OF MICE AND MEMORY
Diana Wichtel on how a comic strip mouse and a literary mouse caused a socmed kerfuffle
“Why does it have to change?” wailed someone on social media. That could be the lament of our age, what with climate chaos, escalating inequality and a stubbornly mutating virus busy making the world increasingly unrecognisable. But no. This tweeter was tormented by the sight of Minnie Mouse in a Stella Mccartney custom sustainable pantsuit.
Never mind that the celebrity rodent has discarded the dress before over the years. Many shared the outrage. This was not just a bit of Disneyland Paris feminist fun to mark its 30th anniversary and Women’s History Month. No. It was, variously, wokedom gone mad, another salvo on the gender wars, a tribute to Hillary Clinton … “Tres chic,” tweeted Clinton.
Unsurprisingly, Fox News got its unsustainable knickers in a twist. “They’re trying to destroy fabrics of our society,” railed conservative commentator
Candace Owens. It was the war on Christmas all over again.
Of course, Disneyland Paris also celebrated Minnie with Polka Dot Day, during which everything, including the Tower of Terror, sported her trademark red and white dots. From the photos it looked like an outbreak of something nasty but at least vintage frou-frou remained safe.
In other, less entertaining mouse news, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the first and, so far, only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, was banned from Tennessee’s Mcminn County Board of Education eighth grade English curriculum. Spiegelman’s parents were Polish Jews who survived Auschwitz. “My father,” Spiegelman writes, “bleeds history.” Not entirely comic strip material. But Maus, in which Jews are drawn as mice, Nazis as cats, is a secondgeneration masterwork, a genre-defying act of engagement with the unimaginable. It’s about what happened during the Holocaust and after, a story short on happy endings. It’s also a sometimes funny, flaying account of the relationship between a son and father in the shadow of trauma.
You could argue about the age at which school students should read something like Maus .My father tried (unsuccessfully) to ban comics but books were fair game. Grade eight students are 12 to 14 years old. By that age I had read Leon Uris’ Exodus, with its graphic concentration camp scenes, been deeply affected by To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies … Did they disturb me? A lot. They also added some contours to my moral landscape. The board’s chief objections to Maus: bad language — words like “damn” — and nudity. In a small panel, Spiegelman’s mother, portrayed as a mouse, is found in the bath after taking her life.
The minutes record a board member: “We don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff. It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids.” A history teacher, no doubt trained, as good educators are, to approach difficult subjects and histories safely, tried to counter: “There is nothing pretty about the Holocaust.” The vote to remove the book was unanimous.
As many as 1.5 million of those murdered across Europe within living memory in the Holocaust were children. This sort of censorship teaches students nothing except how spectacularly those in charge of their education can miss the point. At a time when Whoopi Goldberg has had to apologise for declaring on the talk show she co-hosts, The View, that the Holocaust “isn’t about race” and that “these are two groups of white people”, there is much tough teaching to be done.
The upside of this sorry business has been the chance to see interviews with the author. When it was first published in the 80s, Maus, a comic about the Shoah, broke every rule in the book. On CNN, Spiegelman continued to go his own way, musing about the board’s “daffy, myopic response” while vaping and taking bites of what looked like breakfast. He questioned the board’s moral priorities. “It has the breath of autocracy and fascism about it.” He noted that he was speaking to CNN on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, “which adds to the poignancy, irony and madness of this”.
In the end a ban almost as nonsensical as the fuss over Minnie Mouse’s pants achieved something. As I write, as a result of the kerfuffle, Maus is topping Amazon’s bestsellers’ list. Mazel tov.