The Silence of the Mothers: Art Spiegelman's Maus and Philippe Claudel's Brodeck

ABSTRACT

The present article offers a comparative reading of Spiegelman's Maus (1980–1991) and Claudel's Brodeck [Le Rapport de Brodeck] (2007). Separated by their formal differences and autobiographical/fictional contingencies, the two narratives are united by their postmodern aura. They also appear to promulgate the well-documented marginalization of the feminine perspective in Holocaust literature. I argue, however, that Maus and Brodeck simultaneously embrace and challenge the tradition of Holocaust writing that privileges the male perspective and reduces women to the stereotype of helplessness and silent domesticity. They achieve this by foregrounding the liminalization of women's experience of Nazi persecution and relating the distinctiveness of Jewish women's ordeal to their sexuality, and in particular to their roles as child bearers and main child carers. Additionally, Claudel's and Spiegelman's engagement with canonical texts of European culture (e.g. the myths of Philomela or Orpheus and Euridice) points to the entrenchment of gender stereotypes which ultimately contributed to the sexism of Nazi policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust
• women
• motherhood
• Art Spiegelman
• Philippe Claudel

Acknowledgement

I wish to express my gratitude to Prof. Martin Cloonan of the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) for making it possible for me to present the original version of this article at a conference. I would also like to thank the two anonymous readers for their thorough engagement with my work, judicious comments, and recommendation of additional readings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Helena Duffy (MSt Oxon, PhD Oxford Brookes) is Collegium Researcher at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies in Finland, where she is completing a monograph on literary representations of Jewish mothers during the Holocaust and where she lectures French and Comparative Literature. She is also coordinator of an international study circle operating under the auspices of the Nordic Summer University and dedicated to narrativizations of violence. Prior to her present appointment, Duffy was Teaching Fellow in French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she also held the highly prestigious Marie Curie Research Fellowship. Duffy had taught French language and culture at other UK universities (Hull, Oxford Brookes), and in Australia (University of Queensland, University of New England), Poland (University of Wrocław) and France (Clermont-Ferrand). She is the author of a recently published monograph, World War II in Andreï Makine's Historiographic Metafiction (Brill, 2018) and of more than forty journal articles, book chapters, essays and book reviews. Her publications have appeared in French Studies, French Forum, FMLS, Modern and Contemporary France, and Holocaust Studies. Her second monograph, Inventing the Infranovel: The Aesthetics, Ethics and Politics of Holocaust Representation in Postmodern French Fiction, is to be published next year by Legenda. Among her other forthcoming publications is a chapter on Antoine Volodine, to appear later this year in Contemporary Fiction in French (Cambridge UP), and a chapter on François Ozon's film Frantz (2016), included in a collective volume on the French director's work (Edinburgh UP).

ORCID

Helena Duffy http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6047-9952

Notes

1 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 21.

2 Ringelblum was a social historian and founder of the group Oneg Shabbat dedicated to documenting the life in the Warsaw ghetto. He initiated the ghetto archives within a month of the German invasion of Poland. Emanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: Journal of Emanuel Ringelblum, ed. and trans. Jacob Sloan (New York: Shocken, 1974), pp. 273–74.

3 Myrna Goldenberg, “Different Horrors, Same Hell: Women Remembering the Holocaust,” in Roger S. Gotlieb (ed.), Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 150–66 (p. 163).

4 Joan Ringelheim, “The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust,” in Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (eds.), The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 169–77 (pp. 169–70).

5 Sara R. Horowitz, “Gender, Genocide, and Jewish Memory,” Prooftexts, vol. 20 no. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 2000): pp. 159–90 (p. 159).

6 Ronit Lentin, “Expected to Live: Women Shoah Survivors’ Testimonials of Silence,” Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 22, no. 6 (2000): pp. 689–700 (p. 693).

7 Lawrence L. Langer, “Gendered Suffering? Women in Holocaust Testimonies,” in Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (eds.), Women in the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 351–363 (p. 362).

8 Quoted by Zoë Waxman, Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 4–5.

9 Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Auschwitz and the Professors,” Commentary, vol. 105–106 (June 1998): pp. 42–6. Quoted by Waxman, p. 5.

