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Perspectives in Maus

Art Spiegelman’s Maus creates and inspires a web of perspective that lends itself perfectly to new historicist interpretation.  The book is as much, perhaps more, about the interaction and disparateness of these perspectives as it is about the German invasion of Poland.

At the center of this web is Vladek Spiegelman’s experience in Poland during World War II. Beyond that, lies his retelling of them almost fifty years later and his relationships with Mala and Art.  Further out lays Art’s relationship with his father, his mother, and his step-mother; his own interpretation and retelling of Vladek’s story; and the cultural assumptions of the time of his retelling.  The final spiral of the web is the reader’s thoughts about World War II, Jews, Vladek, and Art.

Art takes great pains to make sure that the reader is conscious of these layers and interactions, barely allowing a page to go by that does not include some switch in perspective, be it from Art’s version of his father’s tale to Vladek’s narration or from Art’s interaction with Mala to his search for his mother’s memory.  As an author, Art is playing with the interaction of the various relationships and points of view to expose the cultural perspective of the reader (“New Historicism”).

A new historicist will look at the cultural and historical forces surround each of these perspectives to make assumptions about the political, social, and economical worlds that created them.  In the case of Maus, Art Spiegelman provides at least four distinct social worlds: that of pre-World War II Poles, Jewish people during World War II, post-World War II New York City Jewish immigrants, and first-generation Americans.  He plays very neatly upon each successive perspective’s view upon its predecessors in depicting his own fascination in his parents’ history and contrasting it with his distance from his father.

A new historical reading of Maus allows for the amassing of political and social assumptions that span fifty years.

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