Tarzan

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TARZAN

Created by the author Edgar Rice Burroughs the fictional character Tarzan was born Lord Greystoke, a member of an aristocratic British family. Stranded in the African jungle as a small child, Tarzan is found and raised by a group of primates. The character was first introduced to the public in 1 9 1 2 in Tarzan of the Apes, which appeared in the magazine All-Story. The twenty-five novels that followed between 1 9 1 2 and 1 947 were a huge commercial success, with over 1 00 million copies sold, and Tarzan has become symbolic of a primal form of masculinity untouched by Western industrial civilization, as well as an escapist fantasy for generations of boys and men.

The Tarzan novels share certain plot features: The peace and order of the African jungle, maintained by Tarzan, is dis turbed by the arrival of a group of Europeans in search of treasure, usually associated with a lost civilization; the expedi tion often includes a white woman, typically of middle-class background, who is abducted and subsequently rescued; and Tarzan restores order in the jungle through a mixture of ani mal instinct, cunning, and sheer physical prowess.

Burroughs' novels negotiate meanings of masculinity by using the figure of Tarzan to address Victorian notions of race and civilized self-restraint, Gilded Age fears of overcivilization, and early-twentieth-century demands for a "strenuous life" and a "passionate manhood." Tarzan owes his m asculine power to a combination of his Anglo-Saxon racial heritage, which endowed him with "civilized" behavioral traits, and a childhood in the wilds of Africa that steels his masculinity by forcing on him a Darwinistic struggle for survival. This model of masculinity suggests an ambivalent relation between man hood and civilization: only men of allegedly civilized races are endowed with true manliness, but this civilization stifles mas

culinity by removing men from invigorating contact with nature. Only in the African jungle can an otherwise effeminate English aristocratic boy achieve his full masculine potential. In the end, Tarzan represents an imperialistic fantasy: While it is the more primitive masculinity that enables Tarzan to prevail over his enemies, it is his Anglo-Saxon heritage that enables him to create order out of chaos in the jungle.

Tarzan's appeal was not limited to the readers of mass market pulp magazines, but influenced scientific thinking about masculinity as well. Granville Stanley Hall, the father of

American psychology, enjoyed Tarzan so much that he taught Tarzan of the Apes in his course on human development at Clark University. For Hall, who encouraged parents to nurture evolutionary remnants of savagery in boys as an antidote to the effeminizing effects of modern industrial civilization, Tarzan represented an example of the synthesis he hoped for young American men to achieve.

Tarzan represents the fantasy of a natural masculine iden tity that exists outside of civilization but is not incompatible with it. This fantasy has had more recent manifestations, par ticularly in the mythopoetic men's movement and such writ ings as Douglas Gillette's King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine ( 199 1 ) and Robert Bly's Iron John: A Book About Men ( 1 990) . The escapist fantasy that such texts represent signifies the desire of many men for an unchanging blueprint for manhood that is preordained by nature.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 996.

Holtsmark, Erling B. Edgar Rice Burroughs. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Kasson, John F. Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male

Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America. New York: Hill and Wang 200l.

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TARZAN RELATED ENTRIES

Darwinism; Hall, Granville Stanley; Heroism; Imperialism; Industrialization; Iron John: A Book About Men; Men's Movements; Middle-Class Manhood; Passionate Manhood; Progressive Era; Race; Roosevelt, Theodore; Whiteness

-Thomas Win ter

TECHNOLOGY

American masculinity has long been linked to mastering tech nology. From the first axe to the spinning j enny to the McCormick reaper, inventions designed by and for men have shaped United States settlement and industry. Yet, more than a masculine tool for cultivation and industry, technology has also been a force for masculine identity. Three technological movements illustrate the ways in which American masculini ties are interwoven with technologies. They make it clear that while American men have long been concerned with making machines, machines have long been at work making men.

"Tinkering" Technology: From the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century

In the eighteenth-century, technology was essential for claim ing masculinity; a man owned his own tools and could not claim status as an independent man until he possessed the right equipment for the job, be it farming or blacksmithing. The association between tools, crafts, and masculinity went unchallenged until the late nineteenth century, when mecha nized innovations and industrialization changed the meaning of technology in men's lives -those with the proper "tools" became scientists, "tinkerers," and factory owners. This trans formation turned craftsmen into workers and dramatically altered definitions of masculinity.

The new relation between technology and masculinity was evident by the early twentieth century, when m any American men considered such technological innovators as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford the great heroes of the day. Edison, creator of hundreds of inventions, including electric lighting and motion pictures, and Ford, originator of the assembly line and the Model T automobile, represented the best of an era of unbridled male inventiveness. Together, they signaled for many that a new age had arrived in which self taught "tinkerers" could master technology to revolutionize the world's products, processes, and systems.

Ford and Edison became heroic figures not merely on the strength of their inventions. Rather, it was their hands on approach to invention that defined their manliness and

fascinated the American public. Edison, often called the Wizard of Menlo Park, was well known for the relentless energy and strict work ethic that he and his "insomnia squad" of assistants celebrated. At a time when many American men associated intellectualism with effeminacy, Edison and Ford eschewed university-educated engineers in favor of experienced tinkerers, surrounding themselves with carpenters and machinists who favored craftsmanship and experimentation over theories and book learning.

Ford and Edison dominated an era in which men's bodies seemed capable of creating, harnessing, and directing techno logical power. If American men could neither be in charge of the industries nor shape the work processes that technology created, they could nonetheless take pride in their ability to control their machines. Popular representations of Ford's River Rouge Factory in Detroit, Michigan, reveal an assump tion that these powerful new inventions would make powerful new men. For instance, Diego Rivera's murals depict muscular workers directing the flow of technological energy, while Charles Sheeler's photographs and paintings place the factory and its workers in a celebratory, spiritual light. Although tech nology had its critics, including Henry Adams, who wrote about the fearful implications of machine power for men, its celebrants were more numerous. When men worshiped the prowess of an Edison or a Ford, they anticipated a new era governed by those who mastered technological systems rather than those who labored with their own tools.

Post-World War II: "Do-it-Yourself" Technology During and after World War II, as factories grew increasingly systematized and management became professionalized, the educated engineer began to assume the status of male American hero and to challenge the primacy of the workplace tinkerer. But although hands-on technological wizards like Ford and Edison were increasingly replaced by distant bureau crats, the tinkerer (and the model of masculinity he repre sented) found refuge in the home. Between 1 920 and 1 950, American men transformed the home's gendered spaces as they embraced a new ethic of do-it-yourself technology.

Do-it-yourself movements did not appear until the early twentieth century. Previously, after the nineteenth-century rise of separate spheres in which men sought employment in the world outside the home and women remained "employed" within the home, wives, daughters, and hired male laborers were expected to care for the home. According to Andrew Jackson Downing, a popular nineteenth-century architect and writer of "country house" plan books, the only proper way to have one's lawn maintained was to hire someone to do it. This