranoid schizophrenia and that he is abusing stimulants. He sometimes behaves quite normally and generously, but there are times when he becomes frighteningly jealous, violent, abusive, and delusional.
As the story progresses, Sophie tells Stingo of her past. She describes her violently antisemitic father, a law professor in Kraków; her unwillingness to help him spread his ideas; her arrest by the Nazis; and particularly her brief stint as a stenographer-typist in the home of Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz, where she was interned. She specifically relates her attempts to seduce Höss to persuade him that her blond, blue-eyed, German-speaking son should be allowed to leave the camp and enter the Lebensborn program, in which he would be raised as a German child. She failed in this attempt and ultimately never learned of her son's fate. Only at the end of the book does the reader learn what became of Sophie's daughter, Eva.
Eventually, Nathan's delusions lead him to believe that Stingo is having an affair with Sophie, and he threatens to kill them both. As Sophie and Stingo attempt to flee New York, Sophie reveals her deepest secret: On the night that she arrives at Auschwitz, a camp doctor makes her choose which of her two children will die immediately by gassing and which would continue to live, albeit in the camp. Of her two children, Sophie chose to sacrifice her eight-year-old daughter, Eva, in a decision that has left her in mourning and filled with a guilt that she cannot overcome. By now alcoholic and deeply depressed, Sophie is willing to self-destruct with Nathan, who has already tried to persuade her to die by suicide with him. Despite Stingo proposing marriage and a shared night that relieves Stingo of his virginity and fulfills many of his sexual fantasies, Sophie disappears, leaving only a note in which she says that she must return to Nathan.
Upon arriving back in Brooklyn, Stingo is devastated to discover that Sophie and Nathan have killed themselves by ingesting sodium cyanide.
Themes and inspirations Themes Sylvie Mathé notes that Styron's "position" in the writing of this novel was made clear in his contemporary interviews and essays, in the latter case, in particular "Auschwitz", "Hell Reconsidered", and "A Wheel of Evil Come Full Circle", and quotes Alvin Rosenfeld's summary of Styron's position, where Rosenfeld states that:Rosenfeld, Alvin H. (1979) "The Holocaust According to William Styron," Midstream, Vol. 25, No. 10 (December), pp. 43-49.
Rosenfeld, summarizing, states, "The drift of these revisionist views, all of which culminate in Sophie's Choice, is to take the Holocaust out of Jewish and Christian history and place it within a generalized history of evil." Mathé reinforces Rosenfeld's conclusion with a quote from Styron himself, who noted in his "Hell Reconsidered" essay that "the titanic and sinister forces at work in history and in modern life… threaten all men, not only Jews."Styron, William (1978) "Hell Reconsidered," In This Quiet Dust and Other Writings, , pp. 105-115, New York, NY, USA: Random House, , , see , accessed 7 November 2015. She goes on to note that Styron's choices to represent these ideas, and to incorporate them so clearly into the narrative of his novel, resulted in polemic and controversy that continued, at least into the early years of the new millennium.
Plot inspiration Sophie's Choice is said to have been partly based on the author's time in Brooklyn, where he met a refugee from Poland,to-the-brooklyn-of-sophie-s-choice.html and he is said to have visited Auschwitz while researching the novel.
Alexandra Styron, the author's daughter, published the following account in The New Yorker in 2007:
A central element of the novel's plot, the personally catastrophic choice referred to in the title, is said to have been inspired by a story of a Romani woman who was ordered by the Nazis to select which of her children was to be murdered, which Styron attributes to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. However, Ira Nadel claims that the story is found in Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. In that book, Arendt argues that those who ran the camps perpetrated an "attack on the moral person":
Arendt cites Albert Camus' Twice a Year (1947) for the story, without providing a pinpoint reference. See Note 154 on the cited page.Twice a Year was a 1946 book edition that contained the text of Camus' The Crisis of Man (French, La Crise de l'homme), a work that gives the examples of four moral contradictions (including the Greek mother's exposure).Camus read this complete essay at Columbia University on March 28, 1946. See: and , and links therein. The lecture was re-delivered 70 years later, at the same amphitheater, narrated by actor Viggo Mortensen, see
Reception and controversies Awards and recognition
Sophie's Choice won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1980.Weil, Robert (2009) "Sophie's Choice by William Styron, 1980" at National Book Association [Fiction Blog, August 14], see , accessed 7 November 2015.This was the 1980 award for hardcover general Fiction, see National Book awards website. The National Book Awards there given for both hardcover and paperback in most categories from 1980 to 1983 and for multiple fiction categories, especially in 1980. See Much later, in 2002, Styron would receive the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation's Witness to Justice Award.