10 Joan Ringelheim, “The Split between Gender and the Holocaust,” in Ofer and Weitzman, pp. 340–50 (p. 345).

11 Joan Ringelheim, “Thoughts about Women and the Holocaust,” in Gotlieb (ed.), Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust pp. 150–66; Robin Ruth Linden, Making Stories, Making Selves: Feminist Reflections on the Holocaust (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993); Brana Gurewitsch (ed.), Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1998); Judith Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998); Esther Hertzog, Life, Death and Sacrifice: Women and Family in the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2008) and “Subjugated Motherhood and the Holocaust,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, vol. 30, no. 1 (2016): pp. 16–34; Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (eds.), Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2010); Ofer and Weitzman; Joan Ringelheim “The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust,” in Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (eds.), The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 169–77; Waxman.

12 For a survey of female-authored Holocaust literature, see Lillian S. Kremer, Women's Holocaust Writings (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). Among other women authors not mentioned by Kremer are Chava Rosenfarb, Valentine Goby, Soazig Aaron, or Colombe Schneck.

13 James Berger, After the End: Representations of the Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 81.

14 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1989).

15 Waxman points out that arriving in a concentration camp accompanied by children or visibly pregnant usually meant instant death, while in some ghettos pregnancy was punishable with deportation. Waxman, pp. 335–36.

16 Hutcheon, A Poetics, p. 20.

17 The question of Maus's generic status is a complex one. Spiegelman himself opposed the classification of his comic book as fiction when he asked for it to be moved from the fiction to non-fiction bestsellers list in Sunday New York Times Book Review. See Michael Kimmelman, “Examining How Maus Evolved,” The New York Times, 27 December 1991, online, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/27/arts/review-art-examining-how-maus-evolved.html. Disregarding authorial intention, critics have often categorised Maus as “graphic novel” rather than “graphic memoir.” Others, such as Alan Berger, have manifested their sensitivity of the novel's ambiguous generic status: “[Maus] is simultaneously an autobiography, a biography, a comic book for adults, a documentary, a novel, and psychological history.” Alan L. Berger, “Bearing Witness: Theological Implications of Second–Generation Literature in America,” in Efraim Sicher (ed.), Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory After Auschwitz (Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 1998) pp. 252–75 (p. 260).

18 Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 2.

19 Among critics who have paid attention to this aspect of Spiegelman's memoir are Victoria A. Elmwood, “‘Happy, Happy Ever After’: The Transformation of Trauma between the Generations in Art Spiegelman's Maus: The Survivor's Tale,” Biography, vol. 27, vol. 4 (Autumn 2004): pp. 691–720; Alison Mandaville, “Tailing Violence: Comics Narrative, Gender and the Father Tale in Art Spiegelman's Maus,” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 44, no. 2 (2009): pp. 216–48; Michael Rothberg, “‘We Were Talking Jewish’: Art Spiegelman's Maus as ‘Holocaust’ Production,” Contemporary Literature, vol. 35, no. 4 (Winter 1994): pp. 661–87; Nancy K. Miller, “Cartoons of the Self: Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Murderer—Art Spiegelman's Maus,” in Deborah R. Geis (ed.), Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's “Survivor's Tale” of the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa, Al: The University of Alabama Press, 2007), pp. 44–59; Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Family and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 33–5.

20 Sara Horowitz, “Women in Holocaust Literature: Engendering Trauma Memory,” in Ofer and Weitzman, pp. 364–78 (p. 367).

21 Since Spiegelman himself insists on the non-fictional character of this text, unlike some scholars, I will be equating the author with the character called Artie/Art/Arthur.

22 Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 276–77.

23 Horowitz, “Women in Holocaust Literature,” p. 367.

24 Ibid., p. 368.

25 Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, p. 160.

26 Ibid., pp. 211–16.

27 Horowitz, “Women in Holocaust Literature,” p. 368.

28 Art Spiegelman, Metamaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus (New York: Pantheon, 2011), pp. 279–88.

29 Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, p. 86.

30 Mandaville, p. 233.

31 Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, p. 213.

32 Ibid., p. 106.

33 Ibid., p. 20.

34 Celia Stopnicka Heller, On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland Between the Two World Wars (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), pp. 143–44; Katarzyna Person, Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto 1940–1943 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014), pp. 10–12. Person notes that for the Jewish intelligentsia that reached adulthood in the interwar period, Polish would have been the principal language. She lists a number of writers of Jewish origins, including Julian Tuwim, Bolesław Leśmian and Antoni Słonimski, who all expressed themselves in Polish and who rarely, if ever, touched on Jewish themes in their work.

