Of Sequels and Sons: Tarzan and the Problem of Paternity

"There is but one Tarzan," he said. "There can never be another." -Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Son of Tarzan (1917) We have come to understand Tarzan of the Apes (1914), the opening volume of Edgar Rice Burroughs's immensely popular ape-man series, as a paradigmatic tale of racial recapitulation. Orphaned on the west coast of Africa, the infant son of the Lord and Lady Greystoke is adopted by an ape mother mourning the death of her own child, and then raised to puberty among the beasts of her tribe. Tarzan's jungle boyhood-in which he reenacts the developmental stages of his most primitive ancestors, from newborn to animal to savage-paradoxically prepares him, as no other sequence could, for the civilized white adulthood that is his birthright. As Gail Bederman has recently affirmed, a childhood in this primal environment "makes Tarzan an exemplar of [the] perfect manhood" anticipated by turn-of-the-- century recapitulation theorists (220-21). Wild child becomes savage boy becomes civilized man, who in due evolutionary turn outstrips even his own aristocratic forebears. For only by returning to racial origins, recapitulation theory argued, might one move the present race a step ahead. By dramatizing this developmental process in the figure of Tarzan, critics assert, Burroughs gave powerful imaginative shape to a widespread cultural belief. The problem with this account of the Tarzan story, however, is that within a few short years Burroughs would renounce the very recapitulation narrative that underwrote his introductory volume. After giving himself wholeheartedly to that narrative through not one but three Tarzan books, in the final pages of the fourth volume Burroughs suddenly recoiled from the most basic implications of his recapitulatory plot. He did so, I will argue, because of the limits that the demands of that plot posed to the future success of his series, even though the series' triumph had much to do with Burroughs's canny probing of the anxieties surrounding race and reproduction in early-twentieth-- century American culture. Tracking Burroughs's retreat from recapitulation, I believe, will prove as instructive for an understanding of the series as a whole as the initial awakening to the recapitulation narrative proved for readings of Tarzan of the Apes. More specifically, examining this retreat will shed new light on several crucial yet misunderstood aspects of the Tarzan volumes. It will make new sense, for example, of the series' fascination with repetition. It will also clarify the impetus behind Tarzan's emphatic embrace of racially motivated violence despite early narrative signals to the contrary. Most intriguing, it will help explain why Burroughs felt compelled to give Tarzan a son-and then almost immediately to pretend that son had never existed. What we will discover, in fact, is that it is the presence of Tarzan's son-a development virtually demanded by the recapitulation plot itself-that quite unexpectedly pushes the series not toward millennial perfection, but repetitive, if not regressive, mayhem. At stake is more than mere clarification of the series' concerns. Investigating this turn toward regression will illuminate popular American attitudes toward fatherhood at a time when paternal roles were under serious scrutiny. Accustomed by the growth of wage-employment under industrial capitalism to regard breadwinning as not simply a father's prerogative but his essence, yet disappointed by their diminished position in family life, many turn-of-the-century middle-class American men paid increasing attention to fatherly nurture and family companionship. An implicit goal of this attention was to provide more manly guidance for their sons, whom many feared were softening under their mothers' rule (Griswold 90). As we will see, Burroughs invents for Tarzan a child in need of precisely such rescue. But Burroughs simultaneously suggests that in order to preserve their own sense of virility and dominance, many men may have fantasized the disappearance of those selfsame sons. …