The Theme of Identity in Maus by Art Spiegelman

On page 41 of Art Spiegelman's Maus II, the reader is confronted with a human character for the first time in the series. Or at least, we see half of the human head of Spiegelman himself, his face concealed by a mouse mask, as he works atop a pile of dead mice, is interviewed by reporters (also in animal masks), and visits his shrink. The depiction of the mask is a startling departure, continuity-wise, from the previous book, representing Spiegelman's capability to step away from the chronological and linear line of the story and take a few pages to explore more abstract ideas both in subject matter and in drawing method. It is also one of the first moments of self-reflection in the series: Spiegelman struggling with his connection to his father's story and the critical reaction to Maus I.

One of the main points of criticism he confronts in this scene is the thought-process behind his portrayal of characters as animals. "If your book was about ISRAELI Jews, what kind of animal would you draw?" a dog-faced reporter asks. "I have no idea," Spiegelman answers, "...porcupines?" Spiegelman takes the same smart-alecky tone in the following pages, pointing out the framed picture of a "real" cat in Pavel's office and asking the reader if the introduction of "real" animals into the story louses up his metaphor. "My metaphor" sounds passively but sardonically bitter in this context, a testimony to there being no truth to the metaphor forced onto the book by the public. It may also be an admittance that there isn't a metaphor whatsoever; Spiegelman certainly takes no consideration in Maus I of his cat/mouse scheme. It just is, which isn't to say no consideration was taken. I think the reader is expected to make some sort of base assumption about his decision: Spiegelman is toying with the relationship between predator and prey, and strength and weakness. Or, Spiegelman is attempting to collectivize the Holocaust experience for groups within the story, placing everyone on level ground. Of course there is the image of the "Jew as rat" drawn from the Nazi propaganda of the 1930s and '40s that Spiegelman attends to at the beginning of Maus II with a snippet from a pre-WWII, German newspaper article:

"Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed....Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal....Down with Mickey Mouse!" (3)

Why do we receive this paragraph in the opening of the second book? Doesn't the passage seem better suited as a starting point for the first, which would go a long way in explaining the title of the work and the artist's rendering decisions? It's most surely an attempt at an answer to the "Why mice?" question which must have been raised so often after the publishing of Maus I. At the same time, this answer, given alone, is a bit of a cop-out in that it represents Spiegelman's understanding of his illustrative decisions at the time of Maus I. By not directly addressing the characterizations in the first book-by not including the German newspaper quote in the front or pointing out the differences between the human-mice and the mice-mice on page 147-Spiegelman downplays them entirely. The effect is that the reader ends up making those very simple assumptions about Spiegelman's creative control.

Maybe Spiegelman was just waiting to address it in book two, or maybe the investigative nature of the readership urged him to think deeper on the issue. Either way, the idea of the superficial identity translated into the drawings of Spiegelman surpasses the easy "Jews were drawn as rats by Nazis" explanation in And Here My Troubles Began; the animal bodies now take on whole new meanings to the author. First we receive the Mickey Mouse quote, which, coupled with our experience with the straight-ahead narration of My Father Bleeds History, misleads us into thinking that these few sentences are all we will ever find out about why MausisMaus. Next: a picture of Richieu, the brother he never met, to remind us of the truth behind the cartoon. Then in the opening scene, a conversation takes place between Spiegelman and his wife, Francoise about how she should be drawn. "Huh? A MOUSE of course!" she exclaims when he asks her. Spiegelman contends that she's French, but Francoise reminds him that she converted to Judaism. The tone of the scene is lighthearted, but the implications are heavier: Spiegelman has granted himself the power to shape his character's identities, to point out the essential condition of a person. Should Francoise be defined as a French frog or a Jewish mouse?

This is the first moment in the series that Spiegelman tussles over how to depict someone and exposes problems in his typology. Up to this point, it's been easy: mice for Jews and cats for Germans. This grouping alone-which mismatches nationality and religion-fails to account for overlaps between the two and propagates a physical distinction between them that never existed. Spiegelman accounts for this predicament in the case of Francoise, who wants desperately to be drawn as a mouse. Why would she rather have her Jewish-ness on display more so than her French-ness? On the next page, after a minor spat, Francoise tells Spiegelman that she only converted to make his father happy and that he should have married a former Jewish girlfriend instead. "Yes. Then you could just draw mice no problem," she says. Francoise has come to value her conversion to Judaism as the link between herself and the Spiegelman family. Religion has become more important to her idea of self, for whatever reason, than her French heritage.

It is this generalization of identity that Spiegelman focuses on in book two. Whether it is self-imposed, as in the case of Francoise, or assigned, as in the cases of the German Jews (specifically, the character on page 50 of book two who claims to be German and is drawn as both a mouse and a cat), all the characters in Maus have a detail of their beings elevated. Spiegelman isn't creating the key, either; he's merely shining a light on it, and in the case of And Here My Troubles Began, turning it on its head. He dons the mouse mask on page 41, symbolizing his disconnect from an event that's made him a "critical and commercial success" (notice the dead Hungarian Jews under his desk don't wear masks). I think the scene is meant to be taken as a confession of guilt as well as an acknowledgement that the key must be flawed if Spiegelman himself is allowed to take the same form-and in a sense, to share the same experience-as the Jews who suffer the Holocaust. "I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams," he divulges to Francoise (16). Pavel, the Jewish shrink who survived Terezin and Auschwitz, however, is put in the same mask just a few pages after the hill of bodies. We must ask ourselves: Is it the entitlement to a specific identity Spiegelman is questioning, or the accuracy of it all? Should Pavel, 40 years out of the camps, still be defined as Jewish any more than Spiegelman should?

The whole discussion reminds me of a scene later in book two, when Vladek, Art's father, attempts to return used groceries at the store. He returns to the car with a refund and explains what happened: "The manager is a very fine gentleman...He helped me as soon I explained to him my health, how Mala left me, and how it was in the camps" (90). Vladek doesn't give second thought to exploiting his history as a means of argument, and engaging a "mask" that supercedes his Jewish-ness (or mouse-ness): He's a survivor. Remember, in My Father Bleeds History, Spiegelman illustrates Vladek and Anja walking through Poland disguised in Polish pig masks. Spiegelman takes a keen interest in the way identity is manipulated, albeit factually, by the self and by the other to yield results. In answering the question, "Why aren't Jewish Americans dogs?" I think the answer is part Spiegelman finding his Jewish identity more attractive to the purposes of his story and part society's branding him as an end product of the Holocaust. In America, identity is simultaneously rigid and malleable; we understand it through our own generalities and through the purposeful signals given off by others.

Spiegelman never attempts to teach lessons or put uplifting spins on the story with these insights. In fact, the reader receives just the opposite: scenes in which the characters have bought into the key. Vladek worries for Anja on page 136 of book one. He believes her Jewish features (which have been vilified and largely made up) will give her away to German officials. Art talks about Vladek in book one: "It's something that worries me about the book I'm doing about him...In some ways he's just like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew" (131). The dialogue is a truthful look at the kind of shame we feel when stereotypes happen to be more than stereotypes. But by placing his father squarely in the path of the stereotype, Art makes no argument for the separation of Vladek's miserliness from his religion. It's the same kind of thinking that leads to Vladek's objection at Francoise picking up a "shvartser," an African-American, on the way back from the grocery. "I had the whole time to watch out that this shvartser doesn't steal us the groceries from the back seat!" Vladek cries (99). Spiegelman draws the hitchhiker as a black dog, assigns the identity he's been trained to see and leaves it up to the reader to decide what to do with it.

Works Cited

Maus and Maus II by Art Spiegelman