Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917

Bederman concludes her work by illustrating how the immensely popular 1912 novel Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs encompassed all of the social and cultural values demonstrated through the works of the authors she has explored. As the perfect man, dangerously male yet sufficiently white, Tarzan amassed a huge following of fans who were engrossed by the excitement of the popular genre of exotic adventure story and who embraced the main character as a man they could admire and root for.

The main character, Tarzan, is the son of a British nobleman and his wife, orphaned as an infant when his parents’ ship is cast ashore. Raised by apes and able to communicate with them in their language, Tarzan is possessed of tremendous physical strength, prowess, and knowledge of wilderness survival skills. He learns to read from the cache of books from the wreckage of his parents’ ship, and he develops a sophisticated relationship to the ape mother who raises him. When she is attacked by a brutish, powerful male from the ape community, Tarzan murders him as act to avenge her. Thereafter, Tarzan, having tasted blood and found that he enjoys engaging in violence, acts with impunity and unmitigated aggression, never hesitating to use force to meet his own needs. He brags openly about how many Black men he has killed. As he matures, he surpasses the apes in his community, despite never having encountered other humans for any significant period during his formative, developmental years.

In his young adulthood, when he encounters Jane, he is struck by her beauty; she possesses many of the quintessentially enviable traits of a classical white Anglo-Saxon beauty. Her traveling companions exemplify the soft gentility that had had earned the disdain associated with being poisoned by an overabundance of civility; they are not only inept at surviving in the jungle but ignorant of the reality of their situation. Although Tarzan is overwhelmed by lust and passion for Jane, he stops himself just short of sexually assaulting her, as he begins to learn the norms and expectations of white society. Jane, for her part, finds herself tremendously attracted to Tarzan, especially to those aggressive and virile elements of his personality, and she is drawn to the stereotypical male features he exemplifies and even surpasses in his exaggerated level of physical fitness. Tarzan eventually leaves his home in the jungle, and he and Jane become separated. Later, when Tarzan moves to France, he reencounters Jane and hopes that the two might marry. Jane, who has received a more practical offer of marriage, is disappointed to find the burning mutual attraction she once felt for him tempered by his newfound refinement. Fans of the book were palpably upset to learn that their hero had failed in his attempt to secure the lasting love of the object of his romantic interest. They felt if anyone should end up with “the girl” at the end of the story, it should be Tarzan, as they could not imagine a more perfect male. The idea that, having become overcivilized, he had, in part, overcorrected in his attempt to temper his primitive traits was understandable, but at his core he was felt to be the primal hero whose virility should ensure him what they felt was his amorous reciprocation.