How many pulp adventure characters have towns named after them?
I can’t recall when it was that I first read Tarzan of the Apes. I remember enjoying the Tarzan TV show as a young child, and so I’m thinking I must have read it when I was seven or eight. There’s not much in Edgar Rice Burrough’s writing that is above the fourth grade level, so that’s probably in the ballpark.
What is there to say about this? It’s pulp. I had to take a step back and remember that it was published in 1912. There is enough racism and sexism in the book that a modern reader such as myself has to take it for what it is, and not expect modern sensibilities. In 1912 I’m sure that many found it plausible that a child of aristocracy raised by apes would still possess the intellectual refinements that most (fail to) learn through education.
Tarzan is the idealized hero, and if Burroughs writes Africans as savage cannibals there is also a sly hint that the civilization he hails as superior has had some deleterious effect on us. After all, Tarzan would not have reached his potential without being kept away from civilization. What does it suggest that Tarzan is a finer man than any raised by the trappings of home and technology? Surely John Clayton would not have ever reached such heroic status were he raised by his human parents in England or the colonies, would he?
It was a quick read. I might read some more of Burroughs’s Tarzan books to see where the franchise led. I’m really not interested in later books like Tarzan and the Ant Men, Tarzan and the Elephant Men or Tarzan and the Leopard Men but maybe I’ll read The Return of Tarzan and see how that goes.
