How Does Art Spiegelman Use Animal Symbolism In Maus

In his graphic novel, Maus, Art Spiegelman uses animal symbolism to convey different messages. The novel is the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a survivor of Nazism and his son. The novel uses cartoons to tell stories about the horrors of Nazi Germany. Spiegelman represents Germans as menacing cats, the Jews as mice and the Poles as pigs. Through animal symbolism, he manages to draw his audience closer to the Holocaust. It is a novel of survival that is woven into arty Spiegelman’s tortured relationship with Vladek. Animal symbolism enables the author to retell one of the history’s most grueling story.
The characters and art in Maus reveal several forms of symbolism. Depicting Jews as mice and the Germans as cats are not surprising at all. Cats …show more content…
He achieves this by driving the three social groups and races into animal groups. By portraying Jews as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs, Spiegelman allows the reader to view this racial groups through animal characteristics. It also enables him to reveal a type of genocide between the three races. It is important to note that0 Hitler and his Nazi supporters classed different races from the superior Germans to the inferior Jews. Spiegelman captures this categorization aptly in his book by using animal symbolism. The Germans viewed Jews as racially inferior to them, which makes the choice of his animal characters significant to the plot of the story (Spieß 91). By representing Jews as mice and Germans as cats, Spiegelman draws similarities to the popular television cartoons Tom and Jerry. Tom is a cat, while Jerry is a mouse. In the cartoon series, Tom hunts and terrorizes Jerry because he is strong while Jerry is weak. In reality, the Germans and Jews were engaged in a type of cat and mouse game during the Second World War because the Germans were hunting and killing Jews just like the relationship between a cat and mouse in real life. In most cases, the cat is always angry, menacing, and violent, and reveal their fierceness by showing their sharp teeth and vicious look. Conversely, the mouse is friendly, soft, innocent, and vulnerable. This relationship captures the emotional feature of …show more content…
In this second part, the meaning of the animal characters takes a different perspective than just the racial meanings associated with the different animal characters. Although Jews were labelled as mice, they led a normal life because they drove cars, walked upright, and wore clothes (Spieß 51). This shows that everything about them is human despite being viewed and treated like mice. They have human looks and characteristics despite having animal heads. Everything about the Jews is normal, which symbolizes their interaction with other races. By giving his characters human traits except for their heads, Spiegelman succeeds in conveying the theme of racism that was evident in Nazi Germany. This reveals Spiegelman’s second thoughts on whether to assign animal characteristics to certain races, but he continues with his initial strategy of using animal traits to convey the social interactions between the different races (Berger 40). By placing his characters in animal masks, Spiegelman conveys the message that nationality and race are just superficial characterizations created by the mind just to alienate others. The central message is that despite the different physical characteristics, we are all humans inside. Through this, the readers can relate to the pain and suffering experienced by the Jews under Nazi rule because they