Tarzan

Created by author Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950), Tarzan is a fictional character born Lord Greystoke to an aristocratic British family, stranded as a small child in the African jungle, and raised by primates. Tarzan was first introduced to the public in Tarzan of the Apes (1912) in All-Story Magazine; the 25 novels that followed between 1912 and 1947 were a commercial success with over 100 million copies sold.  Tarzan has become symbolic of a primal form of masculinity untouched by Western industrial civilization and an escapist fantasy for generations of boys and men.

The Tarzan novels share certain plot features:  the peace and order of the African jungle, maintained by Tarzan, is disturbed by the arrival of a group of Europeans in search of treasure, usually associated with a lost civilization; the expedition often includes a white woman, typically of middle-class background, who is abducted and subsequently rescued; and Tarzan restores order in the jungle through a mixture of animal instinct, cunning mind, and sheer physical prowess.

Burroughs' novels negotiate meanings of masculinity by using the figure of Tarzan to address Victorian notions of race and civilized self-restraint, Gilded Age fears of overcivilization, and early twentieth century demands for a "strenuous life" and a "passionate manhood."  Tarzan owes his masculine power to a combination of his Anglo-Saxon racial heritage, which endows him with "civilized" behavioral traits, and a “savage” African childhood steels his masculinity by exposing him to a Darwinistic struggle for survival.  This model of masculinity suggests an ambivalent relation between manhood and civilization: only men of allegedly "civilized" races are endowed with true manliness, but "civilization" stifles masculinity by removing men from invigorating contact with nature. Only in the African jungle can an otherwise effeminate English aristocratic boy achieve his full masculine potential. In the end, Tarzan represents an imperialistic fantasy: while it is the more primitive masculinity that enables Tarzan to prevail over his enemies, it is his "Anglo-Saxon" heritage that enables him to create order out of chaos in the jungle.

Tarzan’s appeal was not limited to the readers of mass-marketed pulp magazines, but influenced scientific thought on masculinity as well.  Granville Stanley Hall, the father of American psychology, enjoyed Tarzan so much that he taught Tarzan of the Apes in his course on human development at Clark University.  For Hall, who encouraged parents to nurture evolutionary remnants of savagery in boys as an antidote to the effeminizing effects of modern urban, industrial civilization, Tarzan represented an example of the synthesis he hoped for young American men to achieve.

Tarzan represents the fantasy of a natural masculine identity that exists outside of civilization but is not incompatible with it.  This fantasy has more recent manifestations in the mythopoetic men's movement and such writings as Douglas Gillette's King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (1991) and Robert Bly's Iron John: A Book About Men (1990).  The escapist fantasy that such texts represent signifies the desire of many men for an unchanging blueprint for manhood, preordained by nature.

Bibliography:

Bederman, Gail. Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Holtsmark, Erling B. Edgar Rice Burroughs. Twayne's United States Authors Series. Kenneth Eble, ed. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.

Kasson, John F. Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America. New York: Hill and Wang 2001.

Further Reading:

Budd, Michael Anton. The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

Burroughs, Edgar Rice. Tarzan of the Apes. Reprint with an introduction by Gore Vidal. New York: New American Library, 1990.

------. The Return of Tarzan. Reprint. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.

------. The Son of Tarzan. Reprint. Sandy, UT: Quiet Vision, 2000.

------. The Jungle Tales of Tarzan. Reprint. Sandy, UT: Quiet Vision, 2000.

Holtsmark, Erling B. Tarzan and Tradition: Classical Myth in Popular Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.

Porges, Irvin. Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1975.

Related Topics:

Darwinism; Hall, Granville Stanley; Heroism; Imperialism; Industrialization; Iron John; Men's Movement; Middle-Class Manhood;  "Passionate Manhood;" Progressive Era; Race; Roosevelt, Theodore; Whiteness

—Thomas Winter