Sophie’s Choice: On the Pedagogical Value of the “Problem Text”

Abstract

Among the most widely read of all Holocaust fictions, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979) is a risky choice for any course on the Holocaust if only because it has evoked from Jewish critics, much as his previous novel The Confessions of Nat Turner did from African-Americans, grave consternation about its justness and accuracy as historical representation. Styron’s public statements about the Holocaust, both preceding publication of his novel and after its sensational success, revealed an agenda that, while ostensibly humanitarian, nevertheless relied on a discourse of universalism almost willfully deaf to the cultural territorial issues evoked by such history. As historian Deborah Lipstadt has shown, for a variety of reasons—including strategic focus on the war effort, a scepticism about atrocity stories from the previous world war, and governmentally cued fears about provoking reactionary sentiment in an American public that was strongly anti-immigrant and at least partly anti-Semitic—the American press only minimally covered the Nazi genocide during the war, consistently obscuring reference to the Nazis’ central victims, the Jews.