Burrough has an ability to create fictional worlds vastly different from, but parallel to, the real world. The contrast between the “civilized” world of humans and the “uncivilized” world of the jungle is prevalent throughout the Tarzan series.
Tarzan of the Apes is very much a product of its age: replete with bloodthirsty natives and a bulky, swooning American Negress. Burroughs countervails such incorrectness with some rather unattractive representations of white civilization-mutinous, murderous sailors, effete aristos, self-involved academics and hard-hearted cowards.
At the heart of the book rightly lies the resourceful title character, a man increasingly torn between the civil and the savage.
Published by Random House
ISBN-13: 978-0345319777
September 21st, 2009 at 10:37 am
Tarzan is the son of two aristocrats and the book plays around with issues of class as well as race and inheritance. Tarzan, raised among apes, proves to be better educated in gentlemanly codes than his cousin who is his rival in the civilised world. At the end of the book Tarzan refuses to claim his ‘gentlemanly” inheritance, saying that his mother was an ape and so could tell him nothing about his family. The outcome is that he loses Jane to his cousin but keeps his integrity. The outcome also seems to imply that there’s not much place for gentlemen in the struggle to survive and bear offspring.