It’s much easier to justify writing about Tarzan in this column, than Spamalot. Though the latter was based on a movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), which had animated sequences, the Tarzan stage musical is based on Disney’s entirely animated 1999 film, which in turn was inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel Tarzan of the Apes. Even apart from the animated film (and Disney’s TV series and direct-to-video Tarzan II, both animated, that followed), Tarzan has a long history in cartoon art. In fact, one of the first Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art exhibitions that I saw was devoted to Tarzan’s history in the comics. Among the important comics artists who have worked on the character are Hal Foster and Burne Hogarth on the Tarzan comic strip, Joe Kubert at DC Comics, and John Buscema at Marvel.

One of the satisfying aspects of seeing a Broadway show on my birthday has been that no matter how old I get, I still seem to be one of the youngest people in the audience. Not so this time. When I bought my ticket on a Saturday afternoon I saw a number of family groups arriving for the matinee, as one would expect for a Disney show. But here I was attending the show on a weeknight, looking at all the twentysomethings sitting around me.

One reason, I suppose, might be that these are people who saw the animated movie when they were kids, and who now want to relive the experience as adults.

Another factor, I would guess, in attracting a younger demographic is the music by Phil Collins, who expanded his score for the movie. There has been rock music on Broadway from Hair through Rent, and Elton John wrote the score for The Lion King and the new “Lestat,” yet it still somehow seems unusual to hear a contemporary pop score like Tarzan‘s on Broadway. On first seeing the animated film I didn’t like the Collins score at all, but found it quite pleasant on seeing the Broadway show. Perhaps my tastes have changed, or perhaps the stage show’s longer score gave me more time to accustom myself to Collins’s style.

The stage Tarzan‘s great triumph is as spectacle. Its director, Bob Crowley, is acclaimed as a stage designer, and he designed both sets and costumes for this production. Moreover, I suspect the influence of Disney Imagineering, which for years has devised theme park attractions which immerse spectators within a fictional world.

Sitting in the audience, waiting for Tarzan to begin, one sees an immense drawing of a ship, gently swaying, against a map of Africa on a black scrim. The sounds of waves are projected into the auditorium, producing a calming effect as theatergoers leave the bustle of Times Square and settle into their seats. When the show begins, so does a storm at sea: there is a crash of thunder and a brilliant flash signifying lightning, which actually raised a shriek from many members of the audience.

Tarzan’s parents John and Alice Clayton, are first seen, seemingly underwater, swimming upward. Then they walk from the water onto an African beach, which is represented by a vertical wall: hence the Claytons are actually walking down a wall.

Soon the gorillas enter, spectacularly swinging from vines. (Burroughs uses a fictional species of “great apes,” perhaps in order to justify the more human elements of their behavior, such as language; Disney’s Tarzan uses gorillas instead.) Virtually the entire cast performs in mid-air over the course of this show; various reviewers compared the effect to watching Cirque du Soleil. At certain points performers even ride through the air over the heads of the audience. (Having read that audience members seated beneath the mezzanine could not see everything that took place in mid-air, I bought a balcony seat, which, for this show, may have been the best choice.)

The entire opening sequence, with the shipwreck of the Claytons, the introduction of the gorillas, the killing of John and Alice Clayton by a black panther (with glowing red eyes), and the adoption of their infant son by the female gorilla Kala, is all performed to Collins’s music but without words, and much of it with the actors suspended from wires, as if the opening were a synthesis of silent movie and aerial ballet.

Crowley’s basic set is a rectangle of bright green layers, successfully evoking the African rain forest while embodying an abstract modernism.

For the most part, the stage musical follows the animated film very closely. For example, as in the film, Jane teaches Tarzan about the outside world through a slide show. One seemingly major departure really isn’t. It has been reported that Chris Rock was originally approached to voice Tarzan’s gorilla friend Terk for the movie, but that he turned it down, seeing racist implications in casting an African-American as an ape; the filmmakers turned Terk into a female, voiced by Rosie O’Donnell. In the stage show Terk is back to being a male, and his wisecracking dialogue shows what the filmmakers originally had in mind when they wanted to cast Rock.

However, the stage Tarzan doesn’t have the title character’s other animal friend, Tantor, the elephant voiced by Seinfeld‘s Wayne Knight in the movie.

