Jane Porter was never intended to be Mrs. Tarzan
Warning: Contains spoilers. Of course, they’re spoilers of two books that were written more than 100 years ago, but still …
Over the years since the publication of Tarzan of the Apes, critics have generally been unkind to Edgar Rice Burroughs — although, to be quite fair, not everything he has written has represented him at his best.
“Among other ostensible justifications for relegating Burroughs to oblivion, if not banning him entirely, have been his [alleged] reliance on formulas, belief in Darwinian evolution, inferiority to Kipling, preposterousness, antireligious tendencies and right-wing extremism, excessive violence, infantile appeal, lack of imagination and snobbery,” author Erling B. Holtsmark writes dryly in Tarzan and Tradition (1981).
Burroughs’ vulnerability to this sort of criticism, if vulnerability it was, stemmed partly from his remarkable ability to take a ridiculously improbable series of events and, by an sophisticated use of language and storytelling technique that owes much to classical Greek techniques, make it believable. Not credible, you understand — nothing could make the adoption of a one-year-old baby by a family of great apes credible. But you could, under Burroughs’ guidance, silence your inner critic just enough to admit the remote possibility that it might actually be a thing that could happen; and that was enough.
The problem came when a reader was unwilling to, as it were, take the ride by fully suspending his disbelief. It becomes very easy to scoff at a narrative that earnestly assures one that it’s possible for a baby born in the African jungle to be raised by apes and to become their king — and, as well, to comfortably assume that a narrative shot through with such crude manipulation of the laws of physics can hold no deeper subtleties. This is likely why so many sophisticated critics have spent the last 100 years taking Burroughs’ ironic references, soft sarcasms and subtle witticisms at face value. There is a noticeable tendency of critics to assume Burroughs’ stories are so simple, one need not spend much time on them to understand them fully.
In some cases, this has worked to Burroughs’ advantage — as in the case of the California librarian who, in 1961, inspired a massive resurgence of interest in all the Tarzan books when she censored them from the library shelves on the grounds that Tarzan and Jane were living in sin. In that extreme case, the critic didn’t even feel it necessary to read the offending material to understand it well enough to pass critical judgement.
Whatever the reason that lies behind this recurring presumption of vapidness, the list that author Holtsmark rattles off demonstrates one of the remarkable features of criticism of Burroughs’ work over the years: the frequency with which his irony is attacked as if it were in earnest, and his characters are critiqued as if they were projections of his personal fantasies.
Case in point: the character of Jane Porter.
Jane Porter, in the pantheon of Burroughs heroines, cuts a very odd figure. She is passive, dim, and helpless; yet critics have always seemed to blithely assume that she represents Burroughs’ vision of an ideal woman.
This assumption cannot survive the faintest breath of critical analysis, especially in comparison with other Burroughs heroines.
Our first introduction to Jane Porter — the very first scene we see through her point of view — is a scene in which she is locked in Tarzan’s cabin, a loaded revolver in her hand, as a hungry lioness claws her way in through a tiny hole in the window. She has already shot the beast once, to some effect, before fainting; when she wakes back up, she has (according to the count she gives later in her letter to Hazel Strong) four more bullets remaining with which to finish the job.
And this is the point at which a very significant revision of the story occurs — a major difference between the original 1912 manuscript and the later editions.
As a reminder, here’s how the lioness-and-cabin scene is handled in the more modern version, the one that was in widespread use by the 1950s:
As Jane opened her eyes to a realization of the imminent peril which threatened her, her brave young heart gave up at last its final vestige of hope. But then to her surprise she saw the huge animal slowly being drawn back through the window, and in the moonlight beyond she saw the heads and shoulders of two men.
Now, compare that with the original 1912 version of the same scene:
As Jane opened her eyes to a realization of the imminent peril which threatened her, her brave young heart gave up at last its final vestige of hope, and she turned to grope for the fallen weapon that she might mete to herself a merciful death ere the cruel fangs tore into her fair flesh.
The lioness was almost through the opening before Jane found the weapon, and she raised it quickly to her temple to shut out forever the hideous jaws gaping for their prey.
An instant she hesitated, to breathe a short and silent prayer to her Maker, and as she did so her eyes fell upon poor Esmerelda lying inert, but alive, beside the cupboard.
How could she leave the poor, faithful thing to those merciless, yellow fangs? No, she must use one cartridge on the senseless woman ere she turned the cold muzzle toward herself again.
How she shrank from the ordeal! But it had been cruelty a thousand times less justifiable to have left the loving black woman who had reared her from infancy with all a mother’s care and solicitude, to regain consciousness beneath the rending claws of the great cat.
Quickly Jane Porter sprang to her feet and ran to the side of the black. She pressed the muzzle of the revolver tight against that devoted heart, closed her eyes, and —
Sabor emitted a frightful shriek.
