Revitalizing Manhood in Tarzan of the Apes:
A Survival Strategy of Having Mother "Wilderness"
Published in the Journal, Kobe College Studies 144-2 (2003), under the same title
Yoshida, Junko
1. Tarzan is regarded as one of the "American Adamic" figures in the tradition of the American myth.
2. In response to the historian Frederic Jackson Turner's 1893 declaration of the closing of the frontier, Burroughs expanded America's "frontier" to an imaginary Africa where Tarzan grows up to be a "noble savage."
3. Tarzan is an exemplary figure of Darwinism, especially the theory of recapitulation. (The supposed recurrence of the evolutionary stages of the species [phylogeny] during the embryonic development of the individual organism [ontogeny].)
A literary critic, R.W.B. Lewis, is probably the first to coin the term the "American Adam" in his study of the stereotypical American hero who often appeared in the American myth. By piecing together an "assortment of essays, orations, poems, stories, histories, and sermons," Lewis constructs the image of the archetypal man as a fundamentally innocent, and isolated youth, challenging the world to change for the better. He undertakes ritualistic trials, is liberated from family and social history or bereft of them, and advances hopefully into a complex, unknown world (Lewis 127). Significant from the perspective of Cultural Studies is the way the "American Adam" has influenced the world and radically been influenced by it. Depending on the social and cultural context where the "American Adam" (the signifier) is encoded and decoded, Americans have deciphered different meanings from it.
Another paradigm I find useful in reading the novel is what a religious sociologist, Walter T. Davis, calls the "American Narrative." He maintains that the American forefathers, consisting of multiple ethnicities, needed a common narrative on which to base their national identity when they confirmed their political role on the international stage. According to Davis, the narrative contains two subplots. One is the story that America is a representative country that has freedom, democracy, opportunity, plenty, and justice. The other plot reflects "manifest destiny," the consciousness that America is a chosen nation answering a special calling. The second plot contains the American Dream, "American Exceptionalism," or merely "Americanism" (Davis 7). Employing these paradigms, I would like to reread Tarzan of the Apes from the perspective of Gender Studies, specifically focusing on the protagonist's masculinity, while placing the novel in the American socio-cultural context at the turn of the century.
Let us first examine the gender roles of Tarzan's parents. His English father, Lord Greystoke John Clayton, is portrayed as a mentally, morally, physically strong, and virile man associated with "the noblest monuments of historic achievement upon a thousand victorious battlefields" (Burroughs 16). Meanwhile, his newly married wife, Alice, is portrayed as a typically Victorian, virtuous, dependent, and self-sacrificial woman a type sometimes called the "Angel of the House." When they find themselves deserted by a rebel force of sailors somewhere on the African west coast, John resolves to survive in the African primeval forest as a "primeval man" while expecting his wife to be a "primeval woman." Nonetheless Alice is overwhelmed by the horror of the violent Apes' assault on them, and secludes herself from the savage and primeval African jungle, believing that she lives in an imaginary England.
Ironically, John's wish begins to be realized as his son, Tarzan, is taken away from him by Kala, a female Ape, a literal "primeval female," to replace her dead baby as a changeling. For almost seventeen years Tarzan was nurtured by Kala's wild but genuine mother's love. Immediately after Kalaﾕs death, Tarzan, armed with his father's knife and superior intellect as a human, confronts one of his greatest foes, the Ape king, Kerchak, and stabs him to death giving that familiar wild cry on the spot. Burroughs summarizes the event as follows, "And thus came the young Lord Greystoke into the kingship of the Apes" (Burroughs 111). Here we observe a picture of hybrid manhood composed of civilization and wilderness. This English lord is "the embodiment of physical perfection and giant strength" (140). Later as Jane is rescued by Tarzan from danger in the jungle, she recognizes his extraordinary physical beauty. "A perfect type of the strongly masculine, unmarred by dissipation, or brutal or degrading passions" (195). It is no wonder that Tarzan is repeatedly called a "forest god."
Gender Studies have shown that the prevailing notion of masculinity in the early twentieth century reflects new cultural values and concerns produced by white middle class males in America during the late nineteenth century. According to sociologist Anthony E. Rotundo, the new type of manhood, which he calls the "passionate manhood," puts higher value on physical strength than mental strength (Rotundo 223). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a man's "animal instincts" were regarded rather positively. Men unhesitatingly compared themselves to "primitive" peoples. Underneath this new concept of manhood lay the idea that existence was battle. The Civil War was unquestionably a key force in shaping this male perception of life as warfare (232-34). And the widespread Darwinism undoubtedly enhanced such fascination with "primitives." In the post-Darwin era, animal metaphors such as the one in Jack London's 1903 novel The Call of the Wild drew much public attention. It was in this social environment that men spoke of their masculine nature using phrases like "animal instinct" and "animal energy." Within the same social and cultural context Burroughs portrayed Tarzan as "personification . . . of the primitive man" (122).