There are some things — like putting a convincing elephant onstage — that the stage show can’t do.

Spectacle is the stage Tarzan‘s major strength, and that may explain why the second act is less successful than the first. The movie takes spectacle to levels that the stage show can’t find equivalents for. In the movie Tarzan and friends are held captive aboard the ship of the villain Clayton and break out with the aid of Tantor: this scene is understandably missing from the stage version, but it leaves a dramatic gap.

(The movie’s villain has no real equivalent in Burroughs’ book, and the filmmakers named him Clayton, doubtless to the puzzlement of people who know Burroughs’ story. Clayton is Tarzan’s real last name, but the animated film ignores this.)

In the movie, the evil Clayton has a final confrontation with Tarzan and ends up being strangled (off-camera) by vines, as if he had been hanged. Perhaps the makers of the Broadway version felt this was too gruesome an end to present to family audiences on stage, so their Clayton simply gets locked in the brig. That’s not as dramatic, and, moreover, Clayton doesn’t seem a necessary part of the story on stage, perhaps because the aforementioned shipboard sequence is missing.

The animated movie memorably concludes with a spectacular sequence of Tarzan and Jane sliding and swinging through vines, passing all the other surviving principal characters as they go. It’s the equivalent of the celebratory dance that is a traditional ending of comedy. Without the aid of animation and computers, it is impossible to duplicate this sequence onstage, and the Broadway version ends on a quieter note, with Tarzan and Jane kissing in mid-air. Again, the dramatic impact has been scaled down.

I agree with New York Times drama critic Ben Brantley, who wrote in his May 11 review that after the show’s initial burst of aerial acrobatics, “the thrill is gone”. I found myself getting used to seeing characters soar through the air. Somehow, the aerial feats should ideally have become more astonishing as the show progressed, so that the audience wouldn’t take them for granted.

As the spectacle lessens in dramatic impact in the second act, the show’s essential hollowness becomes clearer. Neither the dialogue nor the performances invest the show with sufficient emotional and psychological depth. That’s a shame since the source material is so powerful in these respects.

At first I thought of watching the animated Tarzan film again to compare it with the stage show. But then I had the better idea of going right to the source, and reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original Tarzan of the Apes. I’d read DC’s comics adaptation of the novel, but I’d never read the Burroughs original. Since the book is now in the public domain in the United States (although the Burroughs estate maintains a trademark on the character), I could obtain a free online copy thanks to the Gutenberg Project, and so can you.

I was in for many surprises. First and foremost, I discovered that the book was far better written than I had expected; my only real complaint was the woodenly one-dimensional dialogue and characterization for Tarzan’s real mother, Alice Clayton.

Another surprise was that in the book, Jane is American: in fact, she’s from Baltimore. The Disney version makes her British, but I don’t quarrel with this, since the English accent and initially inhibited Victorian manner that Minnie Driver gives Jane’s voice in the movie, and that actress Jenn Gambatese supplies in the stage version, make the character both funny and endearing in her first encounters with Tarzan and other jungle denizens.

I had assumed that in the book Jane’s father, Professor Porter, would be more like the gruff, stolid character played by C. Aubrey Smith in the 1932 MGM movie adaptation, and that it was the Disney filmmakers’ idea to turn him into a rather childlike eccentric (who is even as short as a child). But no, Disney was actually being surprisingly faithful to Burroughs’ version of the Professor, who is indeed a comedy character. He is so utterly impractical that Jane worries about him as if she were his parent. At one point the Professor engages in a nonsensical argument with his “fussy” assistant, one Samuel T. Philander (an Edward Everett Horton type?), oblivious to the danger presented by a stalking lion. (“Never, Mr. Philander, never before in my life have I known one of these animals to be permitted to roam at large from its cage. I shall most certainly report this outrageous breach of ethics to the directors of the adjacent zoological garden.”)

I’m disappointed that the Disney stage musical makes the Professor taller and duller, since he presents such clear comedic possibilities.

Reading Burroughs’ book also better enables me to explore the mythic archetypes on which the Tarzan story is founded.

Look at this excerpt from an exchange in which Jane Porter discusses Tarzan with a character called Captain Dufranne: “‘I admit that he would be worth waiting for, this superman of yours,’ laughed the captain. ‘I most certainly should like to see him.'”

