Mask Up: Identity Performance in Art Spiegelman's Maus

Essais vol. 11 no. 1 | Spring 2021

Drake Hansen

Mask Up: Identity Performance in Art Spiegelman’s Maus

Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, Maus, retells a father’s experience of the Holocaust and its effects on his life and his relationship with his son—the author and artist—through a cartoon reality in which every German is an identical cat and every Jew is an identical mouse. Upon first encountering the book, I thought Maus’s use of this metaphor argued that its depicted cultural groups—and cul-tural groups in general—are essentially different, which seems like an unlikely claim for a book about the horrors of the Ho-locaust. Though it quickly became clear that this is not the case, I could see that Spiegelman was not taking the trite, ‘ev-eryone is essentially equal’ route either. As the visuals are developed and complicated through the book, it becomes clear that Maus takes the metaphor of cultural groups as distinct animals and continually pushes against it to argue that identi-ty, particularly racial and ethnic identity, is performed based on stereotype and assumption.

Strikingly, there is a dearth of scholarship on Maus’s animal metaphor as an articulation of identity. Especially in light of the contemporary relevance of these questions, it seems a glaring oversight. Investigating the arguments of this text is of particular value because the performativity demonstrated in

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Maus supports a more nuanced understanding of human iden-tity than seems to be espoused in neoliberal ideals, and, more immediately, because it points to a broader and more empirical understanding of cultural theorist Judith Butler’s original formulation of performativity.

After describing the origins of Maus’s visual metaphors, I will outline the theories of performativity and identity which ground and expand Butler’s argument for gender as perfor-mance to include race, ethnicity, religion, culture, etc., as performances. Using this framing, I will read various passages from Maus where characters confront the limitations of identi-ty, focusing on Spiegelman’s use of masks to indicate characters performing alternate identities.

1. Historical and Theoretical Context

1.1 Comics and Identity Depiction The animal metaphors in Maus build upon a long tradition

of metaphors, especially in propaganda of the 1930s and 40s. Cartoon animals may have been specifically appealing to pro-pagandists because of their perceived innocence. In the 1930s, “the use of comic strips for political purposes was not unusual, despite the widespread belief that comics only represented the status quo in a way that was simplistic and lacking nuance” (Ribbens 9). The language and imagery which radicalized the German populace in the lead-up to World War II commonly equated Jewish people with rats and mice, framing them as the infestation ruining and preventing imagined ‘Aryan purity.’ In an interview, Spiegelman himself stated, “I didn’t make up these metaphors, the Nazis did” (Weschler 7). It is this direct link to the history of the Holocaust which makes the visuals of Maus particularly potent.

And yet, as Andrew Loman reports, the animal metaphors actually predate the Nazis: “the images of Jews as vermin that Hitler’s regime promulgated drew on the same kinds of sym-bolism that American animators used in the 1930s” (567). Continuity between American cartoons and Nazi propaganda is significant beyond mere genealogy since the power relations

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between different animal characters “may allegorize particular-ly American race relations” (552). These images in American popular culture developed out of racist entertainment, indicat-ing that the use of animals may have, essentially, always been about human identitarian relations, priming itself for uptake by Nazi propagandists.

With or without animals, comics were seen as unserious, and so were easy to take at face value. Kees Ribbens indicates how dangerous this perception can be during his investigation of the depictions of people of different races, ethnicities, and nationalities in a comic strip that ran in a Dutch Nazi maga-zine. Though this strip contained human figures, it presented Nazi racial ideology as, in it, “Jews are represented as ‘the other,’ and singled out as a group with distinctive physical character-istics, regardless of their Dutch, American, British, or Russian nationality” (Ribbens 12). He explains that the separation:

occurs first through references to physiognomy in particular, the continuous, highly racialized display of specific physical characteristics, and secondly by constantly stressing their purported negative qualities, actions and attitudes. (12)

By exploring a similarly racialized space sympathetically and in the long-form, Maus is able to reveal the comprehensive failings of this kind of racist caricaturization.

