Tarzan

Created by the author Edgar Rice Burroughs the fictional character Tarzan was born Lord Greystoke, a member of an aristocratic British family. Stranded in the African jungle as a small child, Tarzan is found and raised by a group of primates. The character was first introduced to the public in 1912 in Tarzan of the Apes, which appeared in the magazine All-Story. The twenty-five novels that followed between 1912 and 1947 were a huge commercial success, with over 100 million copies sold, and Tarzan has become symbolic of a primal form of masculinity untouched by Western industrial civilization, as well as 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, 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 endowed him with “civilized” behavioral traits, and a childhood in the wilds of Africa that steels his masculinity by forcing on him 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 this 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-market pulp magazines, but influenced scientific thinking about 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 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 had more recent manifestations, particularly 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 that is preordained by nature.

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