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original Tarzan story was first published in All-Story Magazine in 1912 and then in book form in 1914. This was over twenty years before Superman’s debut in Action Comics #1 in 1938. But the word “superman” had already entered the culture as a translation of “ubermensch” from Friedrich Nietzche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the 1880s, which inspired George Bernard Shaw’s 1903 play Man and Superman. Neither Tarzan nor Nietzche’s and Shaw’s “supermen” had literal super-powers.

Nonetheless, Tarzan is definitely one of the group of characters whom I have classified as “proto-superheroes.” In an interview Superman’s co-creator Jerry Siegel, naming influences on the Man of Steel, stated that “there were many: there was Tarzan, who was the greatest action hero of the time. . . .”

Consider the parallels. Each hero has idealized parents who meet dreadful deaths, leaving the hero as an orphaned infant. John and Alice Clayton themselves made the long journey from their advanced civilization (Victorian England) to the comparatively primitive realm (equatorial Africa) where their son was born; Jor-El and Lara dispatched the infant Kal-El in a rocketship from their technologically advanced world, Krypton, to the American farmlands of Earth. Each orphan is found and adopted by a kindly foster parent (Kala) or two (Ma and Pa Kent) in this less sophisticated culture.

It seems odd to compare Ma and Pa Kent to a gorilla (or whatever fictional species of ape Kala might be), and Smallville, Kansas to the jungle home of apes. But the point seems to be that Tarzan and Superman are each like princes whose true identities are unknown and who are raised in lowly circumstances. Tarzan is really a British nobleman, Lord Greystoke, while superman is the son of Krypton’s leading scientist, Jor-El. Not only is Jor-El (in some versions of the Superman legend) a member of the Science Council which governs Krypton’s technocratic society, but in the era of editor Mort Weisinger, Jor-El was a member of the “House of El,” with ancestors who included many of Krypton’s greatest historical figures. Hence, Superman (Kal-El) could be said to be a Kryptonian aristocrat, a member of one of its noble families.

Tarzan and Superman each grows up unaware of what his true identity in his native land is, and instead uses names (Tarzan, Clark Kent) given to him by the culture in which he was raised. Tarzan initially believes that he really is Kala’s son, just as Superman (in various versions of his story) believes he is a native Earthman until he reaches his mid-teens, or even adulthood.

Growing up, Tarzan and Superman each develops into a heroic figure of superior physical prowess. Burroughs concedes that Tarzan is not as strong as one of the dominant male apes, but Burroughs shows how through his superior intelligence and fighting skills, Tarzan can best even the most powerful ape. Moreover, Burroughs shows that through his life in the jungle, Tarzan has not only developed physical prowess greater than that of “civilized” Westerners, but that his senses have also grown more acute than those of normal people. Tarzan may not have actual super-powers, but he comes close.

On the television series Smallville, Clark Kent’s home town seems to be an upscale suburb of Metropolis, but in previous tellings of the Superman legend, Smallville was a genuine small town, far from the big city: Ma and Pa Kent were sometimes even depicted as stereotypical backwoods hicks (see “Comics in Context” #48).

So, another parallel is that Clark Kent/Superman and Tarzan, who each grew up in isolation (to very different degrees) from the rest of society, each must encounter and cope with that society. So it is that Clark Kent moves to Metropolis, and Tarzan encounters other human beings, not only African natives, but white Englishmen and Americans, and eventually journeys to Britain and America.

This process also includes sexual awakening: Tarzan meets Jane, and Superman meets Lois. Reading Burroughs’ account of Jane’s emotions as Tarzan carries her, swinging through the trees, reminded me of Superman carrying Lois in flight over Metropolis in the “Can You Read My Mind?” sequence in Richard Donner’s 1979 Superman movie.

Superman and Tarzan each eventually learns and claims his birth identity — as son of Krypton and as Lord Greystoke — but each ultimately chooses to live in his adopted world: Earth and the African jungle.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the parallels between Superman and Tarzan have been directly addressed through DC’s “Elseworlds” concept, which recasts the mythos of a superhero in different circumstances.

“The Feral Man of Steel” in Superman Annual #6 (1994) initially appears to be inspired more by Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book: the infant Kal-El’s rocket lands in the jungles of India, where he is adopted and raised by a wolf, and grows up to kill his enemy, the tiger Khan (named after Kipling’s Shere Khan).

