Animals In Art Spiegelman's Maus

In Art Spiegelman’s comic series, MAUS, each race in the storyline is analogously depicted as a different animal. This essay will explore the various benefits, drawbacks and their counteractions, that are confounded with author’s choice of this illustration. It can be argued that choosing animals to represent humans, in an event as complex as the Shoah, dehumanizes victims even more. Humans conventionally see species of animals as collective entities rather than individual beings. Thus, by representing all the Jewish people as one type of animal, the reader might unconsciously generalize all the victims’ sufferings and discourses into one coherent image, in order to make sense of things. On the other hand, depicting each race as a certain animal

One of the evident drawbacks of having animals depict human characters, is that they are figuratively and literally dehumanized. Humans are more complex than their primitive desires, impulses, and needs; and this fact could very easily be lost in translation with this choice of illustration. For example, it could be interpreted that the Germans who were drawn as cats, were behaving like the carnivorous species that they are, and chasing mice, because it is encoded in their natural instincts and a part of their primitive behaviour. This exempts the perpetrators, since it implies their lack of free will was affecting their every decision. It also implies that since the Germans are another specie, the mass murder of millions of people could never have happened by any other nationality, and that evil actions are based upon ethnicity, rather than a human’s negligence from their moral standings. However, Spiegelman was able to slightly deter from this indiscretion by giving each character dynamic personalities and pragmatic

Firstly, there were many incidents where the Jewish people were trying to escape the Germans, and so they had to hide their identities. The author represented this disguise by drawing cat masks on his mouse characters (MAUS 1 page 136). These thin masks symbolized how easily they could have been recognized and caught; thus it accurately details how dire the situation was for those who were in hiding. It also helped the reader consciously think about who the oppressor and the oppressed is. Secondly, the animals that represented each race, accurately symbolized what role they played in the events of the Shoah. The Jewish people were represented by a vulnerable animal, mice, and were hunted down by the German people, who were the cats. The Polish people were represented as pigs, because they often sold out the Jewish people (i.e., page 143 MAUS 1). The Americans were drawn as dogs, because they chased cats, and sympathized with the mice. The author’s choice to use mice as the representation of the Jewish people is multifold. The Nazi’s themselves negatively propagated the Jewish people as the “vermin of mankind” who “infected” society. They were treated as subhuman, caged like animals, and forced to live in ghettos where they would be swarming in tight quarters. Its as if the perpetrators, in this symbolic imagery, were