Sophia's War: A Tale of the Revolution
54 pages • 1-hour read
AviSophia's War: A Tale of the Revolution
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes themes of war and death.
The Conflict Between Personal Emotions and Patriotic Duty
The title of the novel, Sophia’s War, reflects the protagonist Sophia Calderwood’s ongoing internal and external battles. When the Revolutionary War breaks out in her home of New York City, Sophia becomes immediately embroiled in the conflict, believing in the patriot cause. However, her feelings for John André soon complicate her experience, revealing the conflict between personal emotions and patriotic duty.
Sophia initially has a straightforward, uncomplicated attitude to the war, as she is swayed by her family’s own views. Sophia’s beloved older brother William is a patriot soldier, and her parents are ardent patriot supporters; Sophia, too, “could give an earnest defense of our rightful freedoms” (11), as she responds eagerly to William’s instruction in political matters. She hopes her countrymen will liberate themselves from British rule, considering herself a patriot in her own right.
However, when the handsome and charming Lieutenant John André starts boarding at her home, Sophia finds herself caught between her personal affections for the lieutenant and her patriotic duty. Stuck in the thick of the revolutionary conflict, Sophia feels unallowed to have her own emotional experience. Since John André is charming and pays attention to her, she realizes it is not as easy to vilify him even though he is British. In turn, the more attracted she feels to him, the more she realizes that she is compromising her political principles, such as when she wishes that her brother didn’t exist. Sophia is thus caught between her innocent heart’s desires and her higher calling to fight for her country.
At the novel’s climax, Sophia must choose between honoring her emotions for John André by allowing his plot to go undetected, or committing to the patriot cause by exposing him. For the past three years, Sophia has felt ashamed of her feelings for John André, whom she often deems the enemy but whom she still finds attractive when she sees him again. She ultimately goes through with exposing his plot and even witnesses his arrest, but she feels plagued by guilt and sorrow as she does so. Although she has done something heroic for the patriot cause, she does not feel satisfaction or pride, only sadness, which reinforces that doing her political duty has enacted a heavy emotional toll on her.
The image of her placing the ribbon André gave her on his grave years later enacts her work to reconcile her conflicting emotions. She accepts that she did once care for an enemy soldier, despite all the pain he caused her. She also accepts that she contributed to his death, despite her feelings for him. Sophia’s newfound acceptance conveys the difficulty of making personal sacrifices on behalf of a higher cause.
The Quest for Personal Growth Under Duress
Sophia Calderwood’s story is a coming-of-age narrative which traces her journey from childhood into adulthood amidst the turmoil of the Revolutionary War. While Sophia experiences some of the typical milestones in such narratives, such as her emotional development and growing independence, the pressures that surround her create unusual difficulties for her, forcing her to undertake the quest for personal growth under duress.
At the novel’s start, Sophia is just 12 years old. She is on the cusp of becoming a young woman and is thus developing her own sense of morality and identity. Her relationships with her parents and her brother William Calderwood have particularly influenced her outlook on the world and her sense of self. Sophia’s conventional coming-of-age experience changes, however, when the war breaks out and she is thrust into constant political unrest. Becoming a woman suddenly looks completely different to Sophia, as her city is occupied by British soldiers, her father is sick and unable to work, her brother is in captivity, her mother is emotionally strained, and a British soldier is living upstairs.
Sophia’s wartime circumstances compel her to be brave, take risks, and make sacrifices in new ways. Sophia faces a network of challenges and conflicts throughout the novel. Each one ushers her towards personal growth. Sophia’s decision to work with Mr. Robert Townsend as a patriot spy particularly accelerates her maturation. When she initially learns of Townsend’s proposition, she wonders, “But how could I, Sophia Calderwood, a refined and educated young woman, do so?” (132). Sophia still sees herself as the young woman she once was. She will gradually orient to her new espionage role, which will transform her character and worldview.
Throughout her work with Mr. Townsend, she takes greater and greater risks to serve her country, each one challenging a former, younger version of her. Over time, she realizes that the young girl she once was no longer aligns with the woman she is becoming:
There was the question, had I deceived myself? Was all I’d done for a noble cause, to have my nation’s fair revenge? Or were my actions motivated by my wish for him to recognize me? To treat me as he had done when I was a girl? […] How contemptible! How low! How degrading! Never mind what I been. The question was, what would I do…now? (278)
In this moment, Sophia is struggling to reconcile her former, youthful affections for John André with her newfound determination to apprehend him. These questions incite deeper quandaries about Sophia’s identity. Her experiences since André lived at her home have remade her into a brave woman. While this new chapter of her life still feels somewhat foreign to Sophia, she understands that she must focus on the future, not the past.
Sophia becomes a stronger, more resolved, and bolder character by the novel’s end because of the obstacles she has overcome. Instead of cowering in the face of distress, Sophia rises to the occasion and fights against it. In doing so, her hardships help her to grow into the woman she was supposed to become.
The Influence of War on Loyalty and Allegiances
At the novel’s start, Sophia is largely unaware of complex political dynamics. While her brother William has “tried to educate [her],” “talked, taught, and catechized [her]” (11), Sophia’s understanding of the loyalist-patriot conflict remains limited to literature and insular domestic conversations about the war. She therefore does not understand firsthand what it means to be loyal to, or to betray, those closest to her. As the war continues, however, Sophia begins to understand the conflict’s influence on loyalty and allegiances.
Sophia’s most obvious conflict over loyalty is when she realizes that she must choose between remaining loyal to her brother and the patriot cause, or tacitly accept the British domination through her growing attraction to John André. While Sophia cares for both men in different ways, she understands from early on that the wartime context makes such allegiances contradictory, even in private life. This conflict over loyalty and allegiance comes to a crisis point when Sophia sees William being led as a prisoner while she is out walking with John André. When she admits that William is her brother, John André offers to keep her secret if she will agree to pretend that nothing happened, which forces Sophia to choose where her loyalties lie: In chasing after her brother, Sophia signals that her loyalty remains with her family and the patriot cause.
Throughout the novel, Sophia also finds it difficult to lie about what she really believes to save herself because she is afraid of betraying the patriots and her family to the British Crown. Lies Sophia tells include her lie to the British soldiers when she fetches the doctor for her father, the lie she tells John André about not having a brother, the lies she tells the townspeople and her father’s employers about Hiram Calderwood’s well-being and William’s whereabouts, and overarchingly, how she lies that she is a loyalist supporter when under threat. Sophia initially takes issue with her own falsehoods, but quickly understands that others like her are doing the same, for example, Mr. Gaine: “Was this not what my parents had done? Was this not what I had done? Dear God! The war made deception our way of life” (73). Sophia feels compromised as a result. She hates that she and her family and friends must lie to protect themselves and cannot live honestly. At the same time, this “way of life” challenges Sophia to form more nuanced definitions of loyalty and allegiance.
Over the course of the novel, Sophia learns that if she feigns allegiances to save her life, she is not ultimately betraying her loyalty to her family or her countrymen. Recurring scenes of Sophia telling people that she is a loyalist convey her attempts to uphold a momentary lie for the sake of accomplishing a greater goal. In choosing her allegiance and then doing all that she must to uphold it, Sophia reveals her new understanding of what it means to be truly loyal to a cause.
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