But eventually the adult Kal-El encounters explorer Lois Lane, playing the role that Jane does in the Tarzan saga, he gets referred to as an “ape-man,” and ultimately becomes a British knight and marries Lois.

The parallels were made more explicit in the later DC/Dark Horse crossover miniseries, Superman/Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle (2001), in which Kal-El is raised by apes in Africa and is called “Argozan.”

The title Tarzan of the Apes and the references to him as an “ape man” are examples of the way that various superheroes and super-villains are humans who are symbolically linked with animals. Thus, the name of another proto-superhero, Zorro, means “the Fox.” Among true superheroes there are Batman, Spider-Man, Hawkman, the Black Panther, and many more.

Even the eagle symbol on Wonder Woman’s costume, and the wings on Captain America’s cowl, link these characters with animals. All of these heroes seem to be contemporary versions of tribal shaman who dressed as animals in order to take on the powers and even the identities of animal spirits.

Burroughs’ presentation of Tarzan as a mysterious figure who strikes unseen at his native foes reminded me at points of Batman. Of course, Batman, Spider-Man, and Daredevil, swinging from ropes, webbing, and cables through the skyscrapers of modern cities, are conscious or unconscious reworkings of the familiar image of Tarzan swinging on vines through the jungle.

Tarzan is also a forebear for the superheroes who represent both the civilized and animalistic sides of humankind. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, who looks rather apelike in Stevenson’s description, got there first. But Hyde is a villain, whereas Tarzan, who was raised as an ape, is a heroic figure. In their different ways, characters like X-Men’s Beast and Wolverine are the heirs of Tarzan.

Burroughs titles one of Tarzan of the Apes chapters, “The Forest God,” and repeats his description of Tarzan as a “god” or “godlike” numerous times. Sexually attracted to him, Jane thinks, “What a perfect creature! There could be naught of cruelty or baseness beneath that godlike exterior. Never, she thought had such a man strode the earth since God created the first in his own image.”

The idea of Tarzan as a “god” reinforces the aspect of the character as a proto-superhero, who is somehow beyond ordinary humanity.

Notice that Jane specifically compares Tarzan to “the first” man, Adam, who was created in the image of God.

Burroughs emphasizes the violence in Tarzan’s personality, and even tells the readers “That he joyed in killing, and that he killed with a joyous laugh upon his handsome lips betokened no innate cruelty. He killed for food most often, but, being a man, he sometimes killed for pleasure, a thing which no other animal does; for it has remained for man alone among all creatures to kill senselessly and wantonly for the mere pleasure of inflicting suffering and death.” (Actually, as Burroughs describes them, Kerchak and other mean-tempered apes will kill out of sheer hatred.)

Still, perhaps Burroughs intends Tarzan to represent man as he was in the Garden of Eden, before discovering “the knowledge of good and evil.” Even after becoming “civilized,” Tarzan does not “fall”: his union with Jane is like starting the saga of Adam and Eve over again, without the unhappy ending.

Burroughs’ references to Tarzan as a “forest god” mark him as a version of the archetypal figure of the “green man,” a spirit of nature and fertility, linked with the vegetative world. Robin Hood and Peter Pan are variations on the “green man”: so are DC’s Swamp Thing and Marvel’s Man-Thing. The “fertility” aspect results in Tarzan’s sexual appeal for Jane. Could it be that, whether by accident or conscious intent, Tarzan’s famous yell, which Burroughs describes in the first book, is a modern version of the cry of the Greek god Pan, another deity of nature and sexuality, who is both manlike and animal-like?

Certainly the nearly omnipresent green color of Tarzan‘s stage set, and even the green on the posters and program cover, fit right into the character’s “green man” heritage.

One song in the show is titled “Son of Man,” a phrase with unmistakable Christian connotations. Jesus would be another deity who dwells among lesser beings as one of them, but the show doesn’t take the Christ analogy further than that song title.

In reading the end of Burroughs’ book, I thought of another Shaw play, Pygmalion, which is better known today through the musical adaptation, My Fair Lady. Professor Henry Higgins had his hands full transforming the vulgar, uneducated Cockney Eliza Doolittle (whom he initially describes as if she were not even human) into a refined lady who can fit into British high society. Both works are founded on an archetype of self-realization through education, as presented through what nowadays we would call a “makeover.”