Critical reception
In his review of the novel in the New York Times, John Gardner takes it as an example of Southern Gothic, writing that:[It] is a splendidly written, thrilling book, a philosophical novel on the most important subject of the 20th century. If it is not, for me, a hands-down literary masterpiece, the reason is that, in transferring the form of the Southern Gothic to this vastly larger subject, Styron has been unable to get rid of or even noticeably tone down those qualities—some superficial, some deep—in the Southern Gothic that have always made Yankees squirm.
Controversies At publication Sophie's Choice generated significant controversy at time of its publication. Sylvie Mathé notes that Sophie's Choice, which she refers to as a "highly controversial novel", appeared in press in the year following the broadcast of the NBC miniseries Holocaust (1978), engendering a period in American culture where "a newly-raised consciousness of the Holocaust was becoming a forefront public issue." Mathé says:
(By "limit event" the author is referring to the nature of, and magnitude and violence of acts in, the Holocaust, characteristics of that "event" that challenged the civilizing tendencies of and the foundations of legitimacy for the moral and political fabric that defined its affected communities.Here, paraphrasing Simone Gigliotti, see following. The reference to a "limit event" (synonymous with "limit case" and "limit situation") is to a concept deriving at least from the early 1990s—Saul Friedländer, in introducing his Probing the Limits of Representation, quotes David Carroll, who refers to the Holocaust as "this limit case of knowledge and feeling". It is a concept that can be understood to mean an event or related circumstance or practice that is "of such magnitude and profound violence" that it "rupture[s]... otherwise normative foundations of legitimacy and... civilising tendencies that underlie... political and moral community" (the later, oft-cited formulation of Simone Gigliotti). For Friedländer, see For Carroll, see For Gigliotti, see )
The controversy to which Mathé is specifically referring arises from a thematic analysis which—in apparent strong consensus (e.g., see Rosenfeld's 1979 work, "The Holocaust According to William Styron")—has Styron, through the novel, his interviews, and essays: Acknowledging Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, while attempting to reorient public perception away from Nazi war crimes and genocides being solely aimed against the Jews and towards also acknowledging the experiences of Slavs, anti-Nazi Christians, political dissidents, and the disabled (hence Sophie's ethnicity and Catholic upbringing); that is, it has him insisting on seeing Auschwitz in particular in more universal terms as "a murderous thrust against 'the entire human family.'" Styron further extends his argument, again with controversy: Proposing that this more general view of the barbarism of Auschwitz (and in particular the fact that Slavic peoples and Christians were also caught up in its program of forced labour and extermination) disproves the unsupported/irrational/bigoted idea of universal Christian collective guilt and challenges historical arguments blaming all previous Christian anti-Semitism as the real cause of the Holocaust, and Suggesting that concentration camps, in using slave labour, justifies the comparison of Nazi war crimes (e.g., in the writings of Rubenstein) with the American institution of slavery and allowed the latter to be viewed as the less inhumane institution of the two.
Speaking of Styron's views as set forth in the novel and his nonfiction work, Rosenfeld refers to them as "revisionist views" that "culminate in Sophie's Choice" with an aim to "take the Holocaust out of Jewish and Christian history and place it within a generalized history of evil", and it is this specific revisionist thrust that is the substance of the novel's initial and persisting ability to engender controversy.
Other aspects of global controversy Sophie's Choice was banned by the Goskomizdat agency as part of censorship in the Soviet Union, and was likewise banned by the censors in the Communist People's Republic of Poland for "its unflinching portrait of Polish anti-Semitism" in the interwar Second Polish Republic and in the postwar Soviet Bloc.
Sophie's Choice was banned by censors working for the government of South Africa under apartheid in November 1979, for being a sexually explicit work.Index on censorship, Vol 9, no 2. It has also been banned in some high schools in the United States. For instance, the book was pulled from the La Mirada High School Library in California by the Norwalk-La Mirada High School District in 2002 because of a parent's complaint about its sexual content. However, a year after students had protested and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had sent a letter to the school district requesting that the district reverse its actions, students were again given access to the book in the school library.
Adaptations Film