Tarzan of the Apes

Now there is a heading to catch any girl’s eye, don’t you think? I happen to be re-reading this book. Edgar Rice Burroughs has a wonderful vocabulary and I understand why my father, an immigrant, had such a fantastic vocabulary of his own. He had read all 24 Tarzan novels, not to mention Burroughs other books!

But back to Tarzan. Tarzan is really the impossible ideal. Forget Rhett Butler. Forget Heathcliff and Rochester. Tarzan treats women with respect. He is noble, honest, faithful, intelligent, kind, fearless, steadfast. All the things a girl wants. She might not know she wants them, but that’s what she wants. I will tell you what I don’t want. I don’t want to be reforming some loser, I don’t want to be taming some kind of misogynist, I don’t want to be a mother, sister or friend to someone bent out of shape. But when you watch a romantic film you seem to get led down the garden path where the woman ends up having to fix the guy.

Tarzan is a very interesting character though I am rather dubious about his achievements in reading without language. I just think he is an interesting creation, rather in the same vein as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, sort of out of nowhere. Tarzan is a truly noble character who seems to know instinctively what is morally right. At our book club recently we discussed a moral compass and whether humans needed religion to give us that moral compass. Some of us were agreed that we didn’t think religion was necessary to know what was right or wrong. Children know instinctively what is fair. They can see when something is divided if it is even steven or if someone is getting a bigger piece of the pie. And that isn’t right (getting a bigger piece of the pie)! Tarzan figures out on his own that killing another man isn’t correct, even though the man is not “of his tribe”. I think that is real. I think we ought to be able to figure that out for ourselves.

And that begs the question, why is there war? Where is our moral compass? Some how we have lost our truth north. Isn’t that sad? Civilization isn’t at the level of a Tarzan.