Burroughs’ Tarzan must take a far more challenging version of this archetypal journey, starting out as a human who was raised to behave like an ape and becoming a British gentleman. Moreover, Burroughs’ Tarzan is initially his own teacher.

It seems to me that this is the principal character arc of Burroughs’ novel, and it is one to which neither the Disney versions nor other film adaptations that I’ve seen do full justice.

In the Disney animated film Tarzan, the gorillas look like animals, but they speak with each other like humans. Hence they are simultaneously animals and people.

This is a duality that is common to the treatment of animals in cartoons, and something that we accept unquestioningly from early childhood. Consider Elmer Fudd hunting Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. On one level, he is a human and they are animals. We may disapprove of hunting animals for sport, but it’s not illegal to do so. On another level, Bugs and Daffy are really humans in the guise of animals: they can talk, they’re physically built much like humans, they’re as tall as Elmer, and they’re certainly smarter than he is. (Note how easily that Bugs can not only deceive Elmer into thinking he really is human, but even seduce him, simply by donning a wig and dress.) On this level, even if we don’t consciously think about it, it would be murder for Elmer to kill Bugs or Daffy. That’s a major reason why we take their side in the cartoons.

In “Tweety and Sylvester” and “Roadrunner” cartoons, Sylvester and Wile E. Coyote are carnivores stalking their natural prey (as the traditional openings of the “Roadrunner” cartoons, giving the animals mock-Latin scientific names, as if these were nature documentaries, remind us). But since Tweety, and even the Roadrunner, despite his inability to talk, demonstrate human personalities, for Sylvester or Wile E. to succeed in killing and devouring them would smack of murder and cannibalism. Hence, the audience decides that it is better for these two predators to go hungry than for them to kill their natural prey.

In his book Burroughs grants the apes their own language, which is complex enough to bear a touch of the poetic. At one point Kerchak challenges Tarzan thus: “‘Come down, Tarzan, great killer,’ cried Kerchak. ‘Come down and feel the fangs of a greater! Do mighty fighters fly to the trees at the first approach of danger?'”

I was impressed by the way the stage musical gives the audience a dual perspective on Tarzan and the gorillas. When they interact among themselves, they speak in English and act with human grace. But this proves to be both a verbal and visual translation of gorilla language and behavior into our own. When actor Josh Strickland as Tarzan initially interacts with Jane and the other explorers, they hear and see him without benefit of “translation.” He grunts, hunches forward in an ape’s posture, strikes the floor, and generally behaves like a beast.

In Disney’s animated film version of The Lion King, some of the lions are voiced by black Americans (such as James Earl Jones), while others are voiced by white Americans (like Matthew Broderick): the villain Scar is unmistakably voiced as a Caucasian Englishman (by Jeremy Irons).

In Julie Taymor’s direction of The Lion King stage musical, there is no effort to disguise the actors playing the lions and other animals as actual beasts. Instead, they are clearly human beings, many of whom wear masks (which do not always conceal their faces) or manipulate puppets that represent their animal personas. Moreover, the majority of the principal actors are black. Hence The Lion King on stage seems more like a contemporary effort to create a myth about African people. To watch the film is to see cartoon animals voiced by human actors. To watch the stage musical is to see human beings, mostly blacks, playing the roles of animals. This is an important distinction.

I expected that the actors portraying the gorillas in the Tarzan stage musical would be more completely costumed to resemble apes. But no. Instead, they wear what appear to be great masses of fur atop their heads and around portions of their bodies, leaving their faces, limbs, midriffs, and (in the case of the men) chests bare. Some of the performers playing apes are white (such as Shuler Hensley as Kerchak) while others are black (like as Chester Gregory II as Terk). They all look unmistakably like human beings.

It’s like the characters in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. The performers, most of whom are dancers in skin-tight costumes, don’t look or act anything like real cats. They come across instead as a rather oddly garbed community of bohemian humans.

In contrast with Burroughs’ novel, there are no actual African natives in Disney’s Tarzan on stage or on film. Since the “apes” in the stage Tarzan look so clearly human, it is even easier to regard Kerchak, Kala and company as stand-ins for African tribespeople.

I’ve heard television newsman Chris Matthews say a few times that movies, no matter what period they are set in, are actually about the time in which they were made.

