4/23/2021 0 Comments Maus Art Spiegelman Essay
Artie the aspiring writer and comic book mouse artist and Vladek Arties father, stand in temporal contrast as well as in complement to the status of these characters in the reality of life and of Holocaust history.In Art Spiegelmans graphic novel depicting his generations reaction to the World War II suffering of Jews and other persecuted groups, animals take on human characteristics and personas, and humans take on animal guises even while they retain their human qualities of speech and reflective thought.This is done from the onset of the narrative, so the pretext of animals behaving like humans, located in a human world, is not jarring once the reader has accepted it, although the iconography of Jew as mouse remains most striking visual aspects of Art Spiegelmans seminal 1996 graphic novel entitled Maus.With powerful texts and illustrations, the book tells the story of the authors father Vladek during the Holocaust as a Jew.
![]() ![]() But, by making the Jews of Maus into sympathetic mice, the reader is forced to identify with how the Jews were portrayed in Europe at the time, as vermin. The guise of Jews as mice, alas, is an old one in European cultural prejudice -- Jews in anti-Semitic European and particularly Teutonic folklore and Christian apocrypha were accused of being bloodthirsty, spreading disease, and infecting communities much like plagues of mice. The Nazis often used vermin as a visual analogy between Jews and mice in their propaganda. The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human, Adolf Hitler said, a quote featured, significantly before the illustrated text of Spiegelmans fully introduces the historical and cultural significances of the mouse and human pairing in the German imagination. Thus, the simplicity of the animal pictures used to define the narrative underlines the simplicity of the ways the Nazis saw Jews during the period. The contradictions between the human like behavior of the mice and the inhuman way they are treated underlines the contradictions of Nazi ideology -- how can a race be both inhuman yet still a race The demonizing of Jews into vermin or mice might ideologically solve this problem, but such an animal like demonizing physically transforms the Nazis into predatory-like cats because it requires such a cruelty and a hardening of the heart. Thus Spiegelman, brilliantly, turns the pictorial and cultural analogy of the Jew as vermin on its head, for mice are also the persecuted, most vulnerable members of a society, on a hierarchy of dog -eat-dog, dog-eat-cat, and cat-eat-mouse. The persecuted Jewish mice scurry into mouse holes, as soldiers scurry into foxholes, for protection from cats. And the cats, assuming the status of humans try to snare these mice in traps. But merely because the Jews take on the status of animals, linguistically and pictorially does not mean that they are the enemy. From the beginning, the reader is asked to identify with the authors protagonist father, a very ordinary mouse man named Vladek. And even the holes and traps used to catch the Jewish mice also linguistically refer to the common snares used to shield and catch human soldiers, in real-time war parlance -- soldiers took shelter in trenches or foxholes, and tripped on booby traps of mines or barbed wires. This military resonance further stresses in the readers and viewers consciousness that the divide between human and animal is not as comfortable as one might wish to think, and the Nazis might like to suggest. And the Nazis, of course, are carnivorous animals, cats, unlike the hungry mice -- as Nazi cat officers are used to keep the Jewish mice in control, in concentration camps. This is possible although the cats by nature are selfish creatures, their bloodthirsty and selfish qualities can and are easily used by others, used by humans to catch prey -- and so were the Nazi officers not so hidden personal cruelties and animosities against the Jews used at the service of a repressive regime. Maus Art Spiegelman Essay Movie Musical OfMy Father Bleeds History, says the narrator at the beginning of Maus, the words superimposed above a beautiful picture of the authors mouse-father and mouse- mother waltzing like a shot from a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie musical of the 1930s. Spiegelmans father-mouse has a power that charismatic essence beyond that of the tropes ascribed to him later by Nazi culture as a Jew. The Sheik is not a stereotypical mouse with women -- although a mouse in the eyes of the gentile world as a Jew, he spurns aligning himself too quickly with one mouse woman, as the illustration of The Sheik mouse shows, as a prostrate female mouse throws herself at the sexy, callous male mouse Sheiks feet. Vladek will show a similarly cavalier attitude towards Arties mother and his suicidal wife, later in the narrative, as well as the stepmother, Marta, whom the reader meets soon after. Poppa, Spiegelman calls his father, and initially the two of them together seem like A Mouse and his Child, a story tale or nursery rhyme rather than two men trapped in a larger history neither of them can fully comprehend, on an emotional, theological, or literary level of narrative. This whimsy deflates some of the womanizing of The Sheik as the framed device of the comic book reminds the reader and the gazer that this takes place in an old mans memory, and might make him seem more successful with women than one might initially suspect. The bespectacled mouse, the cozy dialogue of the frame as Artie the author-mouses coat is taken from his mouse shoulders is accompanied by an ominous subtext, that Marta is a stepmother and survivor, not the author Arties true mother. This also highlights the postmodern texture of the book, whereby the author is a character -- Artie, is first seen asking to write a book about his fathers past experiences, depicting the relationship before the book occurs, yet creating distance between the author himself and his protagonist-self in the pictorial narrative by the use of animal representations of his father and his own authorial self in the sketched world of the comic book.
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