Tarzan of the Apes Edgar Rice Burroughs Read online

  Burroughs remained committed to eugenics at least through the 1930s. In an unpublished, undated six-page essay entitled “I See a Race” (quoted in Porges, pp. 460-463), he articulated his dream of a future in which the United States has been eugenically cleansed. “Only the hills are the same,” he writes. “Everything else is changed. Even the people are different; they are more beautiful, and they are happy.” Intelligence tests are required for political candidates and for voters. Employment is determined by IQ; those scoring highest are awarded the highest posts, such as governing the country, and lesser jobs are assigned along a descending scale. If a person demonstrates an antisocial nature or commits a crime, the offender is “not punished,” but “he is either sterilized or destroyed for the welfare of posterity.” Lastly, all religions are “laid aside,” in favor of one religion: “service to the race.” It is worth noting that Burroughs kept a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in his personal library.

  Theories about racial inheritance abound in Tarzan of the Apes. Burroughs insists, in good eugenicist fashion, that the Nordic races are physically and intellectually superior to Mediterranean and Negro groups. The mutineers on the Fuwulda are a case in point, described as “the offscourings of the sea—unhanged murderers and cutthroats of every race and every nation” (p. 7), their inferiority and their villainy attributed to their mongrel origins. We learn also that Tarzan’s sense of honor and his self-control are attributes of his racial and class legacy. In Tarzan of the Apes Burroughs doesn’t miss an opportunity to make his positions on race and heredity clear, so as to appeal to like-minded readers. His political agenda becomes even more vivid in one of the later Tarzan novels, as the focus of his concern shifts momentarily from race to Communism, and he introduces the only historical figure to appear in the Tarzan series in a scene in which Joseph Stalin sends one of his agents to kill the King of the Apes.

  CALL OF THE WILD MAN

  Tarzan is famous for the scream he delivers after he kills. Placing his foot on the defeated foe, he lets loose a deafening shout of triumph. The gesture is a hunting tradition, the “step-on,” and it is documented in countless photographs of white hunters on safari. The scream, however, is less explicable, and it is a great touch. Few species scream after a kill, though wolves howl and lions sometimes roar. The fictional anthropoid apes among whom Tarzan lives have their post-kill howls as well, but gorillas, presumably their closest real-life relatives, are almost strictly herbivorous. Tarzan’s scream, which in the Johnny Weissmuller films is accompanied by ape-like chest-beating, is the purest expression of his feral nature and is often imitated when children “play Tarzan.”

  One of the mostly forgotten sources of Tarzan of the Apes’ original appeal was the concurrent popularity of wilderness education for boys. Concern that modern living was replacing “robust, manly, self-reliant boyhood” with a generation of “flat-chested cigarette smokers, with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality” led wildlife writer and illustrator Ernest Thompson Seton to establish the Woodcraft Indians in 1902. (Seton would influence Lord Baden-Powell in the creation of the Boy Scouts, and in 1910 he helped found the Boy Scouts of America.) He created a summer camp in Connecticut where boys formed make-believe Indian tribes that elected their own leaders, dressed in Indian costumes, and lived in teepees in order to learn an appreciation for nature. (The first American summer camp for boys had been founded in 1881 in New Hampshire to provide upper-class boys with wilderness experience, but the persistent American Indian motif in summer camps can be credited to Seton.) At roughly the same time that Seton was setting up the Woodcraft Indians, Daniel Carter Beard founded another wilderness organization for boys, the Sons of Daniel Boone, that drew its inspiration not from American Indians but from the Western pioneers. The boys were encouraged to build “forts,” not teepees, and to keep an unloaded gun always handy. By 1905 this group, now called the Boy Pioneers, was the largest boys’ club in America. In England, yet another organization would soon emerge. “If Seton wanted children to be young Indians, and Beard, budding techno-pioneers, boy scouting’s founder, Lord Robert Baden-Powell, imagined boys as young army officers,” writes historian Philip Deloria in Playing Indian. Despite their different approaches to outdoor experience, all parties seemed to agree that modern life posed a special threat to white middle-class manhood, one that demanded an intervention in boyhood.

  For Seton, the problem of modernity was not only one of unhealthy habits, but of urban industrial capitalism itself. “Our civilization is a failure,” he wrote. “Whenever pushed to its logical conclusion, it makes one millionaire and a million paupers. There is no complete happiness under its blight” (Deloria, p. 99). Others viewed the problem differently. Race theorists and social Darwinists contended that “over-civilization” was leading to the degeneration of American manhood, that men were weakening, becoming less virile, and increasingly suffering from a new ailment, neurasthenia. This concern is expressed in Tarzan of the Apes in the contrast Burroughs draws between Tarzan and his first cousin, Cecil Clayton, who has become soft and mildly decadent as a result of his “over-civilized” rearing.

