One of the most easily recognized features of Maus is its use of anthropomorphism. What effect does Spiegelman's use of animals have?
In one way, I think the use of animal characters in Maus acts against one of White's main ideas. White maintains that storytelling and the narrative are universal because it is human nature to narrate. If all of humanity is united in story-telliing and thus story-reading, perhaps Spiegelman uses animals to re-divide humanity according to race. Maus could have been written using human characters. But, by giving them animal forms, it's almost as if Spiegelman wants to exaggerate the gap between races, displaying it instead as a gap between species.
If this is so, what other issues, including racial ones, are portrayed through the anthropomorphism of Maus?
In any type of warfare, people on both sides tend to dehumanize the enemy. It is nearly impossible to kill someone when we actually think of them as belonging to the same brotherhood of humanity as us- when we think, for example, that they too, miss their family, are passionate about a hobby, or dislike certain foods. In Maus, Vladek refers to the person he kills as a tree, or as "it." (p. 48) By using anthropomorphism, I think Spiegelman reinforces the idea that opposing groups of people turn their enemies into generalizations, taking away the human identity which unites all people. The simplistic faces, hardly distinguishable from one another, help create a sense of anonymity. This makes the Jews in Maus all equal to one another, all mice, yet not sharing anything in common with the Germans. Even the betraying mice are still mice. Even the sympathetic cats are still cats. In this way, race is made more identifying, more defining of a person than anything that individual can do. Through our point of view in reading Maus, we come to know and care about the mice as individuals. We stop seeing them as a group of anonymous mice. We never, however, see the nazi cats as anything other than anonymous, terrible cats. We never see them as individuals, also struggling with the events of the time. By turning things around, perhaps we can understand a little better how the cats never come to see the mice as anything more than anonymous mice.
There is also the effect that people have for finding more sympathy in mistreated animals than people. Commercials on TV for the ASPCA and Humane Society tend to hit harder than commercials about kids in Africa. Logically it doesn't make sense but emotionally the phenomenon does exist. Other books and movies like Watership Down and Plague Dogs have used this technique to draw in the audience.
ReplyDelete