Right-wing culture warriors pushing restrictions on classroom instruction sometimes defend these measures by insisting that they avoid targeting historically or intellectually significant material. In their telling, these laws restrict genuinely objectionable matter — such as pornography or "woke indoctrination” — while sparing material that kids truly need to learn, even if it’s controversial.
A new fracas involving a school board in Missouri will test this premise. The controversy revolves around Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust, and it indicates that those seeking to censor books seem oddly unconstrained by the principle that they are supposed to avoid restricting important, challenging historical material.
“It’s one more book — just throw it on the bonfire,” Spiegelman told me ruefully, suggesting the impulse to target books seems to have a built-in tendency to expand, sweeping in even his Pulitzer-winning “Maus” under absurd pretenses.
“It’s a real warning sign of a country that’s yearning for a return of authoritarianism,” Spiegelman said.
The board in Nixa, a small city south of Springfield, will debate the fate of “Maus” this month. The Springfield News-Leader reports that board employees flagged it in a review in keeping with a Missouri law making it illegal to provide minors with sexually explicit material.
It’s not yet clear what the employees found objectionable. But “Maus” — which illustrates Spiegelman’s parents’ experience of the Holocaust and features Nazis as cats and Jews as mice — graphically depicts his mother naked in a bathtub after taking her own life.
“She was sitting in a pool of blood when my father found her,” Spiegelman said of his mother. It is a “rather unsexy image seen from above,” he noted, and “not something I think anybody could describe as a nude woman. She’s a naked corpse.”
That imagery is partially what led a school board in Tennessee to ban “Maus” in January 2022. The story made global news before dropping out of our raging national arguments over book removals.
Last fall, however, a handful of other school boards in Missouri pulled “Maus” from schools. (One board subsequently restored it after PEN America sounded the alarm.) Yet that drew little media attention, and now that the Nixa board is also mulling the fate of “Maus,” Spiegelman decided to speak out once again.
The repeated targeting of “Maus” over alleged sexual content, Spiegelman lamented, is a mere pretext. “It was the other things making them uncomfortable, like genocide,” he said. “I just tried to make them clean and understandable, which is the purpose of storytelling with pictures.”
The Missouri efforts appear prompted by the state’s law, passed last summer, that makes the provision of “explicit sexual material” to a student a Class A misdemeanor. The law defines such material as visual depictions of sex acts or genitalia and exempts works with “serious” artistic or anthropological “significance.”
But that doesn’t seem to have stopped the targeting of “Maus.” When I asked Nixa School Board President Josh Roberts why the book had been flagged, he told me it had been identified as “potentially violative” of school policy and state and federal law, without providing detail on which provisions might have been violated, or how.
What alarms Spiegelman about the targeting of “Maus” on specious grounds, he told me, is that its “fable” form was able to reach a broad audience with a story “about dehumanizing people” and “othering.” Spiegelman suggested those looking to restrict books are seeking to limit school curriculums with their own acts of othering.
“Those others can include Asians, Indigenous Americans, Black people, Muslims — not to mention LGBTQ and beyond,” Spiegelman said. The book-removal frenzy, he noted, is “about squelching what’s supposed to happen in school, which is an education that allows people to become one country that can talk to each other with a base of knowledge.”
All this highlights an ugly feature of this craze: Even if those targeting books are genuinely motivated by narrow objections to supposedly sexual content, they often seem undisturbed when those objections result in the removal of material with profound historical significance.
That was what happened when a Florida school limited access to Amanda Gorman’s poem recited at President Biden’s inauguration on utterly absurd grounds. The move’s defenders didn’t seem remotely troubled by the message it might send to students — that a paean to unity read by a young Black poet marking our fraught national transition to a new presidency might somehow be inappropriate for children.
With “Maus” again in the news, what’s galling is the casual unconcern among many book purgers that the frenzy they’ve unleashed might be sweeping just a tad too broadly, targeting authors from marginalized groups and drawing in important cultural and historical artifacts. Spiegelman is right: To them, “it’s one more book — just throw it on the bonfire.”
