Analytical Essay on Maus: My Father Bleeds History
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Maus
This is an analytical essay on Maus: My Father Bleeds History, by Art Spiegelman. It focuses on how Spiegelman subverts generic conventions to portray certain ideas.
HOW DOES MAUS MANIPULATE GENERIC CONVENTIONS TO REPRESENT IDEAS?
Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1980) is a memoir written in graphic novel form that
tells the story of the author’s father, Vladek during the Holocaust. The author subverts the graphic
novel conventions by structuring Maus in an interview-like format, allowing contemporary readers
to see how Spiegelman struggles to understand his mother’s suicide and establish the relationship
with his father that he never had. The memoir also communicates ideas of the link between past
and present, the psychological impacts of the Holocaust on the first and intergenerational
survivors and issues of racism. Spiegelman does this by manipulating anthropomorphism, floating
images, comic and shading and cross-hatching. In this way, Spiegelman constructs a text that
confronts the audience interested in the history of the Holocaust, as well as explore his
dysfunctional relationship with his father.
Spiegelman subverts the graphic novel genre, through the manipulation of anthropomorphism and
floating images to communicate the link between the past and the present. Through this,
Spiegelman breaks graphic novel conventions, which are chronological and depict humans in
cartoon form, whereas Maus between the past and present, and represents humans with cartoon
animals. On page 43, Spiegelman draws two cats looming over a mouse. The cats’ eyes are
drawn as slits, while their faces are dark and menacing. Their positioning over the mouse also
portrays their dominance, antagonistic traits and anti-Semitic attitude, as well as reinforcing the
Jews’ place, as pests, in the social hierarchy. By using cartoon depictions of animals, he presents
the Jews as mice, who are symbolically timid and yet, clever while the cats are the Nazis, who are
predators and toy with their victims, before killing them. Furthermore, gutters are used to portray a
change in time; gutters meaning the past, while floating images meaning the present. However, on
page 85, Vladek is telling his story, but Spiegelman draws a floating image to show the Jews who
were hung by the Nazis, the image bleeding out of the panels. This represents how, even though
the largely confronting event was in the past, it still haunts Vladek in the present. The gutters, or
lack there-of, connects the past and present, to show how the Holocaust was a traumatic event
and its psychological impacts on its victims years after. The impact it had on Vladek also affects
his relationship with Art, who feels guilty for simply existing. By doing this, Spiegelman breaks the
traditional stereotype of graphic novels being light-hearted, as he shows the horrors the Jews
faced in World War II. Anthropomorphism is also used to create a psychic distant between the
contemporary audience and the story to make the content less-confronting, as it softens the
brutality of the Holocaust, which can be difficult for some of the adult audience, so he consistently
engages with them.
By including the comic, ‘Hell’s Planet’ in the graphic novel, Spiegelman further subverts graphic
novel conventions as they are normally linear and single narrative, communicating the idea of
psychological impacts on first- and second-generation survivors. On page 102, he implements the
comic into the novel and depicts the characters as humans. He breaks away from his
anthropomorphistic style to achieve the opposite purpose; allow the readers to connect with
himself and be confronted by the persecution. He constructs this hybrid to portray his depression
and psychological trauma, which is a result of his mother, Anja’s suicide and dysfunctional
relationship with his father. The comic is also darker and more detailed, representing how this
narrative stands out in Spiegelman’s own life, and intergenerational guilt, as he blames himself for
his mother’s death. The sinister tone conveyed through the comic further highlights the dark,
dispiriting and hopeless thoughts that haunted Art in this period of time, especially after he had just
gotten out of the mental hospital. By drawing himself in a striped, jail-type uniform with gaunt,
hollow cheeks and eyes, Spiegelman further paints himself as the perpetrator of the crime and
allows readers to see his destructive mental state. This highlights his psychological vulnerability
and readers can see Art’s overwhelming thoughts that threaten to drown him, allowing them to
sympathise with him. This comic emphasises the impact of Anja’s suicide on Art and his father,
allowing the audience another perspective into how Art and Vladek are the way they are. Its shows
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