In an interview with Art Spiegelman on the publication of the first Polish-language edition of Maus, Lawrence Weschler explains that the fifteen-year delay in publication resulted from publishers’ fear of producing a book which depicts Polish people as pigs. Spiegelman defends his choice of animal with the rea-soning that “in the American cartoon tradition, pigs simply don’t carry any particular negative connotation” (Weschler 7), but notes the religious connection that pigs “weren’t kosher” (7). Combined with the racial history of these kinds of de-pictions, Spiegelman’s comments highlight the abundance of potential interpretations. Of the animal metaphors, Spiegelman says, “I was just trying to explore them, to take them serious-

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ly, to unravel and deconstruct them” (7), and that “if Maus is about anything . . . it’s a critique of the limitations . . . of the caricaturizing impulse” (8). Spiegelman’s focus on this impulse, and its use in the history of the Holocaust, validates my use of Maus as a space to explore identity, especially as this critique extends beyond the book’s art style and into its characters and their interactions and depictions.

1.2 Identity Contemporary theorizations of identity are deeply indebt-

ed to Judith Butler’s work on the performativity of gender. Minelle Mahtani writes that “Butler asserts that gender is constructed through various performances, suggesting that some performances can, in fact, challenge gender” (426). Though Butler wrote exclusively on gender performance, the theory may be generalized to encompass a much wider array of identity categories. In her study of the experiences of self- identified mixed-race women, Mahtani indicates that “racialized categories, like gendered categories, may also be viewed as regulatory fictions that can be produced through varied perfor-mances among ‘mixed race’ women” (428). By combining her conclusions with Vladek’s recounted experiences of performing a non-Jewish Polish identity in his attempts to avoid capture by Nazis, an interpretation of racialized identities in general as per-formative becomes possible.

Additionally, as Mahtani demonstrates with her in-terviews, using recounted narratives such as Vladek’s story in Maus provides practical evidence for Butler’s articula-tions, which Mahtani notes were predominately theoret-ical (427). She advocates for this kind of grounding, writing that “a more nuanced use of Butler’s model would map out how subjects ‘do’ identity in real time and space, and the role of subjects in that process” (427). Maus, with its detailed—though, of course, still authored—account of a life which in-cludes the most horrifying identity-driven atrocity in history, filtered through the racializing hand of its animal metaphor, provides ample ground for this kind of exploration.

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The danger of casting identity as performative is that it con-notes an identity free-for-all wherein anyone is free to enact whatever performance they want. This misinterpretation fails to recognize that, in our realities, identity is situated in a web of social relationships. Kristen Renwick Monroe defines identi-ty as “the sense, developed early in childhood, of oneself as both an agent and as a kind of object that is seen, thought about, and liked or disliked by others” (500). Though she doesn’t address it within her paper, I believe her definition may serve to explain group identities as the individual aligns their self with those other selves which observe and ‘like’ (or, at the very least, are like) it. Monroe does acknowledge that both singu-lar and group identities equally defend their legitimacy through narrative, given how commonly “groups of people describe a common past that suggests why they have a collective identity that should be recognized as legitimate by others” (494). As the individual self identifies ‘like’ others, it may identify itself with that common past. We see these patterns play out in the history of the Third Reich constructing their Aryan identity to popu-larize Nazi fascism.

The value of Monroe’s description of identity is that it re-quires both the persuasions of the individual and the reifying gaze of exterior individuals. A danger of describing identity in terms of performance is that it seems to suggest to people that the performance exists at the whims of the individual and is therefore unfounded and unrestricted. It is easy to forget that the stage is crowded. Performance and unfixedness do not mean freedom; each actor is entangled in the web of all the other performances, projecting their expectations of performance on others just as the others’ expectations are projected upon them.

2. Discussion

2.1 Masks in Maus The visual metaphor of masks which characters employ

to conceal their identities, or present alternative identities, is the most blatant argument for performed identity; masks are a symbol of theatre. A mask first appears in Maus when Vladek

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convinces a Polish railway worker to help him get back across the border to Sosnowiec and his family. We see Vladek wearing a pig mask as he narrates that he “didn’t let know [he] was a Jew” (Spiegelman 66; fig. 3). Then, Vladek verbally performs a Polish identity—“You’re a Pole like me”—while present Vladek explains that “the Poles were very bitter on the Germans so it was good to speak bad of them,” but as the conductor hides him from a Nazi inspector, Vladek, now alone, holds the pig mask in his hand, ready to guise himself once more in the per-formance (66; fig. 3). In this first instance of the mask device, Spiegelman depicts how group identity can be performed based on assumptions. Vladek assumes a Polish identity by assuming the “train man” shares what he believes are general Polish feel-ings about Germans. By performing group markers, Vladek is able to conceal his Jewish identity.