The girl, startled, pulled the trigger and turned to face the beast, and with the same movement raised the weapon against her own temple.
She did not fire a second time, for to her surprise she saw the huge animal being slowly drawn back through the window, and in the moonlight beyond she saw the heads and shoulders of two men.
(By the way, in the original manuscript, Sabor’s scream causes Jane to miss when she tries to shoot Esmerelda.)
So, just to be clear — Jane Porter is holding a pistol that she knows how to use; there’s a lioness semi-immobilized in the window; and her response is to set about using two of her remaining four bullets to euthanize herself and murder Esmerelda.
Can you imagine Dejah Thoris, heroine of A Princess of Mars, behaving like this? Or Dian the Beautiful, from At the Earth’s Core, or Princess Victory from The Lost Continent? Absolutely not — because those three are true Burroughs heroines. They are bold, strong, capable, relatable — worthy of our respect. But Jane Porter is none of these things. Jane Porter — like her father and Mr. Philander and Esmerelda — is noticeably clownish. She’s an overdrawn trope of the silly, frivolous Southern belle. You might call her — if you’ll pardon the anachronism — Baltimore Barbie.
And yet she is Tarzan’s One True Love, right? From the moment he saw her he knew she was his soul-mate, no?
I would argue that the answer is, in fact, no — that Jane Porter was not intended to be Tarzan’s mate when Burroughs wrote Tarzan of the Apes.
The Case Against Jane
Remember, it was only with considerable reluctance (and under some financial pressure) that Burroughs agreed to write a sequel to Tarzan of the Apes. The book, standing on its own, feels complete. At its end, Jane Porter, having renounced Tarzan following lengthy and calculating ruminations on the effect marrying him might have upon her social standing, has given Tarzan ample cause and justification to simply walk away, and indeed a “civilized” man would likely do exactly that. But then, in comes the telegram, and Tarzan repudiates his entire patrimony for her sake. A greater act of love and self-sacrifice is hard to imagine. It’s made all the more remarkable and tragic by the unworthiness of its recipient. The only solace Tarzan allows himself is to keep what he has done secret from her.
It is a masterful conclusion to a gripping and skillfully told story — a sort of romantic tragedy softened to perfection by the reader’s knowledge that Jane Porter is not a good match for Tarzan, and that Tarzan is a big enough person that he does not need the lands and resources of the House of Greystoke to make his way in the world.
But, of course, it drove 1912 readers mad. They wanted a happy ending — with wedding bells. They didn’t want to be left mulling over the outcome of this great romantic tragedy, in which the hero not only doesn’t get the girl but transcends his own desire for the girl and sacrifices all his romantic hopes so that she can be happy.
Soon cards and letters were pouring in, expressing various degrees of frustration at being denied a clean-cut happy ending. That popular response made two things very clear to Burroughs:
First, Tarzan of the Apes was clearly a winner. The buzz around the story was strong and growing as the decade wore on. He may not have recognized it as his great lifelong meal ticket yet, but he could see that it was going to be well worthwhile. It would be incumbent on him not to ruin it.
The second thing was a reinforcement of what Burroughs, as a seasoned businessman, well knew: that giving the public what they want is how you sell things. He very much wanted to sell things, so that he could leave his horrible job at System Magazine. And the public was making it very clear that it wanted Tarzan and Jane to be together.
Another author, perhaps a younger one with fewer family obligations and more of a romantic view of his art, would have told the public to go get lost. But Burroughs was not about to do that. Burroughs was a businessman and family man first, and an artist second. Moreover, for him, writing these stories was developing into a sideline business — one that he hoped might yet rescue him from dependency on his ethically cavalier employer. Taking a hard line on Tarzan made no sense as a business proposition. The definitive failure of The Outlaw of Torn, his second book, was still vivid in his memory. That appeared to be what happened when one indulged in the luxury of writing (or not writing) whatever one wanted, without regard to public opinion. And Burroughs needed, above all, for his next book to not be another Outlaw of Torn.
And so Burroughs capitulated, and wrote the sequel the public was clamoring for: one that resulted in wedding bells for Tarzan and Jane and finished with the same contemptuous flourish we saw at the end of The Warlord of Mars — with the hero kissing his wife upon the lips at the end of a triumphal ceremony.
