The Post Post-Modern Man
Nearly nude with muscles rippling as he swings through the trees, kills lions and stands as lord over everything he sees, the imagery of Tarzan in the jungle is the antithesis to the emasculation of modernism. He is brutishly strong while also retaining his intellectual superiority over the beasts. Tarzan is not king of the apes in the jungle; he is their god. He is the Uber-Ape, the next step in Darwinian evolution and as such he represents what man—males, not mankind—often fantasize the could be were it not for society’s progressive attempts to impose and equality where none—they believe—none exists. Tarzan is the antidote to the negative impact of the modern world, while at the same representing the dream of a future perfection.
Evolution
Tarzan of the Apes is an action-adventure novel that relies far more on scenes of active engagement than isolated episodes of reflective thought or philosophical prose not directed toward advancing the narrative. That does not mean that the author is not interested in introducing intellectual debate. Important to keep in mind is that Darwin’s theories on man evolving from ape-like ancestors had been around less than half a century and was perhaps even less commonly accepted among the general American populace than it is a hundred years later. Burroughs makes it quite clear that Tarzan is an evolutionary superior to the apes of the jungle, but he lands upon a truly brilliant exercise in imagery to confirm his belief in Darwin’s theoretical suppositions. The apes in his novel have a language which Tarzan can understand and they also are revealed through narrative prose to have advanced cognitive skills and display human emotions and intuition. Tarzan is clearly marked as superior, but this imagery effectively instills the notion that these beasts fulfill the Darwinian notion of a lower scale of development in human history.
Colonial Superiority
Evolution from apes is one thing; evolution into man is another. Tarzan, interestingly, separates himself from the apes with whom he communicates and is raised by virtue of superior reasoning ability and the intellectual intuition to use weapons when physical strength is overwhelmed. The imagery associated with the other natives of the jungles—the black warrior tribes—underscores the predominant acceptance of racial superiority among colonial western powers. These humans with dark skin are at times portrayed as less evolved than the apes and, at any rate, are presented as in great need of the civilizing influence of white genes as personified by Tarzan.
Eugenics
Unfortunately for the purposes of good fiction as well as common sense, Burroughs is not just a believer in Darwin, but also in that most radically dangerous and specious offshoot of evolutionary theory, eugenics. Eugenics essentially postulates that some genes are better than others from which can be extrapolated the misconception that the offspring of those with good genes are by definition an improved version of humanity over the offspring of those with bad genes. Burroughs as much as makes a direct statement of his belief in this fact, but more memorable is the way he conveys it through images revealing that Tarzan’s aristocratic genetic nature overcomes the limitations of primal nurture. Obviously, the “bad genes” representative here would be the apes that raise him in comparison to the European aristocratic blood running in his veins which define his nature. Genetically-deficient nurturing would be expected to dominate in the jungle, but instead Tarzan’s genetically superior bloodlines enable him to do things from learning to read to knowing when to bow that he could not possibly know of without having been instructed through nurture.