This system of cartoon animals and cartoon animal masks is a “potentially dangerous” narrative device (McGlothlin 183). Ribbens’ report of a racist comic strip sounds as if it could be describing Maus when he states that “the homogeneity of Jews as a group is emphasized” (12). With practically identi-cal animal heads, Jewish characters—and members of the text’s other national, racial, or cultural groups—can only be distin-guished from one another by clothing, dialogue, and other context clues. This phenomenon follows the claim that “just as racists will often complain that members of other ethnic groups all look alike to them, human eyes often perceive indi-vidual members of other species as indistinguishable from one another” (De Angelis 232). Thus, this problematic metaphor reflects problematic tendencies in human life and interaction which stem from, according to Monroe, “an innate drive to cat-egorize” (503). While the clear separation in Maus may present problematic implications to its readers, the narrative’s charac-ters maintain their distinctions.

Maus demonstrates this categorizing drive through its animal renderings. Spiegelman’s categories center around the Jewish mice and the German cats with major appearances by the Polish pigs and the American dogs, creating a general

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play on cartoon animal hierarchies. Toward the end of volume two, this list expands to include Swedish reindeer, British fish, and a Roma butterfly (Spiegelman 285, 291, 293; fig. 1). Yet these renderings could be reductive. Spiegelman reckons with a specific danger of composing Maus within the text as he depicts himself worrying that his father can be “just like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew” (133). By calling these similarities out, Spiegelman, in many ways, defeats potential misinterpretation, but perpetuating racist stereotypes of any kind can have knock-on effects. Julia Roos, chronicling anti-Black racism in early Weimar Germany, reports that “histo-rians have pointed to the fateful continuities between the early 1920s campaign against France’s African occupation troops and Nazi racial policies” (73). Discriminatory categorizations can rapidly exacerbate existing identitarian tensions.

One of the earliest instances of conflict over identity and distinction occurs toward the end of volume one’s second chapter (henceforth, I’ll refer to chapters in the manner of I.2). As ten-sions rise in Poland, Anja, Spiegelman’s mother, complains that “when it comes to Jews, the Poles don’t need much stirring up!” (Spiegelman 39; fig. 2). This blanket statement offends the Polish governess, who responds, “I think of you as part of my own family!” prompting Anja to specify, “I didn’t mean you!” (39; fig. 2). This interaction seems to echo the reactionary “not all ____!” response that commonly follows after one’s identi-ty group being called out for bad behavior. The conflict in this scene seems to be one of misalignment in how Anja and the governess identify each other. Monroe explains that “there is an inherent reciprocal aspect to our human natures because of the psychological need for boundaries and the linguistic need for categorization” (504). Our identities exist in relation to those around us. Presumably due to proximity, Anja no longer categorizes the governess as her version of “Polish” while the governess, to herself still very much Polish, categorizes Anja as “family.” Thus, Anja’s rebuke illuminates their disagreement which, by Monroe’s construction, is a threat to both characters’ identities. Notably, despite her earlier protests, the governess

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later refuses to harbor Vladek and Anja as they try to hide from the Nazis (Spiegelman 138). Together, these events suggest that the governess’s Polish identity outweighs her purported familial identification with the Spiegelmans.

As the situation worsens in Poland, masks appear more frequently. In I.6, as Vladek and Anja sneak back into Sosnow-iec after escaping the ghetto in Srodula, Spiegelman expands his visual exploration of identity. Present Vladek explains, “I was a little safe. I had a coat and boots, so like a Gestapo wore when he was not in service. But Anja—her appearance—you could see more easy she was Jewish” (Spiegelman 138; fig. 4). This description accompanies a panel where the couple walks down a darkened street in their pig masks, but Anja’s mouse tail is visible under her skirt. Both are depicted as perform-ing a Polish identity, but something about Anja “looks” Jewish, rendered here as a tail. Anja’s flawed performance is called out from across the street by “an old witch” (139), and shortly after, Vladek himself is recognized as a Jew by a fellow Polish- performing Jew (140; fig. 5). Both are called to their default performances as expected by other actors based on recog-nized phenotypic variations—things which make them appear “Jewish.”

