Authors seem to enjoy making use of the image of shadows in eerie litereature such as Holocaust literature. Like Cynthis Ozick who, in her short story The Shawl, characterizes a German soldier as a dark, fearful shadow, Art Spiegelman makes use of the same imagery in his graphic novel Maus. In Maus, when Spiegelman illustrates the Nazis' massacre of the Jews, he masks all of the Nazi faces with shadow. Therefore, the reader does not see a man, or cat, but a soulless figure similar to the grim reaper or some demonic figure that has come to reap souls. By hiding their faces in such a way, Spiegelman also makes all the Nazis look like one entity, with no deviation in personality. They are all agents of death without pity of humanity. The reader feels rather afraid of this faceless creature, being perhaps more afraid of this mysterious face than a familiar face of hatred or anger. Spiegelman conceals the Nazis' faces once more when he illustrates a dark Nazi figure standing guard by four hanged Jews.
It is interesting to see the agonized, terrorized faces of the Jewish mice in these two images of death and horror. They contrast with the mysteriousness of the Nazi faces. Here, the reader has both a sense of unspeakable, undescribable evil in the unseen faces of the Nazi cats and unspeakable, undescribable horror and suffering from the the horrendous expressions of the faces of the Jewish mice.
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While, Spiegelman does conceal the Nazis in shadows to cause them to seem more menacing and less human compared to the Jewish mice, he also compares the Nazis to other Germans. On page 50 Spiegelman presents a German medic that, unlike the bulky Nazis concealed in shadows, is a bright figure. The contrast promotes that not all Germans that were part of WW2 are guilty and that there is a middle ground between the evil Nazis and the suffering Jews. Dark colors such as black are seen as evil (black cats, night, dark alleys) and because of this fact authors will always use them to signify evil or contrast between two characters. The use of shadows is a less direct form of portraying someone as evil, but it is much more effective than blatantly saying: "the evil Nazis...". Using shadow imagery is a logical tool in an author's belt to illustrate evil to the reader.
ReplyDeleteI also found Spiegelman's shading in illustrations very interesting. At the start of Chapter 4, titled "The Noose Tightens", the mice are all shaded in dark grey. Only the ropes of the nooses and the star that one mouse wears on his coat are white. This choice to make the ropes and star white highlights and connects the two items, and powerfully demonstrates the correlation between Jews and gruesome, imminent death during the Holocaust. Spiegelman's shading choices often emphasize and bring attention to certain aspects and themes of the novel that Spiegelman finds important.
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