English essay responding to the question "how does Maus by art spiegelman explore the global issue of human rights?"
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Course
IB english language and literature
Institution
2
Book
The Complete MAUS
Essay for IB english language and literature HL with a grade of 9/10 answering the question "How does MAUS by art spiegelman explore the global issue of human rights"?
How Does "Maus" by Art Spiegelman Explore the Global Issue of Human Rights?
Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity,
language, religion, or any other status. These include the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery
and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more. The
graphic novel “Maus” by Art Spiegelman illustrates Spiegelman’s father experiences as a Polish Jew
during the holocaust in a frame-tale timeline, applying post-modernist techniques, such as an allegory,
in which the Nazis are represented as cats while Jews are represented as mice. This graphic novel
explores the global issue of human rights showing not only in the narration, but also in a number of
visual metaphors, how the Nazis dehumanized Jews, taking away the human rights that we take for
granted, including the right of life, just because of their religion.
Nowadays it is widely known that Nazism supported theories of racial hierarchy, where they identified
Germans as what the Nazis considered the “master race” or the “Aryans”; while Jews, people of color,
Slavs and Romanis, between others, were located at the bottom of the racial scale, identified as
subhumans. These racial hierarchy in which the Nazis believed led to their desire to exterminate this
“subhumans” in order to maintain the “purity and strength” of the Aryan race. As the son of a holocaust
survivor, Art Spiegelman was able to write the novel based not from history books but from the personal
experience of his father, Vladek, which, on the one hand, led the reader to feel a more intimate
connection, but, on the other hand, it meant that the story is full of gaps and is not history but historical
fiction. Many people can argue that what made this memoir stand out from others is the visual
metaphors by which Art Spiegelman is able to express the situations of extreme objectification,
dehumanization and violence that governed during this time in history in a more impressive fashion.
Spiegelman introduces the concepts of dehumanization, the taking away of human rights that Jewish
people had to suffer by visual metaphors that impact and draw the reader’s attention. An example of
this is the allegory of cats and mice, which is, indeed, the most noticeable aspect of the graphic novel.
This narrative choice of using animal species to represent races and nationalities had the aim of
introducing the concept of resignification, the process by which the Nazis turned Judaism, a religion, into
a race that, according to them, should not even have the right to live. The concept of alienation is
presented through flaws in his allegory, which we can see, for example, in page 64, where Vladek hides
his identity as a mouse, a Jew, by using a mask of a pig, a pole. This is relevant because Vladek was a
Jewish pole, but the Nazis stripped away his nationality because of his ethnic identity, which in this time
in history, had more weight and defined whether someone had the right to live or not. Moreover, the
fact that he had to hide his ethnic identity in order to survive is a clear example of how human rights
were taken away from Jewish people, who were discriminated, tortured, and killed due to their religion,
lacking any right to life, freedom of expression and opinion, and freedom from torture, between many
others.
Spiegelman uses the image-text structure to explain the process by which Jewish rights were removed
gradually; and the impact that these removal had in the life of Jewish families. An example of this is the
appearance of the swastika, which is seen in page 32, along with a noticeable shading applied to express
the concern of Jewish people, their uncertainty as to what would happen next, and, as an element of
foreshadowing. The timeline narrative in which the story is told makes it easier for the reader to identify
the gradual systematic change, for example comparing page 65, where a scene of verbal violence and
public humiliation against Jews is being told, and the first laws for restriction were being applied; to
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