Who Tightened the Umbilical Cord? A Gendered Reconstruction of Anja’s Identity in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the retrieval of the figure of the mother in Art Spiegelman’s graphic narrative Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1980-1991), and its intertextual connection to the comic strip “Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History”, formerly written in 1972, from the perspective of Trauma Studies. Although Maus supposes an attempt to recover the lost testimony of Anja, it turns also a gendered construction of Anja’s identity, reducing her to her role as mother. This reflects the dominant male approach to the Holocaust experience that persists not only in aesthetic works, but also in empirical evidence such as photographs, perpetuating stereotypes across time.