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Popular Culture Review
substitution and promising a vision of the “ABDUCTION OF THE WHITE GIRL BY
APES...”). But rest assured: if any of those apes did lay a finger on Enid
Markey’s Jane, it was a white hand inside that monkey-suit glove.
Tarzan saves Jane, defeating the ape-creature (who happens to be his
foster parents’ biological son) only to carry her away, beset himself by the
bestial stirrings. Now it’s Jane’s turn to save herself, by saving Tarzan from
himself. A paragon of Southern Ladyhood, Jane inspires his restraint. For
Jane—as the book unambiguously messages—does Tarzan become a civilized
man. For Jane he leaves nature and all things natural behind. I’d go so far as to
say that because over the course of twenty-four books these two hearts-on-fire
lovers have only one child suggests that they consummated their love only the
one time, on the wedding night, and thus can Jane, for all intents and purposes
within the world of Southern propriety, uphold the cults of virginity and
connubial domesticity that readers of William Faulkner know so well. (Compare
this to New York City’s solution, whereby the source of white fascination and
anxiety becomes the literal impediment: make the Kong so enormous to render
intimate congress impossible.)
Here’s where things get really interesting. Jane too, despite her snowy
whiteness, is beset by bestial stirrings. Instinctively, for Lord Greystoke, for the
noble hidden within; but physically, for the savage body in front of her. A body
Burroughs describes as deeply darkened by the African sun and a body clad in
native garb. As Conevery Bolton Valecius’s study of attitudes of nineteenth
century settlers to Southern frontier states like Missouri and Arkansas shows,
white Americans felt they “did not belong in hot places; black people did.”3 At
one point Jane shudders with the thought of the half-caste children Tarzan likely
has fathered on a native bride, but that shudder runs rich and deep. Burroughs
has overtly saved the reader from witnessing the white woman’s rape by the
ape-creature and surrogate black man only to subliminally titillate the reader
with the miscegenous lust between Tarzan and Jane. It’s not for nothing that
Nigel Cox’s novel Tarzan Presley imagines Tarzan as rockabilly Elvis, taking
advantage of the transgressive blackness essential to the two iconic white men’s
appeal: “Tarzan [Presley] was not just the race thing but also the race thing with
sex in it.”4
The universe of Tarzan narratives and artifacts I call Tarzania, flirts
with more than just the miscegenation taboo. Miscegenation, homosexuality,
and incest—these are the sexual relations civilization has defined not as
unnatural, but as uncivilized. They are not crimes against nature. They are
crimes o f nature against civilization. Thus these bestial potentialities constitute
the necessary and necessarily repressed subtexts of Tarzan’s design to evolve
into an English gentleman. In Tarzan tales, cannibalism is often their proxy.5
Miscegenation, homosexuality, and incest also happen to be the three
contending motives for the murder at the center of William Faulkner’s great
Southern epic Absalom, Abaslom! Does Henry Sutpen kill Charles Bon rather
than let his sister marry him because Bon has black blood; because he is their