59 pages • 1 hour read
Edgar Rice BurroughsTarzan of the Apes
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1912A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American writer of adventure fiction who was born in 1875 and died in 1950. Burroughs is known for creating Tarzan and the character John Carter from the Barsoom stories. He was born in Chicago and lived much of his life in the suburb of Oak Park. As a young man, he attempted to enlist in the military but was discharged due to a heart condition. He then tried his hand at a variety of different jobs, including ranching, gold prospecting, and selling pencil sharpeners. He began writing adventure stories to sell to pulp magazines around 1911 after being encouraged by the low quality of most published stories at the time. His works were well received, particularly by young boys who were often the primary audience for pulp adventure fiction. While Burroughs claimed that the story of Tarzan was inspired by the Roman legend of Romulus and Remus, a pair of noble infants raised by a wolf in the wilderness, Rudyard Kipling speculated in his posthumously published autobiography that Burroughs had “‘jazzed’ the motif of the Jungle Books” (Something of Myself, Macmillan and Co, 1937, p. 219). Despite the similarities between the two stories of human children being raised in the jungle by animals, Burroughs denied having ever read The Jungle Book.
Burroughs strongly supported the philosophy of eugenics, the same ideal embraced in Germany by the Nazi party. He traced his ancestry back to England and argued that the Anglo-Saxon race was “superior” to other races. Several of his books depict utopian societies in which eugenics has solved social problems such as crime by employing forced sterilization. Burroughs explicitly advocated for the adoption of eugenicist policies in his unpublished essay I See A New Race. His racial bias against non-white people can be found throughout his fiction. His Barsoom series notably features a Confederate soldier as the protagonist and hero, although Burroughs was not raised in the American South. Similarly, his depiction of the character Tarzan frequently emphasizes how Tarzan’s English ancestry helps him to excel and eventually dominate the Indigenous populations in Africa, who are portrayed as being “inferior” to the protagonist.
Historical Context: European Colonialism in Africa
The “Scramble for Africa” refers to the invasion and colonization of Africa by Western European nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the period from 1870 to 1914, almost the entire continent of Africa was claimed by European nations, with only Liberia and Ethiopia remaining independent. The Berlin Conference of 1884 formalized and regulated this imperial expansion so that European powers would not come into conflict with one another over African land. One of the most infamous colonial enterprises enacted during this period was King Leopold II of Belgium’s annexation of Congo. This region of central Africa was explored by the American Henry Morton Stanley on behalf of Leopold II, and he made treaties with various local chiefs to form a colony called the Congo Free State. This colony was under the direct control of the Belgian monarch, who sought to profit from the region’s rubber resources. Leopold II’s treatment of Indigenous ethnic groups was highly violent and oppressive; many workers on rubber plantations lived in impoverished conditions with very few freedoms. This situation led to protests by activists and reformers from Europe and America who sought to expose the atrocities committed by Leopold II and the rubber industry. By 1908, the public’s opposition to the Congo Free State led to the Belgian parliament removing the region from the monarch’s control. However, most of these European colonies in Africa persisted until World War II. The decolonization process that occurred thereafter left many African nations economically disadvantaged and divided based upon the borders drawn by Europeans rather than the traditional territories of local ethnic groups, causing ongoing strife and tension in many regions of the continent. Thus, although Tarzan of the Apes is popularly considered to be an adventure story, it also serves as a historical artifact and an indirect product of many injustices that the colonial endeavors of European nations perpetrated upon the nations and cultures of the African continent. It is important to note that examples of racism are deeply ingrained in Burroughs’s prose and philosophy throughout the novel, and as such are inextricably linked to the premise of the story as a whole.
Ideological Context: Scientific Racism
Scientific racism is a form of pseudoscience based on an incorrect understanding of human biology that posits a supposed natural hierarchy of racial superiority. This belief was widely accepted as factual in the 19th and early 20th centuries before being eventually debunked after World War II. This idea was developed by European scholars during the 18th century after the taxonomical classification of animal species was developed by Carl Linnaeus. It gained additional popularity after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Many European intellectuals sought to apply the principles of taxonomy, evolution, and natural selection to the racial categories of humans, despite the fact that race has no biological basis, as humans are not genetically distinct species and all are classified as Homo sapiens. By applying this incorrect understanding of genetics, evolutionary biology, and anthropology to human populations, scientific racism attempted to prove that certain races possessed inheritable characteristics that made them either more or less advanced than others. One of the methods that was developed to try to quantify racial difference is known as phrenology. This pseudoscience uses the measurements and angles of the human skull as the basis for assumptions about intelligence and temperament, with larger foreheads being considered a sign of high intelligence and more pronounced jaws being associated with early hominids and apes. However, the size and angles of the skull have no proven relationship to intelligence or personality within human populations. Although the pseudoscience of phrenology has long since been debunked, it does make an appearance in Burroughs’s novels from time to time, especially when the cranial features of certain characters are pointedly described.
Proponents of scientific racism used the physical differences in appearance between races to justify the misguided belief that certain races, generally Northwestern Europeans, were inherently “superior” to other humans. Most notably, enslavers used phrenological “evidence” of the supposed lower intelligence and more animalistic qualities of non-white people to suggest that slavery was a natural and ethical practice. Scientific racism eventually became the basis for the practice of eugenics—the idea that by preventing humans with undesirable traits from reproducing, the human species could be gradually improved. The Nazis employed scientific racism by instituting mandatory intelligence tests, carrying out the forced sterilization of people with disabilities, and committing a systematic genocide of the Jewish people in concentration camps. More recent scientific studies have disproven the basis of scientific racism through analysis of genetics and the development of a better understanding of how social inequality can impact seemingly unbiased data like test scores.
