Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

First published: 1912 in All-Story Magazine; 1914 in book form

Type of work: Adventure tale

Themes: Nature, friendship, and love and romance

Time of work: 1888-1910

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: The African jungle

Principal Characters:

• Tarzan of the Apes, an exceptionally strong and handsome man, who develops an animal’s instincts for survival and furthers an inherent genius for learning
• Jane Porter, a beautiful American woman, who, rescued from death by Tarzan, falls in love with him
• Lieutenant Paul D’Arnot, a ship’s officer, who, rescued from cannibals and nursed to health by Tarzan, teaches him the French language and accompanies him to Paris
• Kala, Tarzan’s foster mother, an ape
• Professor Archimedes Q. Porter, Jane’s absent-minded father, a widower
• Samuel T. Philander, his nearsighted secretary, general assistant and devoted friend
• William Cecil Clayton, Tarzan’s cousin, an English nobleman in love with Jane Porter
• Esmeralda, the Porters’ black maid and the devoted protector of Jane
• Robert Canler, a businessman, who offers the Porters financial security in return for the hand of Jane in marriage

The Story

Nature in Tarzan of the Apes is shown to be hostile to those who cannot adapt to it. Tarzan’s parents, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, and Lady Alice Rutherford Clayton, fail in their attempt to insert material nicety into the menacing coastal jungle where they have been marooned. Lady Alice dies within a year after bearing her son. Clayton is killed shortly thereafter by the mighty ape, Kerchak. Jane Porter, her father, and other persons from Europe and America prove to be singularly inept at meeting the challenges of the jungle, its beasts, and its cannibal inhabitants.

Lady Alice’s orphaned son emerges as the grand exception. Reared from infancy by a female ape who had lost her own newborn, Tarzan, as his adoptive mother calls him, the name denoting “White-Skin,” is prodigiously adaptable to his ever-challenging habitat. Among the apes, he learns that survival consists in making the jungle his own. He also learns, by means of the remnants of his human parents’ possessions, not only to read and write English but also to discern those qualities of civilized life that are consonant with humaneness and moral compunction. To his great strength and highly developed physical agility, by which he adapts himself to the wilds, Tarzan adds the expert use of his dead father’s hunting knife, of rope that had come from shipboard, and of a cannibal’s bow and poisoned arrows.

When Jane Porter, her father, her father’s assistant, her maid Esmeralda, and her suitor, William Cecil Clayton, who is Tarzan’s own cousin, are marooned as John Clayton and Lady Alice had been, Tarzan saves them all from both mutineers and beasts. He falls in love with Jane and she with him, but Tarzan is as ill-adapted to love as the Europeans and Americans are to life in the jungle. Up to this point in his existence, he has experienced no love except the maternal love of an ape, which he requited in filial fashion. He does not force himself upon Jane, but his jungle surroundings offer him no fitting context for the expression of his love. Tarzan and Jane are of different worlds.

The two worlds are tentatively bridged when Tarzan rescues Lieutenant Paul d’Arnot from the cannibals. D’Arnot teaches Tarzan French, which, apart from the language of the apes, is Tarzan’s first spoken language. Friendship between the two men develops without the inhibitions and complexities that preclude the consummation of love between Tarzan and Jane. D’Arnot takes his friend to Europe, and Tarzan, with his exceptional aptitude for learning, adjusts to the world of civility and gentility without, however, permitting it to supplant the world of the jungle, to which he will always belong.

It is precisely this world of the jungle that keeps Tarzan’s pursuit of Jane from a successful conclusion. He traces her to northern Wisconsin, where he rescues her from a forest fire. Swinging through the trees, he is again in his element, but, again, the romance of dramatic rescue does not overcome the reality of Jane’s practical world. Called upon to choose from among three suitors, she does not accept Tarzan, whom she loves, because their worlds are incompatible; nor does she accept Robert Canler, whom she detests, because he represents the venality of her world. She accepts the proposal of William Cecil Clayton, whom she does not love but who does love her and who is a true gentleman. Moreover, she and Clayton share the same world. The story ends with Tarzan’s return to Africa and the author’s promise of more to come. In The Return of Tarzan (1915), Jane will finally abandon her world for Tarzan’s and become the mate of her beloved.

Context

Tarzan of the Apes: A Romance of the Jungle first appeared in the October, 1912, issue of The All-Story magazine. The publication of Tarzan of the Apes in book form two years later initiated the international success of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ modern hero. Twenty-one additional Tarzan books followed in the years 1915 through 1947, and two collections of Tarzan stories were published posthumously in 1963 and 1964. Burroughs also published ten novels about the planet Mars, four about the planet Venus, six about the interior of the earth, two Apache novels, and fourteen other novels of adventure, romance, and fantasy. It was the Tarzan figure, however, that contributed a new myth to the world, a myth that gained dimension in motion pictures, comic strips, and television series and even provided such place-names as Tarzana, California, and Tarzan, Texas.

It is the mythic dimension of Tarzan of the Apes that has ensured its popularity with young people. The appeal of Tarzan is his exceptional physical ability coupled with an admirable predilection for morality and justice. The same kind of appeal sustains the popularity of Ulysses, Parsifal, Robin Hood, and Superman. The idea of a healthy mind in a healthy body lends itself to effortful discipline and rigor in formal systems of education and religion. Yet when his or her imagination is caught by the heroic figure of the jungle lord in the form of a suspenseful and stimulating story, the young reader effortlessly and voluntarily pursues the idea. Effective fictional exemplars must be larger than life without seeming to be so; a good storyteller smoothes away the semblance. Burroughs is a superb storyteller, and his Tarzan is a magnificently mythic exemplar of the sound mind in the sound body.

Bibliography

Farmer, Philip José. Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. A detailed biography of Tarzan as a real person, neatly explaining the series’ inconsistencies. Includes a five-generation family tree relating Tarzan to Sherlock Holmes, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Doc Savage, Nero Wolfe, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Bulldog Drummond.

Fenton, Robert W. The Big Swingers. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967. A somewhat superficial discussion of Burroughs and his stories.

Holtsmark, Erling B. Tarzan and Tradition: Classical Myth in Popular Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Analyzes Burroughs’s novels and their characters as deriving from the literary traditions of classical antiquity.

Lupoff, Richard A. Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure. New York: Ace Books, 1968. A good study of the man who created Tarzan, John Carter, and other series.

Porges, Irwin. Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1975. An extensive biography of Burroughs and analysis of his works, published on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Includes many photographs of Burroughs, story drafts, magazine covers, and the maps and character lists that helped him to preserve continuity within his series.

Vidal, Gore. “Tarzan Revisited.” Esquire 60, no. 6 (December, 1963): 193, 262, 264. Review and commentary on the Tarzan novels.