But along the way, we meet the woman Tarzan was really supposed to end up with. It’s not hard to spot her — although we never even get to learn her name; she is identified only as “the Ouled-Naïl.” She saves Tarzan’s life twice; she is fierce and dangerous and beautiful, like all real Burroughs heroines; and she strikes a remarkable contrast with Jane Porter’s continued puerile passiveness. Just a few dozen pages after we read about the Ouled-Naïl’s daring, lion-defying rescue of Tarzan from arch-villain Nikolas Rokoff’s clutches, we’re reading about Jane Porter on the beach with Clayton — the scene when Clayton tries to sacrifice himself to a hungry lion to save her, and instead of running for cover or picking up a cudgel herself, she stands there judging him for not resisting more showily. (Luckily, Tarzan is lurking in the jungle, watching the two of them suffer in starvation and misery there on the beach, and kills the lion with a cast of his spear before ungallantly leaving the two of them to their fate.)
Moreover, Tarzan himself is noticeably less of an admirable man at the end of The Return of Tarzan than he is at the end of Tarzan of the Apes — as evidenced by his almost greedy attitude toward the 4,000 pounds of gold ingots retrieved from the city of Opar. Is it a coincidence that that chapter is titled “The Passing of the Ape-Man”? I don’t believe it is. Civilization has claimed John C. Tarzan, Lord Greystoke, for its own.
But the most striking change is that dumb luck suddenly starts playing a major role in Tarzan’s personal story in The Return of Tarzan. Throughout the entire text of Tarzan of the Apes, Tarzan is never once saved from death by luck alone (except, of course, for the extraordinary events of his babyhood). All his successes and survivals are earned with skill and intrepidity — sometimes heavily augmented by luck, but never wholly dependent on it. But that changes almost immediately in The Return of Tarzan. Dumb luck saves Tarzan’s life no fewer than seven times in The Return of Tarzan: in Chapter 2 when Rokoff’s revolver misfires; in the duel in Chapter 6 when Raoul de Coude inexplicably shoots poorly (three times!); in Chapter 7, when Rokoff misses with several point-blank revolver shots at Tarzan’s back during the bar fight; in Chapter 9 when someone (presumably Rokoff) shoots his hat off from concealment while he’s out hunting; in Chapter 10 when he stands in the middle of the road challenging the men who are stalking him, a la Clint Eastwood, and is shot down with a badly-aimed rifle bullet; in Chapter 19, when he is saved from La’s knife by the fortuitously-timed tantrum of a priest; and finally in Chapter 26, when he’s saved from Rokoff’s rifle shot only by Tennington’s quick reflexes.
There’s clearly something going on between the lines here. Burroughs is giving the public what it wants … but he is, at the same time, leaving his subtle footprints of disapproval all over the story.
Burroughs came close to expressing himself openly on this subject in a letter to his publisher after the first Tarzan book came out, but before The Return of Tarzan was complete:
“There is so much reference to the “punk ending” that I am inclined to think that that is the very feature of the story that really clinched their interest,” he wrote, according to biographer Irwin Porges in The Man who Created Tarzan (1975). “For two cents I’d give them another surprise in the sequel. I have a bully little Arab girl, daughter of a sheik, who is the only logical mate for a savage like Tarzan. I am just ‘thinking,’ however, and probably shall not do it, though it would be quite artistic.”
From the standpoint of a modern reader, it’s hard to avoid concluding that Burroughs was right on both counts. And it’s perfectly clear from this passage what Burroughs really wanted to do. It also seems pretty likely that the real purpose of writing this to his editor was to discreetly sound him out on the possibility. Burroughs would, within just a few years, be master of his own literary destiny; but at that time, he still needed his editor’s approval and support.
There’s another factor to consider, too, which must have entered into Burroughs’ decision. The Ouled-Naïl was Arabic, and Tarzan was an English nobleman. Would the reading public of 1914 have accepted a marriage between them? Or would they have seen in such a match an example of “miscegenation” or “race-suicide,” to use the then-current terms for intermarriage between white Europeans and members of other ethnic groups? Would doing what he wanted to do have spoiled everything?
With Tarzan of the Apes, Burroughs hadn’t needed to worry about spoiling the franchise, because there wasn’t one yet. But once Tarzan had hit the scene with such explosive force, the danger of destroying the readers’ enthusiasm by transgressing the era’s taboos too blatantly was just too great. Burroughs, I would suggest, had a choice: Disregard the public and create the novel he wanted to create; or give the public what it wanted, and try to control his instinctive artistic resentment.
We know which of these two courses Burroughs followed; and he certainly cannot be blamed for doing so. But if, in reading The Return of Tarzan, you noticed a few points in which the characters didn’t seem like they were getting the same level of respect that they enjoyed in the first book, well, perhaps this is why. Perhaps Burroughs, the storytelling genius, was grieving the lost masterpiece that might have been and now could never be, and simply could not help showing his frustration just a little bit as he built the comparatively-ordinary story that would take that masterpiece’s place.
This essay was first published as an annotation/afterword in The Tarzan Duology of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Corvallis, Ore.: Pulp-Lit Productions, 2015).
