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bioniclib 's review for:
Tarzan of the Apes
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Who hasn’t heard of Tarzan? While many people haven’t seen the movies (including yours truly) they can all hear the primal scream uttered by the wild man. So looking for a light read to balance my heavy management and database school books, I stumbled across Tarzan of the Apes. And since I subscribe to the thought that the book is always better than the movie, I thought I’d give it a go. Despite all its faults, of which there are many, I’m glad I did.
The first couple of chapters tell of how Lord Greystoke and his wife come to be stranded in the wilds of Africa, a mutiny. As an aristocratic man, Greystoke put his massive brain to work and successfully builds a house for the two of them. All is well, save for their lack of rescue, and soon the missus is with child. To cut to the chase, scant months after the baby is born, the parents both die. As luck with have it, a poor lady ape loses her baby around the same time. As you probably guessed, Kala (the lady ape) adopts the young lad and viola: Tarzan!
The expected struggles of a human boy being raised by apes occur. He’s slower to develop than his ape-brethren but he soon catches up and surpasses them. He’s a perfect physical specimen, combining both the raw primal strength of apes with the highly adaptive and intelligent brain of man. He can kill gorillas and lions with nothing more than a knife and a vine-fashioned rope. He highly developed homo sapien brain even allows him to learn to read by months-long examination of the books left by his daddy. Clearly, Burroughs wants to the reader to see Tarzan as the pinnacle of human achievement.
If Tarzan is the ideal, then the other men (and women) featured in the book are, well, trash. First you have the sailors. I filthy lot, prone to literally shooting their “friends” in the back. Then you have the black African native and their cannibalism. Next up is the other band of white folk that come to the African coast: they’re overly concerned with honor and are a bumbling bookish lot. Jane is the stereotypical woman ruled by her emotions and prone to irrational behavior but it’s excusable since she is, after all, just a women. I save the best for last: Esmeralda. She’s Jane’s maid and is a slave in all but name. An obese woman that faints more often than she blinks and her speech is damn near the hyperbole of an uneducated person. In short, the Apes and their excusable murderous rages are portrayed as more noble than any man (or woman) aside from Tarzan. If it wasn’t the admirable independent streak Jane has, I’d say the book was a cookie-cutter stereotype.
Honestly, even with all that said, it’s worth a read. If nothing else to see the clear influence the time in which it was written has on it. It was published nearly 100 years ago in 1914. It’s always fascinating to catch a glimpse of the past. It’s amazing how far we’ve come in 100 years, yet also the attitudes towards women and black that shock me so aren’t completely gone yet. So it helps put present day examples of racism and misogyny into perspective. Bad? Indisputably. But it used to be a lot worse.
On a side note, I read the e-version of this book. The free one. Did you know that most books in the public domain are always available at your friendly neighborhood library? It’s true. I found Tarzan in the Minuteman Library Network Catalog. When you click the link, just search for Tarzan and you’ll get a slew of them or browse the titles to see what else is there.
The first couple of chapters tell of how Lord Greystoke and his wife come to be stranded in the wilds of Africa, a mutiny. As an aristocratic man, Greystoke put his massive brain to work and successfully builds a house for the two of them. All is well, save for their lack of rescue, and soon the missus is with child. To cut to the chase, scant months after the baby is born, the parents both die. As luck with have it, a poor lady ape loses her baby around the same time. As you probably guessed, Kala (the lady ape) adopts the young lad and viola: Tarzan!
The expected struggles of a human boy being raised by apes occur. He’s slower to develop than his ape-brethren but he soon catches up and surpasses them. He’s a perfect physical specimen, combining both the raw primal strength of apes with the highly adaptive and intelligent brain of man. He can kill gorillas and lions with nothing more than a knife and a vine-fashioned rope. He highly developed homo sapien brain even allows him to learn to read by months-long examination of the books left by his daddy. Clearly, Burroughs wants to the reader to see Tarzan as the pinnacle of human achievement.
If Tarzan is the ideal, then the other men (and women) featured in the book are, well, trash. First you have the sailors. I filthy lot, prone to literally shooting their “friends” in the back. Then you have the black African native and their cannibalism. Next up is the other band of white folk that come to the African coast: they’re overly concerned with honor and are a bumbling bookish lot. Jane is the stereotypical woman ruled by her emotions and prone to irrational behavior but it’s excusable since she is, after all, just a women. I save the best for last: Esmeralda. She’s Jane’s maid and is a slave in all but name. An obese woman that faints more often than she blinks and her speech is damn near the hyperbole of an uneducated person. In short, the Apes and their excusable murderous rages are portrayed as more noble than any man (or woman) aside from Tarzan. If it wasn’t the admirable independent streak Jane has, I’d say the book was a cookie-cutter stereotype.
Honestly, even with all that said, it’s worth a read. If nothing else to see the clear influence the time in which it was written has on it. It was published nearly 100 years ago in 1914. It’s always fascinating to catch a glimpse of the past. It’s amazing how far we’ve come in 100 years, yet also the attitudes towards women and black that shock me so aren’t completely gone yet. So it helps put present day examples of racism and misogyny into perspective. Bad? Indisputably. But it used to be a lot worse.
On a side note, I read the e-version of this book. The free one. Did you know that most books in the public domain are always available at your friendly neighborhood library? It’s true. I found Tarzan in the Minuteman Library Network Catalog. When you click the link, just search for Tarzan and you’ll get a slew of them or browse the titles to see what else is there.