This certainly applies to Disney’s Tarzan, which becomes a parable for today’s multiracial, multicultural society. Just as mutants in X-Men are metaphors for minorities of any kind, the gorillas in Disney’s Tarzan become metaphors for people of non-Western culture, and specifically Africans. The message is that we’re all alike under the skin, and that the gorillas’ culture and society are just as valid as that of the white British and American characters like the Porters and Clayton.

Maybe this is the reason behind the change that the stage version makes in the movie’s Clayton, the villain who insists that gorillas are animals to be caged or shot. In the movie Clayton is portrayed as an arrogant, macho Brit, the “great white hunter” of popular fiction presented as a villain by contemporary standards. The stage musical turns Clayton into an American with a thick Southern accent, conjuring the stereotype of a racist redneck.

In the Disney versions Tarzan is tempted to go back to England with the Porters, and even dons a suit at one point. But in the end he stays in Africa, as do the Porters: a new community is created, which combines humans and gorillas living together in harmony.

Burroughs’ Tarzan and Jane, in the later books, prefer living in Africa to living in America or Europe. But Burroughs does not perceive living amid the society of apes as a viable alternative for a human being. Although Burroughs gives his great apes a language, he does not have them speak that often in this first Tarzan novel. Moreover, he emphasizes that the apes’ language and their intelligence are severely limited in comparison with humans. (Burroughs seems to have anticipated later studies that revealed that chimpanzees have a limited form of language.) Burroughs only partly anthropomorphizes his ape characters. Ultimately, he insists that they are animals, and that Tarzan, as a human, cannot confine himself to their level.

This differentiates Burroughs from Kipling, who portrays certain of his Jungle Book characters as being wiser than human beings.

In the Disney versions, the villain Clayton kills Kerchak, the gorilla who is Tarzan’s foster father. Tarzan mourns Kerchak’s death, and the Disney version treats it as a murder, for which Clayton must be punished.

But in Burroughs’ book, it is Tarzan who kills Kerchak, who was trying to kill him. In part this is an Oedipal struggle against a sinister father. It is also Burroughs’ effort at depicting the savagery of Tarzan’s world; it is not unlike how Robert E. Howard’s Conan murders the king of Aquilonia on his throne and seizes his crown.

I think that this is also a sign that although by killing Kerchak, Tarzan makes himself “King of the Apes,” this is not the world he should stay in. In Burroughs’ book, the only ape that Tarzan truly cares for is his foster mother Kala. Burroughs kills her off, severing Tarzan’s only real emotional tie to the world of the apes.

Instead, after becoming the apes’ king, Tarzan distances himself from them. He increasingly spends his time at the cabin of his deceased human parents, where he has taught himself to read by studying their books. “As he had grown older, he found that he had grown away from his people. Their interests and his were far removed. They had not kept pace with him, nor could they understand aught of the many strange and wonderful dreams that passed through the active brain of their human king. So limited was their vocabulary that Tarzan could not even talk with them of the many new truths, and the great fields of thought that his reading had opened up before his longing eyes, or make known ambitions which stirred his soul.”

I can accept Burroughs’ notion that Tarzan could teach himself the meaning of nouns from studying picture books. Burroughs admits that it would be harder for Tarzan to decipher the meaning of verbs or other parts of speech; nevertheless, he does so, hard as I may find it to believe this.

It strikes me that Tarzan’s self-education has a literary precedent: that of Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s novel. In both cases, the popular conception of the character is that he is inarticulate, knowing only a few words, yet in their original novels, each learns to speak intelligently and even beautifully.

In the cases of both Tarzan and Shelley’s Monster, the important point is that each taught himself: each was driven to learn, to improve himself, to rise from utter ignorance of human culture to become as fully human as possible.

Burroughs’ book even solves various questions that had puzzled me in various Tarzan adaptations. Why does he wear a loincloth, since apes wear no clothing? Burroughs shows that after Tarzan learns that humans wear clothing, he decides to do so too, precisely in order to set himself apart from the apes. How come Tarzan doesn’t have a beard? Burroughs explains that he teaches himself to shave because Tarzan thinks hair on his face makes him look too apelike. Why doesn’t Tarzan, ignorant of civilized human behavior, just rape Jane? I was surprised to see that Burroughs actually addresses the question: he has Tarzan consider taking Jane by force, but Tarzan decides against it because he is intelligent enough to perceive that humans may have different sexual customs than apes. I find this somewhat hard to believe, too, but it fits in with Burroughs’ theme of Tarzan’s overriding agenda of self-improvement.

