Review: Tarzan of the Apes

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1912)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40425.Tarzan_of_the_Apes?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_18

The idea of the ‘noble savage’ son of Viscount Greystoke both reflects British colonial perspectives of Africans and challenges them. The image of Tarzan swinging through the jungle on grapevines yodelling ‘Aayahyayahaah’ has appealed to generations of children.
Tarzan grows up in the jungle, raised by apes, but his discovery of his dead parents’ cabin leads him to struggle with his identity—is he a savage man? or a noble ape? From books and letters found there, he examines the ‘little bugs’ on the pages and teaches himself to read.
He kills the chief Kerchak and becomes King of the Apes, yet his superior intelligence distances him from them.
He falls in love with Jane, a thoroughly civilised white woman, whom he saves from peril. She, too, is smitten. ‘Beast?’ she wonders of the ape-man. ‘Then God make me a beast, for man or beast, I am yours.’
The passages devoted to Tarzan and Jane discovering each other are beautiful, but I was disappointed nowhere to see the line, ‘Me Tarzan; you Jane’.
He searches for many chapters to reunite with Jane, only to discover she is engaged to the cousin who has usurped his viscountship.
He proves his ‘racial superiority’ by treating Jane in a gentlemanly manner, said to be a ‘hallmark of his aristocratic birth’, though he has never been taught this behaviour, and by his revulsion to cannibalism and refusal to eat an African man he has killed. We have to quell our own revulsion at Burrough’s stereotypical portrayal of black Africans, his racist theme of the triumph of white Western civilisation and his sexist helpless females.
The structure of the novel reflects its origin in 1912 as a magazine sequel, each chapter telling another of Tarzan’s escapades and his relations with his ape family, the ‘blacks’—cannibalistic hunters living nearby—and the white visitors.
Tarzan’s evolution toward acculturation is lightning fast, more rapid than would be credible, and I believe Burroughs could have done a whole lot more with the beast-or-man/gentleman-or-savage theme.