35 Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, p. 30. To exonerate at least partially Vladek's paternalistic attitude towards Anja and his constant emphasis on his heroism as husband, Horowitz invokes his sense of guilt proceeding from his inability to protect his child (Horowitz, “Women in Holocaust Literature,” p. 368). However, her argument does not stand up to scrutiny in the light of Vladek's repeated efforts to follow his friend, Ilzecki, and put Richieu up with a Polish family. Rather than Vladek's failure as a father, this episode highlights Anja's overprotectiveness, which is also apparent in her overbearing attitude towards Artie, and explains her postwar depression and ensuing suicide. Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, p. 83.

36 Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, p. 256.

37 Before finally leaving Vladek, Mala states that Anja must have been a saint. Ibid., p. 134.

38 On several occasions, Artie asks his father to stay focused on his story. Also, Vladek requests that certain episodes should not find their way into the book.

39 Michael G. Levine, “Necessary Stains: Spiegelman's Maus and the Bleeding of History,” American Image, vol. 50, no. 3 (2002): pp. 317–41 (p. 326).

40 Ibid., p. 325.

41 Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, p. 161.

42 Ibid., p. 201.

43 Levine, “Necessary Stains,” p. 326.

44 Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, p. 259. Defying his own experience of racial violence, Vladek proves to be anti-Black. He is opposed to his son's giving a lift to a hitchhiker whom he calls using the derogatory Yiddish term “shvartser.”

45 Joan Wallach Scott, Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 172.

46 Hutcheon, A Poetics, p. 5.

47 Ibid., p. XIII.

48 Lawrence Langer, “The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps,” Centerpoint, vol. 4 (Autumn): 222–31 (p. 226).

49 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

50 For an examination and critique of the conception of the liberation of the concentration camps as a happy event that put an end to the deportees’ ordeal, see Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps: The Holocaust and Its Aftermath (London: Yale University Press, 2015).

51 Spiegelman, Metamaus, p. 280, p. 282, p. 283.

52 Philippe Claudel, Le Rapport de Brodeck (Paris: Stock, 2007).

53 Emily Greenhouse, “Interview: Philippe Claudel,” trans. Emily Greenhouse, Granta, vol. 111 (30 June 2010), https://granta.com/interview-philippe-claudel/.

54 Dominick LaCapra has called Spiegelman's idea to bring Auschwitz to the comics as potentially “risky, even foolhardy” and “shockingly inappropriate.” Dominick LaCapra, “Twas the Night before Christmas: Art Spiegelman's Maus,” in History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 139–79 (pp. 139–40). Michael Rothberg, called Maus “potentially obscene.” Michael Rothberg, “‘We Were Talking Jewish,’” p. 141.

55 France Grenaudier-Klijn, “Landscapes Do Not Lie: War, Abjection and Memory in Philippe Claudel's Le Rapport de Brodeck,” Essays in French Literature and Culture, vol. 47 (Nov. 2010): pp. 87–107 (pp. 94–5).

56 Brodeck has also won the Prix des Libraires du Québec (2008), the Prix des Lecteurs-Le Livre de Poche (2009) and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the United Kingdom (2010).

57 Manu Larcenet, Le Rapport de Brodeck. 2 vols (Paris: Dargaud, 2015–2016).

58 Here are some of the articles dedicated to Claudel's novel: Dominique Bonnet, “Étrangeté et étranger dans l’univers de Philippe Claudel,” Carnets: Revue électronique d’études française de l’APEF, vol. 1 (May 2014): pp. 45–57; Dominique Bonnet, “Le Rapport de Brodeck: Sur les traces du récit lacunaire à la manière de Jean Giono,” Çedille, vol. 8 (April 2012): pp. 65–75; Kateřina Drsková, “‘Composer son rien avec un morceau de tout:’ À propos des romans Les Âmes grises et Le Rapport de Brodeck de Philippe Claudel,” Études Romanes de Brno, vol. 31, no. 1 (2012): pp. 189–96; Aurélie Barjonet, “La Troisième Génération devant la Seconde Guerre mondiale: Une situation inédite,” Études romanes de Brno, vol. 3, no. 1 (2012): pp. 39–55; Ivonne Hsieh, “L’Emprise du passé: Crime, châtiment et culpabilité dans la création de Philippe Claudel,” Voix plurielles, vol. 7, no. 2 (November 2010): pp. 2–15; Helena Duffy, “Philippe Claudel's Brodeck as a Parody of the Fable or the Holocaust Universalized,” Holocaust Studies, vol. 24, no. 4 (2018): pp. 503–26.

