William Styron's "Sophie's Choice": A wisdom that is woe, a woe that is madness.
Item
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Title
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William Styron's "Sophie's Choice": A wisdom that is woe, a woe that is madness.
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Identifier
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AAI8914792
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identifier
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8914792
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Creator
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Sirlin, Rhoda A.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Charles C. Walcutt
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Date
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1988
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American
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Abstract
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American writers, especially those who emphasize man's darker side, have often been more respected and appreciated in Europe than in their own native country. William Styron, like Poe and Faulkner before him, is so admired in France, for example, that Sophie's Choice is considered one of the most significant novels to have emerged since the Second World War. The novel's reception in the United States, however, has been mixed at best, provoking angry and even irrational responses because Styron hits too many sensitive nerves and is so adamant in his criticism of American innocence and naivete. Specifically, contrary to many critics of the novel, Sophie's Choice explores anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism without being anti-Semitic, racist, or sexist itself. Styron, following an anti-Emersonian tradition, like Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James, demonstrates that evil is not merely the privation of good but a potent force within us. Here, Sophie's Choice resembles Melville's Moby-Dick in its examination of the nature of evil and madness, and indeed the novel has many Melvillean overtones; thus, Sophie's Choice is not merely a trendy novel about the Holocaust but must be seen as part of a noble tradition of novels critical of American innocence, urging us to discard this Adamic myth, to see its potentially lethal nature. Sophie's Choice also owes much to European existentialists, particularly Albert Camus, whose philosophical essays, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, and Resistance, Rebellion and Death, have influenced Styron's fiction in their insistence on affirming the dignity of man in the face of an indifferent, godless universe; therefore, it is not surprising that after visiting Auschwitz, Styron asked not where was God but where was man. Underneath Styron's dark vision, then, is the possibility of passionate affirmation through awareness and action.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