  The popular idea that boys recapitulate in their individual development the evolution of the white race from barbarism to civilization offered some hope. If there was a wild man in every boy, the theory went, then the liberation of his wildness could “inoculate” the child with the primitive strength needed to avoid degeneracy or feminization later in life. G. Stanley Hall, an educator, psychologist, and the president of Clark University, promoted the idea that boys should embrace their primitive passions instead of repressing them, as he and other boys of the Victorian era had been taught to do. In an 1899 lecture, Hall urged an audience of female kindergarten teachers to cultivate primitive emotions in their five-year-old charges. He explained, “The child is in the primitive age. Instinct of the savage survives in him.... Boys are naturally robbers; they are bandits and fighters by nature. A scientific study has been made of boys’ societies.... In every instance these societies have been predatory. All of the members thirsted for blood, and all of their plans were for thievery and murder.” Educators needed to encourage boys to bring out their inner savage: “All that rot they teach to children about the little raindrop fairies with their buckets washing down the windows must go. We shall go back to reading the old, bloody stories to children, and children will like to hear them because they are healthy little savages” (quoted in Bederman, p. 98). Not surprisingly, G. Stanley Hall would later lecture on Tarzan of the Apes in his college courses on human development.

  The thinning blood of middle- and upper-class American boys could be thickened by contact with nature and the primitive, or by violence. Tarzan’s combined racial inheritance and savage training make him invincible. His jungle existence sharpens the manly reflexes that have atrophied in the men of his class who rely on reason instead of physical prowess to survive. Burroughs offers Professor Porter and his secretary Samuel T. Philander as examples of over-civilized (and, presumably, over-educated) men who are as helpless in nature as babies, and so clueless that when Tarzan saves their lives they are not even conscious of having been in danger. The belief that civilization robs men of their masculine vigor and “authenticity” by depriving them of the challenges and satisfactions inherent in the violent encounters necessary to wilderness survival is an idea that is still very much with us. The 1999 film Fight Club offers a case in point. In this exchange from the movie we see that consumerism stands in for what G. Stanley Hall termed “over-civilization”:

  TYLER: Do you know what a duvet is?

  JACK: Comforter.

  TYLER: It’s a blanket, just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and I know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival? In the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then?

  JACK: You know, consumers.

  TYLER: Right. We’re consumers. We’re by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty—these things don’t concern me. What concerns m
e is celebrity magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.

  Only by fighting for the sake of fighting, the film suggests, can “real manhood” be retrieved. Fight Club, like Tarzan of the Apes, suggests that the struggle to maintain a gratifying sense of self is tied to ideals of masculinity. Ironically, with its reliance on fantasies concerning racial purity, Burroughs’s masculine ideal helps us see just how constructed and contingent ideals of masculinity can be.

  BURROUGHS’S AFRICA

  Burroughs had limited knowledge of West Africa when he began the Tarzan series, and even after his great success he had no interest in challenging his fantasy version of “the Dark Continent,” as he and many others called it, by actually visiting it. He later acknowledged that he had relied on only a few books for his cursory research, including Henry Morton Stanley’s In Darkest Africa (1890). But Burroughs didn’t really need books to get ideas about Africa, because a particular set of ideas, myths, and falsehoods regarding Africa had already become part of American consciousness and of America’s unconscious, its dream life. What Burroughs fantasized about Africa and put into his novels was to have a significant influence on future images of the continent in our culture (including stereotype-laden safari rides at amusement parks), but what Burroughs depicted was fully in accord with the cliched beliefs about Africa and Africans held in 1912 by many Americans. In this period, at the peak of European colonial adventurism and exploitation, Africa was to most Americans a place of jungles, “primitive” people, and wild, ferocious animals. It was a place where white men could, as Tarzan does, really show what they were made of.

  In the late nineteenth century, exciting accounts of African adventures written by explorers and big game hunters became regular features of magazines, especially National Geographic. Thanks to the invention of halftone, a technology that enabled the mass reproduction of photographs, images proliferated in the popular press of semi-clad, exotically ornamented Africans, and of pith-helmeted white hunters, male and female, standing near or astride their kills. The deeds of “great white hunters” were widely celebrated, especially in 1911 when former president Theodore Roosevelt published in National Geographic a lengthy personal account, “Wild Man and Wild Beast in Africa,” of his recent ten-month East African safari. With the objective of collecting specimens for the Smithsonian, Roosevelt and his party, which included 250 African porters, killed approximately 500 big game animals, including seventeen lions, eleven elephants, and twenty rhinoceros. One of the photographs illustrating his article shows Roosevelt holding his rifle upright as he steps on a freshly killed African buffalo. While Roosevelt wielded the rifle, his son Kermit wielded the camera; he is the photographer credited for almost every shot. In each photograph Roosevelt’s dominance is communicated by his relation to the kill, his posture, and the position of his gun. These animals, killed in the name of science, were promptly skinned and carefully prepared for taxidermic preservation. Roosevelt did not shoot gorillas, but his friend Carl E. Akeley did. “The giant of Karisimbi,” a large silverback collected in the Belgian Congo by an expedition led by Akeley, remains on display in a diorama in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

  In creating his Africa, a continent dominated by the prowess of white men, Burroughs also borrowed from novels, mainly British, and especially those of H. Rider Haggard, whose adventure stories were energizing myths of English imperialism. Critic Martin Green writes that such adventure tales were “the story England told itself as it went to sleep at night; and in the form of its dreams, they charged England’s will with the energy to go out into the world and explore, conquer, and rule.” Burroughs seems eager in Tarzan of the Apes to identify with his Anglo-Saxon cousins across the pond, as against the “mongrel immigrants” and African-Americans at home—how else does one explain the fact that he gives his hero British nationality?