But Spiegelman quickly highlights how these outward char-acteristics are not universal or essential indicators of identity, but rather learned interpretations. Shortly after those recogni-tions, he shows Vladek’s explanation that he would travel into town on a streetcar, always taking the car for Nazis because “the Germans paid no attention,” while “in the Polish car they could smell if a Polish Jew came in” (Spiegelman 142). Despite hating Jews so much, the external distinctions so obvious to the natives of Poland are entirely unclear to the Nazis. The irony of this moment highlights the broader irony of these kinds of racial/ethnic/sectarian conflicts: people believe they are so different that they must kill each other, but that hatred does not require the ability to tell each other apart. This inessentiality demon-strates how “racialized productions, like gendered productions, are culturally constructed, rather than biological, imperatives”

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(Mahtani 428). Vladek’s false performance passes for an audi-ence which ostensibly hates him more but lacks the cultural literacy to detect his errors.

Even in front of the audience which is liable to recognize his lack of authenticity, Vladek is able to maintain his alter-native performance. When a group of Polish children identify him as a Jew and run screaming to their mothers, Vladek, still masked, approaches the mothers and tells them not to worry and that he’s not a Jew (Spiegelman 151; fig. 6). The Polish mothers accept his statement and laugh the incident off as kids being kids. Beyond highlighting how, with familiarity, inau-thentic identity can be performed to members of the in-group, the rapid assumption of his identity by the children demon-strates how quickly individuals are taught to recognize and police others’ performances. This early in their upbringing and encul-turation, the children already have basic training in performing, assigning, and assuming identities.

Vladek’s recounted experiences substantiate Mahtani’s claims beyond the scope of her subjects. Mahtani’s study led her to claim “some women of ‘mixed race’ challenge and contest racialized labels by putting into practice a varied set of racialized performances” (425). Though the much more openly transitory spaces occupied by “mixed-race” individuals allows for a greater range of performances, Vladek’s testimony suggests that more outwardly categorizable people are simi-larly capable of performing alternate identities. Interestingly, Ribbens finds this same observation in Beekman’s racist comic strip, explaining that:

By showing how some ‘obvious’ Jewish figures have managed to avoid the new measure [the yellow star] by ‘posturing’ as non-Jews, Beekman emphasizes their pur-portedly dubious credentials, their disloyalty towards the authorities, and their opportunistic haggling with identities. (13)

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The deliberate inauthentic identity performance which is pre-sented as an unquestioned survival strategy in Maus is used to support Beekman’s anti-Semitism. Performativity undermines racists’ self-aggrandizing hierarchical worldview. This world-view is flawed because “race is actively performed and mas-queraded among participants, rendering it ephemeral, such that racial categories are subtly, and not so subtly, displaced and disrupted” (Mahtani 428). Mahtani’s findings combined with Spiegelman’s account and Beekman’s racist fears suggest that these “participants” are anyone who exists in a racialized system.

2.2 Masks in II.2 The mask metaphor is taken to its extreme in the meta-tex-

tual first section of II.2. Here, we are confronted with a new Art Spiegelman, a human wearing a mouse/Maus mask, wres-tling with the guilt and emotional toll of producing such a suc-cessful work on the backbone of one of the most significant human atrocities as he’s hounded by interviewers and business-men trying to get something out of him (Spiegelman 202; fig. 7). Erin McGlothlin explains that “the wearing of the mask, which places Art both inside and outside of the representation-al framework that governs the rest of Maus, prevents him from assuming a quasi-transcendent, autonomous authorial identi-ty” (183). Placing animal masks of the same style as the animal characters in the story’s other temporal levels on human bodies forces Maus’s readers to reassess its titular metaphoric logic while furthering its depictions of performance.

Though McGlothlin claims “there are crucial differenc-es between the two uses of the mask” (196), her claim relies on an essential existential dichotomy between human and animal where animal-assuming-animal exists within the book’s meta-phor, but human-assuming-animal does not. This assumption is flawed because it requires affixing unfounded social classifica-tions to non-human animals. As Richard De Angelis explains, “the common human perception of animals is also essentially a racist one” (238). These new visuals are an expansion on, not a rebuke of, the visual metaphors that have preceded them.

