Tarzan is a fictional character, an archetypal feral child raised in the African jungle by apes, who later returns to civilization only to largely reject it and return to the wild as a heroic adventurer. Created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan first appeared in the novel Tarzan of the Apes (magazine publication 1912, book publication 1914), and then in twenty-three sequels and innumerable works in other media, authorized or not.

The Tarzan character

Tarzan is the son of a British Lord and Lady who were marooned on the West coast of Africa by mutineers. Tarzan's parents died when he was an infant, and he was raised by the Mangani, Great Apes of a species unknown to science. Kala is his ape mother. Tarzan (White-skin) is his ape name; his English name is John Clayton, Lord Greystoke (according to Burroughs; Earl of Greystoke in later, non-canonical sources, notably the 1984 movie Greystoke).
 
As a young adult, he meets a young American woman, Jane Porter, who along with her father and others of their party is marooned at exactly the same spot on the African coast where Tarzan's parents were twenty years earlier. When she returns to America, he leaves the jungle in search of her, his one true love. In later books, Tarzan and Jane marry and he lives with her for a time in England. They have one son, Jack, who takes the ape name Korak the Killer. Tarzan is contemptuous of the hypocrisy of civilization, and he and Jane return to Africa, making their home on an extensive estate that becomes a base for Tarzan's later adventures.

In Tarzan, Burroughs created an extreme example of a hero figure largely unalloyed with character flaws or faults. He is described as being Caucasian, extremely athletic, tall, handsome, and tanned, with grey eyes and black hair. Emotionally, he is courageous, loyal and steady. He is intelligent and learns new languages easily. He is presented as behaving ethically, at least by Burroughs' definitions, in most situations, except when seeking vengeance under the motivation of grief, as when his ape mother Kala is killed in Tarzan of the Apes, or when he believes Jane has been murdered in Tarzan the Untamed.

He is deeply in love with his wife and totally devoted to her, and in numerous situations where other women express their attraction to Tarzan, politely but firmly declines their attentions. When presented with a situation where a weaker individual or party is being preyed upon by a stronger foe, Tarzan invariably takes the part of the weaker party. In dealing with other men Tarzan is firm and forceful. With male friends he is reserved but deeply loyal and generous. As a host he is likewise generous and gracious. As a leader he commands devoted loyalty.

In contrast to these noble characteristics, Tarzan's philosophy embraces an extreme form of "return to nature". Although he is able to pass within society as a civilized individual, he prefers to "strip off the thin veneer of civilization", as Burroughs often puts it. His preferred dress is a knife and a loincloth of animal hide, his preferred abode is a convenient tree branch which happens to be nearby when he desires to sleep, and his favored food is raw meat, killed by himself; even better if he is able to bury it a week so that putrefaction has had a chance to tenderize it a bit.

Tarzan's primitivist philosophy was absorbed by countless fans, amongst whom was Jane Goodall, who describes the Tarzan series as having a major influence on her childhood. She states that she felt she would be a much better spouse for Tarzan than his fictional wife, Jane, and that when she first began to live among and study the chimpanzees she was fulfilling her childhood dream of living among the great apes just as Tarzan did.

Skills and abilities

In many ways, Tarzan's jungle upbringing gave him abilities above and beyond those of ordinary humans. These abilities include climbing, clinging, and leaping as well as any great ape, as well as walking on all fours exceptionally well, despite his human frame. His senses are enhanced; he is able to smell food or poachers at least two thirds of a mile away, and hear approaching stampedes from two. He can read body language exceptionally well. He is an excellent judge of character.

His strength, speed, agility, reflexes, balance, flexibility, reaction time, and swimming abilities are much better than normal. He has wrestled full grown bull apes and gorillas, rhinos, crocodiles, anacondas, sharks, big cats and even dinosaurs (when he visited Pellucidar). He has bent iron bars in his bare hands and easily lifted large treasure chests one-handed that four burly sailors had trouble with. His aim never fails.

He is capable of communicating with every species of animal in the jungle, short of predators. He can recover from wounds that would kill normal men, such as gunshot wounds to the head. He was trained as a soldier in WWI and possesses advanced learning skills which enabled him to teach himself how to read with nothing but a few books. He is attacked by a sorcerer who is using a magic rock for mind control, only to discover Tarzan is immune to mental probing. Eventually, Tarzan becomes immortal due to a witch doctor's potion.

While Tarzan of the Apes met with some critical success, subsequent books in the series received a cooler reception. They have been criticized for being derivative and formulaic. The characters are often said to be two-dimensional, the dialogue wooden, and the storytelling devices (such as excessive reliance on coincidence) strain credibility. While Burroughs is not a polished novelist, he is a vivid storyteller, and many of his novels are still in print.

Despite critical panning, the Tarzan stories have been amazingly popular. Fans love his melodramatic situations and the elaborate details he works into his fictional world, such as his construction of a partial language for his great apes.

Critical reception

Since the beginning of the 1970's, Tarzan books and movies have often been criticized as being blatantly racist. The early books give an overwhelmingly negative and stereotypical portrayal of native Africans, both "Arab" and Black. In The Return of Tarzan, Arabs are "surly looking" and say things like "dog of a Christian", while blacks are "lithe, ebon warriors, gesticulating and jabbering". Other ethnic groups and social classes are likewise rendered as stereotypes; this was the custom in popular fiction of the time. A Swede has "a long yellow moustache, an unwholesome complexion, and filthy nails" and Russians cheat at cards. Royalty (excepting the House of Greystoke), is invariably effete. In later books, there is an attempt to portray Africans in a more realistic light. For example, in "Tarzan's Quest", while the hero is still Tarzan, and the Black Africans relatively primitive, they are portrayed as individuals, with good and bad traits, and the main villains have white skins. Burroughs never does get over his distaste for European royalty, though.

Burroughs' opinions, made known mainly through the narrative voice in the stories, reflect common attitudes, widely held in his time, which in a 21st-century context would be considered racist and sexist. The author is not especially mean-spirited in his attitudes. His heroes do not engage in violence against women or in racially motivated violence. Still, the attitudes of a superior-inferior relationship are plain and occasionally explicit; according to James Loewen's Sundown Towns, this may be a vestige of Burroughs having been from Oak Park, Illinois, a former Sundown town (a town that forbids non-whites from living within it--or it may very well be the fact these were common attitudes at the turn of the century).

Like many men of his time, Burrough's racism was part of what he absorbed from the culture around him. When Burroughs moved to Hollywood, his attitudes became much more liberal, and the later Tarzan books include heavy-handed satire of sexism, racism, and organized religion. In Jungle Tales of Tarzan, Tarzan adopts a little Black boy, and teaches him jungle lore. Whites who mistreat blacks are portrayed as in the wrong, and if his view of Blacks is by-and-large negative, his view of whites is no better. As for sexism, in Tarzan's Quest, we have a situation in which Jane aknowledges that a man should "naturally" be the leader of their little band, but, since none of the men present are competent to undertake the task, she assumes leadership herself.