Sexual politics and confessional testimony in Sophie's Choice - Critical Essay

On the Auschwitz platform, standing before the Nazi doctor who will select which prisoners will work, which will die, Sophie Zawistowska makes the mistake of catching the doctor's attention. He has murmured that he would like to get her into bed; she blurts out in German that she is Polish, not Jewish, nor are her children Jewish. Stingo, the narrator of William Styron's 1979 novel Sophie's Choice, asks, "Why hadn't she played dumb? 'Nicht sprecht Deutsch.' It could have saved the moment" (588). (1) Subsequently drawn into an exchange with Sophie, the doctor demands that Sophie choose which of her two children must go to the gas chamber.

This scene is disturbing, not simply as an event in Sophie's life but because of the way the text seems to indict Sophie even while it pities her. Why hadn't she stayed silent? The question ties Sophie's voice to her victimization. Her voice is credited with the agency that betrays her, the agency that brands her with guilt. If Sophie is her own betrayer, to what extent is she held paradoxically responsible for her own victimization?

Styron quite intentionally sets out to complicate Sophie's status as a Holocaust victim. In a 1980 interview, he explains that

in order to make Sophie really complicated and give her other dimensions, I couldn't make her just a victim. [...] If she was

just a pathetic victim she wouldn't be very interesting; but to put her in juxtaposition with the commandant [...] as a person who in desperation is acting in an unconventional way vis-a-vis the Nazis, trying to masquerade as a collaborator--this would give her a larger dimension. (Mills 237)

Within the novel, Stingo, the novel's narrator, articulates this valuing of Sophie as more than "just a victim":

If Sophie had been just a victim--helpless as a blown leaf, a human speck, volitionless, like so many multitudes of her fellow damned--she would have seemed merely pathetic, another wretched waif of the storm cast up in Brooklyn with no secrets which had to be unlocked. But the fact of the matter is that at Auschwitz (and this she came gradually to confess to me that summer) she had been a victim, yes, but both victim and accomplice, accessory--however haphazard and ambiguous and uncalculating her design--to the mass slaughter whose sickening vaporous residue spiraled skyward from the chimneys of Birkenau. [...] (266)

Thematically, Sophie's complex status seems aimed at evoking the reader s sympathy and compassion. As we will learn, Sophie is a decent person put into an impossible, tragic situation. She is an innocent sent to Auschwitz; she must decide which of her children will live and which will die; she survives within the camp when others do not, in part because she receives the favored labor status of serving the commandant. The guilt she carries with her after the war, along with the contempt she received from her father, is depicted as making her vulnerable to her Jewish American lover Nathan Landau's possessive, violent love. Over time she reluctantly tells the story of her past to Stingo, but she is never able to forgive herself and finally chooses to die beside Nathan in a suicide pact. Certainly there is much in Styron's novel that accuses the systems that have tortured Sophie and recognizes the injustice of Sophie's sufferings.

Still, Sophie's being both victim and accomplice is a paradox with a troubling social history, especially for women victims, for the two statuses have contrary implications that have frequently been used against women. The passage quoted above takes the position that a victim is helpless and volitionless, whereas an accomplice performs acts that presumably could be helped and which involve volition. To the degree, then, that a victim shows any volition (for good or ill), she slides away from victim toward agent, a position that resists claims to the innocence of victimization. We still see this opposition between agent and victim used against female victims in actual rape trials--a rape victim would not choose clothes that might allure; a sexual harassment victim would not initiate a phone call to her harasser. The paradox that gives Sophie "more dimension" also prepares ground for a struggle around the evaluation of whatever Sophie or the novel offers in defense of her choices.

Sophie's status as a victim is further complicated by the multiple ways in which she is abused. Not only must she choose between her children, but also Sophie is berated by a cruel father, married off to a cruel husband, widowed, left to fend in desperation for her children during the Nazi regime, and sent to Auschwitz for stealing meat to save her mother. Besides suffering the desperate physical and mental conditions of every concentration camp prisoner, she is separated from her remaining child and later intimidated into allowing a German woman prisoner to perform cunnilingus on her. In New York she is digitally raped on a subway train and both verbally and physically brutalized by Nathan. Finally, even the sympathetic narrator Stingo, explicitly using Sophie's story to work through his own guilty affiliation with the American South's history of slavery, patronizes her and appropriates her story for his therapy and for his art, and does so in a comedic patter that itself troubles the status of his role as her sympathetic interlocutor.