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Additionally, McGlothlin’s claim fails to acknowledge that those hounding this Spiegelman are also humans masked as animals, evidently aligned with the book’s categories—an American interviewer in a dog mask, a German interviewer in a cat mask, a Jewish interviewer in a mouse mask, and an Amer-ican businessman in a bulldog mask (Spiegelman 202; fig. 7). The visual of humans in animal masks drives home the idea of performed identity, especially as performed for popular media. There is clearly a complex individual under each of the masks, but they are putting on a face for the camera—whether liter-ally or figuratively—and performing that assumed identity; the ostensibly German reporter asks Art why young Germans should feel guilty about the Holocaust and the Jewish in-terviewer presses Art about Israeli Jews (202; fig. 7). Art himself, by hiding behind a mask, seems to be experiencing some kind of imposter syndrome, or some feeling that his per-formed identity is disingenuous, perhaps as a Jew, or perhaps as the person expected to be “the Author of Maus.” The visual claustrophobia throughout this section, shown through Art shrinking into a child (202; fig. 7), shows how restrictive human performativity is. Our “performances take place in constrained places, the vigilant racial border guards constantly on patrol” (Mahtani 436). Though it’s just a facade, the crowd acts to keep anyone from breaking it.

3. Conclusion Maus revolves around an incredibly simple graphic met-

aphor which it continually calls into question as it navigates the abundant complexities of human identity. Portraying ethnic and national groups as identical simple animal forms is a clear representation of the way the human brain rapidly organizes and categorizes the overwhelming amount of information it is constantly inundated with. It’s such an incredible power, but it has tragic consequences. The animal characters are not an expla-nation of how the world is but a visualization of how we divide and categorize the world.

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In a time when questions of human identity are central in popular discourse, and reactionary forces have bolstered rising tides of nationalism and fascism across our planet, stories of the Holocaust are uncomfortably salient. Maus, in particular, offers a valuable framework for interpreting these phenomena: Characters mask themselves in some new and/or alternate iden-tity. The personal account that this story comes from carries numerous instances of grounded performance which validate Judith Butler’s theorizations for identities beyond gender. As Maus’s characters move through and reflect on the horrors of the Holocaust, donning and doffing masks, it becomes clear that human identity is performed for an encompassing and op-pressive audience. The better we articulate the underpinnings of self and group identity, the better equipped we can be to pre-serve, protect, and defend those identities most at risk.

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Figures

Fig. 1. Panels from Maus showing other animal identities. British fish (Spiegelman 291), Swedish reindeer (285), and a Roma butterfly (293). The fish are identified as British by the Union Flag flying on their vehicle.

Fig. 2. Identity conflict between Anja and the governess (Spiegelman 39)

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Fig. 3. The first appearance of a mask in Maus (Spiegelman 66)

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Fig. 4. Anja’s tail and rejection by the governess (Spiegelman 138)

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Fig. 5. A masked Vladek is recognized (Spiegelman 140).

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Fig. 6. A masked Vladek is recognized by Polish children, but performs Polishness for their mothers (Spiegelman 151).

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Fig. 7. A masked Art Spiegelman is surrounded by masked human reporters and bussinessmen and shrinks into a child (Spiegelman 202).

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Works Cited De Angelis, Richard. “Of Mice and Vermin: Animals as

Absent Referent in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 7, no.1, 2005, pp. 230-49.

Loman, Andrew. “‘Well Intended Liberal Slop’: Allegories of Race in Spiegelman’s Maus.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 40, no. 3, 2006, pp. 551-71. JSTOR.

Mahtani, Minelle. “Tricking the Border Guards: Performing Race.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 20, no. 4, 2002, pp. 425-40. SAGE Journals.

McGlothlin, Erin. “No Time Like the Present: Narrative and Time in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” Narrative, vol. 11, no. 2, 2003, pp. 177-98. JSTOR.

Monroe, Kristen Renwick. “Morality and a Sense of Self: The Importance of Identity and Categorization for Moral Action.” American Journal of Political Science, vol. 45, no. 3, 2001, pp. 491-507. JSTOR.

Ribbens, Kees. “Picturing Anti-Semitism in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands: Anti-Jewish Stereotyping in a Racist Sec-ond World War Comic Strip,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, 2018, pp. 8-23. Taylor & Francis Online.

Roos, Julia. “Nationalism, Racism and Propaganda in Ear-ly Weimar Germany: Contradictions in the Campaign against the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’,” German History, vol. 30, no. 1, 2012, pp. 45-74. Oxford Academic.

Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. Pantheon Books, 1996.Weschler, Lawrence. “Pig Perplex,” Lingua Franca: The Review

of Academic Life, vol. 11, no. 5, 2001, pp. 6-8. EBSCOhost.

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