Animal Imagery In Maus

The Power of the Animal Imagery in Maus Art Spiegelman, an American cartoonist, takes advantages of postmodern principles in his best known graphic novel Maus. He successfully used the related characteristics between animals and humans to demonstrate a cruel and bloody historical event, the Holocaust to the readers. Art Spiegelman, as the second generation of the survivors, had only experienced the Holocaust from the point view of a listener but not really participate in the event, therefore, demonstrate the Holocaust in an authentic way in Maus will be difficult things to him. As the peer reviewed articles, “Studies in American Jewish Literature", "Visual Narrative: Art Spiegelman 's "Maus"" and ""Well Intended Liberal Slop": Allegories

Firstly, Art Spiegelman made use of certain animals to stand for human characteristics is appropriate to the cultural context of the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler’s idea of Jews are not belong to human race but vermin began the Holocaust during the World War II. As he said: “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human” (Andrew Loman). Under his domination, Er Sturmer, a Nazi newspaper publication, and some anti-Semitic publications think the image of mice is a suitable image to describe Jews because they believes Jews should be eliminated as vermin. At the time, mouse were cultural stereotype of Jews in the most of Nazi Germnay’s eyes. In Maus, Art Spiegelman used Nazi Germany’s idea of Jews are disease carrying vermin to depict Jews as the image of mice. Secondly, Animal imagery helped Art Spiegelman to reveal the social reality of the Holocaust in an entertaining way during the period. Art Spiegelman did not want to take the ethic risk of representing the issue of racism directly, so he follows the form of Disney cartoon with their way of transfer aspects of racist to entertaining way, which was an American mass culture in the twentieth century. He used different animals to differentiate the race. For example, he used cat and mouse, which are innate antagonism, to metaphor for that Nazi Germany’s duty was to wipe them out. In the book, he depicted Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs and Americans as dogs. Art Spiegelman vivid represents the relationship between Jews, Germans and Poles by using food chain, like cat and mouse. Art Spiegelman shows a more pleasant way to differentiate the race characteristics during the period of the Holocaust by using animal imagery but not human