Sociologists Jeffrey P. Hantover and Michael S. Kimmel point out that at the root of the change was "masculine anxiety" or the "crisis of masculinity" (Hantover 75; Kimmel 57). Men in the late nineteenth century believed that they faced diminishing opportunities for masculine validation and that adolescents were hampered to develop their manhood fully. Behind their anxiety were social and structural changes. The number of white-collar workers multiplied eight times between 1870 and 1910 owing to industrialization. In big cities where the number of corporations increased, a bureaucratic new order was born. Within the new order, every businessman had to submit himself to his boss. Rotundo writes, "In the nineteenth century, middle-class men had believed that a true man was a self-reliant being who would never bow to unjust authority or mere position. The new structures of work and opportunity in the marketplace did not support such a concept of manhood"(249-50). Moreover, with the increase of workingwomen in the workplace, previously a male domain, Rotundo maintains, "[men's] sense of manly prerogative was threatened. Women's presence made a symbolic statement to men that the world of middle-class work was no longer a male club. . . .The subjective reality for men was that their workplace was not masculine in the same sense that it had been" (250).
In addition to the changes in the workplace, the late nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon called "feminization" should not be overlooked. Boys were educated and civilized by female caretakers based on the doctrine of "separate spheres," which divided the social realm into two gender-related spheres: home and the world. According to this view, home was woman's domain where women provided nurture and love to other family members, while the world was the realm of business and public life where men spent most of their time during the day. This system eventually led female caretakers to imprint female values on some boys. Thus, the fear of "womanly" men became an important cultural issue, and men started to classify themselves into "hardy, masculine types" and "gentle, feminine types" (Rotundo 265). Moreover, the masculine type (Tarzan) and the feminine type (Cecil Clayton) existed even in an individual male's psychology as conflicting cultural values.
In response to the crisis of masculinity various institutions and movements gave a supporting hand to the education of adolescents. The masculinist response was one of them. The Boy Scouts of America, which was founded in 1910, meant to stem the tide of feminization of American manhood and introduce effeminate boys to the wilderness, competition, and strenuous virtue. Also, sports were utilized to revitalize American manhood. Kimmel writes, "Nowhere was this more evident than in the rapid rise of baseball. . . . Baseball became one of the central mechanisms by which masculinity was reconstructed at the turn of the century" (Kimmel 59). In other words, a baseball player has his manhood validated through his performance on the field. Also, the feature of the game that a player repeatedly leaves the safety of "home" into a hostile "battle field" and returns "home" achieving a victory mirrors the daily journeys of men into the world and back again. Thus, baseball came to represent not only the competition of nineteenth-century manhood but also the organization of male life into zones of struggle and safety (Rotundo 244).
One of the representative discourses could be found in President Theodore Roosevelt's speeches. He believed that men should regard life as warfare and spare no strife. For him, the term ﾒwarﾓ was the synonym of "strife." In his 1899 speech "Strenuous Life," he treated the martial ideals for the individual man and for the nation as barely distinguishable from one another:
Let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without
the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife,
through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national
greatness. (Roosevelt 20-21)
The passage above communicates that "strenuous masculinity" is a key force in expanding the American Empire.
In the case of Tarzan, it is after the establishment of his "strenuous masculinity" that he can actually face his contemporary "New Woman" Jane Porter. She is a nineteen-year-old athletic, Gibson girl type, a prevalent middle class female image at the turn of the century, who "played tennis and golf and rode a bicycle despite her long skirt" (Evans 147). She has enough curiosity to accompany her father, Professor Archimedes Q. Porter, all the way to Africa, but in a sense she visits Africa to be exposed to the wilderness of the primeval forest and to transform into a "primeval woman." Immediately after Terkoz, an ape, violently attacks Jane in the jungle, Tarzan swiftly rushes to the scene, and battles with Terkoz.
Jane Porter . . . her eyes wide with mingled horror, fascination, fear, and admiration "[watches]
the primordial ape battle with the primeval man for possession of a woman" for her. . . . .
When the long knife drank deep a dozen times of Terkoz' heart's blood, and the great carcass
rolled lifeless upon the ground, it was a primeval woman who sprang forward with outstretched
arms toward the primeval man who had fought for her and won her. (188)
Though Jane temporarily transforms into the "primeval woman," she frequently struggles in a dilemma of whether to choose civilization or wilderness. For Tarzan, keeping her in the sate of a "primeval woman" is no easy task, resulting in his need to strive more to achieve this goal. Therefore, when Jane engages herself to Cecil Clayton, an English man, the only remedy for Tarzan is to articulate that his mother was an Ape, and that he has never known who his father was despite verification of his heredity from his fingerprints. In other words, the announcement is a total negation of his civilized father, Lord Greystoke John Clayton. Accordingly, Tarzan's words, "My mother was an Ape. . . . I never knew who my father was"(Burroughs 288), become the strategy not only for Tarzan himself but also for readers mesmerized by Tarzan's masculinity who also need to survive in the industrialized, competitive, and complex modern world. As long as the United States continues its imperialistic expansion, American youths need to return to this strategy modifying the meaning of "Tarzan" in the way that suits them.
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