Eventually Tarzan meets and befriends his own version of Henry Higgins, the Frenchman Paul d’Arnot, a man of refined manners, who serves as the ape man’s mentor in the ways of Western civilization. Burroughs’ narration tells us that “So apt a pupil had he been that the young Frenchman had labored assiduously to make of Tarzan of the Apes a polished gentleman in so far as nicety of manners and speech were concerned.”

Towards the end of the book, a greatly changed Tarzan meets Jane once more, this time on her home ground of Baltimore, to propose marriage. “‘You are free now, Jane,’ he said, ‘and I have come across the ages out of the dim and distant past from the lair of the primeval man to claim you — for your sake I have become a civilized man — for your sake I have crossed oceans and continents — for your sake I will be whatever you will me to be. I can make you happy, Jane, in the life you know and love best. Will you marry me?'” Tarzan’s arc in the novel encapsulates mankind’s own evolution from his animal origins through barbarism to civilization, or, if you prefer, every man’s growth from an infant that is incapable of adult thinking through childhood into mature adulthood, with love, marriage and feminine virtues as socializing influences.

Burroughs’ point is that Tarzan has even gone surpassed supposedly enlightened Western civilization. Burroughs’ book propounds the familiar theme that “civilized” people are more uncivilized than they pretend to be.

Sweeney Todd, Burroughs latches upon the theme of cannibalism. Apparently unaware that gorillas are primarily vegetarians, Burroughs has his great apes kill and eat apes from other “tribes,” whom they regard as enemies. Not particularly enlightened on racial matters, Burroughs also portrays African natives as cannibals. Even the white mutineers who take over the Porters’ ship are driven to cannibalism.

But Tarzan, Noble Savage that he is, will not engage in cannibalism. In part this is due to Burroughs’ odd interpretation of genetics: Tarzan has inherited a good Englishman’s inner sense of morality. “How may we judge him, by what standards, this ape-man with the heart and head and body of an English gentleman, and the training of a wild beast?” asks Burroughs. He goes on, “All he knew was that he could not eat the flesh of this black man, and thus hereditary instinct, ages old, usurped the functions of his untaught mind and saved him from transgressing a worldwide law of whose very existence he was ignorant.”

But Tarzan is also uncorrupted by human society. In the latter part of the book, a man named Robert Canler, takes advantage of the Porters’ financial difficulties and attempts to marry her. “Do you realize that you are buying me, Mr. Canler?” Jane asks him. Burroughs makes it clear that Canler is little different from Terkoz, an ape who earlier had abducted Jane, attempting to force her to become his mate. Tarzan thwarts both these sexual predators.

At the book’s end, Tarzan and Jane acknowledge their love for each other, but Jane feels honor bound to marry William Cecil Clayton, who has inherited Tarzan’s father’s title and wealth. Neither Clayton nor Jane knows that Tarzan is the true heir, the real Lord Greystoke. But d’Arnot has discovered the truth, and communicates it to Tarzan. “Here was the man who had Tarzan’s title, and Tarzan’s estates, and was going to marry the woman whom Tarzan loved — the woman who loved Tarzan,” Burroughs writes about Clayton. “A single word from Tarzan would make a great difference in this man’s life. It would take away his title and his lands and his castles, and — it would take them away from Jane Porter also.”

Rather like Clark Kent denying to Lois Lane that he is Superman, Tarzan conceals his true identity for the sake of the happiness of the woman he loves, but feels he cannot have. In the book’s final line, Tarzan tells Clayton, “I never knew who my father was.”

In later Tarzan stories Burroughs reunited Tarzan with Jane and had them wed. But the ending of this first Tarzan novel is significant. How many “civilized” people would act as generously and selflessly? This is as much an act of heroism as Tarzan’s physical combats earlier in the book.

It shows just how far Tarzan has progressed: from savage ape man to a truly noble man who is capable of such a grand gesture of self-denial to assure the happiness of another person. Imagine seeing an actor who was capable of presenting this sort of self-transformation onstage? Now there would be a drama to remember.

Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson

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