59 Grenaudier-Klijn has identified the region as Alsace. Grenaudier-Klijn, “Landscapes Do Not Lie,” p. 192.

60 Philippe Claudel, Brodeck, trans. John Cullen (New York: Anchor Books, 2010), p. 228.

61 Claudel, Brodeck, p. 166. Shöner Prinz so lieb/Zu weit fortgegangen [Handsome prince, so dear/Gone too far away].

62 The character's nickname translates as ‘eater of the souls.’

63 Elmwood, p. 712.

64 Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, pp. 94–5.

65 Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 35.

66 Claudel, Brodeck, p. 39.

67 Ibid., p. 56.

68 Ibid., p. 68.

69 Ibid., p. 128.

70 Ibid., p. 193.

71 Yitzhak Zahavy, Archeology, Stamps and Coins of the State of Israel (2009), p. 157.

72 Claudel, Brodeck, p. 193. Emphasis added.

73 Ibid., p. 243.

74 Ibid., p. 164

75 Ibid., p. 165.

76 Ibid., p. 189.

77 Sébastien Hogue, “Oublier ou se souvenir? Culpabilité et mémoire dans Le Rapport de Brodeck de Philippe Claudel,” Masters diss., Université de Laval, 2015, pp. 92–3.

78 Nichola Anne Haxell, “Woman as Lacemaker: The Development of a Literary Stereotype in Texts by Charlotte Brontë, Nerval, Lainé, and Chawaf,” The Modern Language Review, vol. 89, no. 3 (July 1994): pp. 545–60 (p. 546).

79 Ibid., p. 547.

80 Ibid., p. 547.

81 Ibid., p. 547.

82 Lentin, “Expected to Live,” p. 691.

83 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1975).

84 Nancy K. Miller, “Arachnologies: The Woman, the Text and the Critic,” in Nancy K. Miller (ed.), The Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 270–95; Nancy Schor, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory and French Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Susan Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).

85 Claudel, Brodeck, p. 96.

86 Jean-Charles de Laveaux, Nouveau Dictionnaire de la langue française (1820), vol. 1, p. 268.

87 Rothberg, “We Were Talking Jewish,” p. 675.

88 Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, p. 138.

89 Sander Gilman, The Jew's Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 5.

90 Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, p. 139.

91 Quoted in Myrna Goldberg and Amy Shapiro (eds.), Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2013), p. 11.

92 Naomi Mandel, Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), p. 118.

93 Ibid., p. 103.

94 Ibid., p. 104. Mandel refers to Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1997) that recount the author's childhood experience of KL Majdanek and Auschwitz. A year after the book's publication, Wilkomirski was exposed as an impostor and his narrative as elaborate fiction rather than a memoir.

95 Ibid., p. 118.

96 Miller, “Cartoons of the Self,” p. 109.

97 Levine, “Expected to Live,” p. 324.

98 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p. 64.

99 Miller, “Arachnologies,” p. 272.

100 A simple weaver, Arachne engages in a contest with Athena. In contrast to the Goddess's “classically theocentric” tapestry that testifies to her “phallic identification with Olympian authority,” Arachne retells stories of seduction and betrayal, featuring women such as Leda, Europa, Anthiope and Medusa. Enraged, Athena beats Arachne on the head with the shuttle, and, ultimately, after Arachne's suicide, turns her into a spider. Miller, “Arachnologies,” p. 273.

101 Coincidentally, Philomela is transformed into a nightingale, a detail that may have inspired Claudel's recourse to the trope of the bird in Emélia's story.

102 See, for example, Cixous's call for women to make their bodies heard as she postulates “More body, hence more writing.” Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith and Paula Cohen, Signs, vol. 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): pp. 875–93 (p. 880 and p. 886).

103 Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 2 (1981): pp. 179–205 (p. 187).

104 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 126.

105 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” p. 881.

106 Claudel, Brodeck, p. 251.

107 Julia Kristeva, “Women's Time,” trans. Harry Blake and Alice Jardine, Signs, vol. 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1981): pp. 13–35 (p. 31).

108 Ibid.

109 Ibid.

110 Fiona Tolan, “Feminism,” in Patricia Waugh (ed.), Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 319–39 (p. 335).

111 Julia Hell, “Ruins Travel: Orphic Journeys through 1940s Germany,” in John Zilcosky (ed.), Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008), pp. 123–60; Julia Hell, “Modernity and the Holocaust, or Listening to Eurydice,” Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 27, no. 6 (2010): pp. 125–54.

112 Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, p. 213.

113 Hirsch, Family Frames, pp. 34–5.

114 Ibid., p. 35.

115 Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, p. 92.

116 Claudel, Brodeck, p. 67.

117 Ibid., p. 245.

Additional information

Funding

This article was written with the support of research funding from the Turku Institute of Advanced Studies.