  In King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and Allan Quartermain (1887), H. Rider Haggard describes the discovery of lost white civilizations located at the heart of the Dark Continent, a premise based on legends dating back to the sixteenth century, when rumors of the great ruins of Zimbabwe first reached Europe. The fallacious belief that only white men could have constructed so sophisticated a city spawned stories of whites still living in a hidden settlement deep in the African jungle. Burroughs refers to this fantasy when he speaks of Tarzan as typifying “some demigod of a wild and warlike by-gone people of his ancient forest” (p. 103). Critic Marianna Torgovnick notes that Burroughs “gave enduring cultural life to the idea that civilizations in Africa were of white origin,” thus helping to shape popular misconceptions of Africa and its past. The idea of a lost civilization, a favorite of adventure writers of this period, is also suggested by Burroughs’s anthropoid apes, who, we are told, occupy an evolutionary place between gorillas and man. More or less a “missing link,” they seem to have survived, unlike Java Man or the Neanderthals, somehow preserved on the African continent. Theodore Roosevelt wrote that nature in Africa “does not differ materially from what it was in Europe in the late Pleistocene,” and one of the most destructive beliefs that followed from this line of thinking was that the inhabitants of the “pre-historic” continent had not evolved as far as other “races.” In his book In Darkest Africa, Henry Morton Stanley describes a Pygmy woman as “characteristic of the link long sought between the average modern humanity and its Darwinian progenitors.” Just as Tarzan’s superiority to the anthropoid apes is a matter of evolution, so too, Burroughs speciously contends, is his superiority to the African tribesmen he mocks and kills. Burroughs’s Africa, like Haggard’s, contrasts an African savagery that exists outside of time with a white civilization that possesses not only a story of progress but a glorious forgotten past. In this fictional Africa, rich, lost, white civilizations wait to be plundered or to be discovered by their rightful white heirs. In the twenty-three sequels to his original adventures, Tarzan will discover a dozen lost white civilizations in Burroughs’s Africa.

  CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  In Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), D. H. Lawrence observed that Americans were haunted by the dilemma of “wanting to have their cake and eat it too,” by which he meant wanting to live within civilized order while enjoying savage freedom at the same time. In his descriptions of Tarzan’s affect when he kills, Burroughs conveys this odd double desire. After Tarzan hangs Kulonga, the first man he has ever killed, Burroughs writes:

  All things outside his own tribe were his deadly enemies, with the few exceptions of which Tantor, the elephant, was a marked example.

  And he realized all this without malice or hatred. To kill was the law of the wild world he knew. Few were his primitive pleasures, but the greatest of these was to hunt and kill, and so he accorded to others the right to cherish the same desires as he, even though he himself might be the object of their hunt.

  His strange life had left him neither morose nor bloodthirsty. That he joyed in killing, and that he killed with a joyous laugh upon his handsome lips betokened no innate cruelty. He killed for food most often, but, being a man, he sometimes killed for pleasure, a thing which no other animal does; for it has remained for man alone among all creatures to kill senselessly and wantonly for the mere pleasure of inflicting suffering and death.

  And when he killed for revenge, or in self-defense, he did that also without hysteria, for it was a very businesslike proceeding which admitted of no levity (p. 79).

  In this peculiar and troubling passage, Burroughs comes close to acknowledging that you should not use the word “hunt” when you speak of killing human beings, and he comes close to recognizing that it is impossible to “kill for pleasure” without cruelty, but he then retreats from a recognition that would fundamentally undermine the premise of the novel, that Tarzan, “the killer of beasts and many black men” (p. 109) cannot be both savage and civilized, and that hunting men is called murder. Violence, the tak
ing of life, Burroughs insists here, does not leave its mark on Tarzan—he is “neither morose nor bloodthirsty”—because, his logic runs, he lives by the law of the jungle, where all killing is fair. But on a deeper level, Burroughs knows this cannot be, that only in the world of day-dreams can the exercise of the power to kill leave one morally untouched. So-called primitive aggression does not translate into a socially condoned “license to kill.”

  The dynamic relationship between aggression and civilization becomes even more complicated when a woman enters the story. Like Westerns, war stories, most sea stories, and other adventure tales, Tarzan of the Apes is set in a man’s world, a place where women are scarce—where mothers don’t express their disapproval of fighting and dirt, or otherwise enforce rules and obligations, or pull emotional strings. (Tarzan’s mother Kala is the perfect mother for this male fantasy world; she protects Tarzan and offers him her breast, but she never tells him to wash behind his ears or to clean his room.) Stories of action and adventure like Tarzan of the Apes are designed to repudiate, or at least offer refuge from, the demands of domesticity and other feminizing forces, and to allow men vicariously to test themselves against natural or primitive forces in a world where women (or at least white women) don’t belong.