Boys in Children's Literature and Popular Culture

Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child

Annette Wannamaker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135923594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Boys in Children's Literature and Popular Culture proposes new theoretical frameworks for understanding the contradictory ways masculinity is represented in popular texts consumed by boys in the United States. The popular texts boys like are often ignored by educators and scholars, or are simply dismissed as garbage that boys should be discouraged from enjoying. However, examining and making visible the ways masculinity functions in these texts is vital to understanding the broad array of works that make up children's culture and form dominant versions of masculinity. Such popular texts as Harry Potter, Captain Underpants, and Japanese manga and anime often perform rituals of subject formation in overtly grotesque ways that repulse adult readers and attract boys. They often use depictions of the abject – threats to bodily borders – to blur the distinctions between what is outside the body and what is inside, between what is "I" and what is "not I." Because of their reliance on depictions of the abject, those popular texts that most vigorously perform exaggerated versions of masculinity also create opportunities to make dominant masculinity visible as a social construct.

1

ME TARZAN, YOU OTHER

The Evolution of an Icon

Every boy who is good for anything is a natural savage. The scientists who want to study the primitive man, and have so much difficulty finding one anywhere in this sophisticated age, couldn’t do better than to devote their attention to the common country-boy. He has the primal, vigorous instincts and impulses of the African savage, without any of the vices inherited from a civilization long ago decayed or developed in an unrestrained barbaric society.

—Warner (1877: 198)

Boyhood in the United States is an impossible ideal, viewed as natural and primitive yet also shaped by and contained within civilization and all its prejudices. An object in the process of becoming a subject, it is uncanny—familiar yet disturbingly different, simultaneously the heart and future of the empire and yet a savage in a distant colony always threatening to revolt (and eventually kill the Father). It stakes a claim to universality at the same time as it marks itself as distinctly masculine, heterosexual, white, Western, upper or middle class, Christian, and entitled to a destiny manifest. Kenneth Kidd illustrates in Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale that the myth of the feral boy has been central to the construction of American boyhood in the twentieth century. The lesson we learn from the stories we tell ourselves about feral boys is one “about the white, middle-class male’s perilous passage from nature to culture, from bestiality to humanity, from homosocial pack life to individual self-reliance and heterosexual prowess—that is, from boyhood to manhood” (Kidd 2004: 7). The myth of the feral boy, then, does the difficult work of maintaining a paradox, a delicate balance between subject and abject that always threatens to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and under the uncertainty of all that is tenuously held at bay through abjection. To sustain itself, the myth of American boyhood must continuously be retold, reperformed, and reinvented within public discourse in ways that smooth over its contradictions. It is reified through repetition. One such repetition is the cultural icon of Tarzan: the story of feral boy turned muscle man has been a mainstay of American popular culture for almost a century. Tarzan represents an impossible ideal of American masculinity and its racist, imperialistic, classist underpinnings that sometimes go unmarked: he is aristocratic yet not effete, savage but not barbaric, wild but not native, and civilized but not feminized. Indeed, he represents the fantasy of the primal, vigorous, savage, privileged, white boy (“boys will be boys”), who will naturally and without effort grow into his entitlements as lord of the jungle.

Despite his significance as an influential cultural icon, Tarzan is curiously absent from most children’s literature textbooks, anthologies, and critical texts, even though he has been admired by American boys (and girls and adults) for almost a century in a variety of incarnations in novels, comic books, television shows, toys, films, and, most recently, video games.¹ Perhaps Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan has not been extensively discussed by children’s literature scholars because the Tarzan stories, originally printed in pulp magazines, are decidedly antiliterary, lowbrow, commercial texts. Or, perhaps, children’s literature scholars prefer not to claim the overtly racist, imperialistic, social-Darwinist text of Tarzan of the Apes (1912) as part of the children’s literature canon because it is an embarrassing reminder of the mainstream racism of American culture. Or, perhaps, Tarzan represents a traditional version of violent, hard-bodied masculinity that many adults would prefer to replace with more feminist depictions of masculinity. Tarzan, however, is an icon of popular children’s literature and culture. The original Tarzan stories by Burroughs were read by adults and children; boys and men were major consumers of the Tarzan comic books and films of the early and mid-twentieth century; children made up much of the audience for the Tarzan television programs; and the latest Tarzan films, produced by Disney, are bowdlerized versions of the character and story marketed directly to an audience of young children and their parents.

The latest versions of the Tarzan story produced by Disney (a 1999 film followed by straight-to-DVD sequels, a cartoon television show, and several video and computer games) seem, at first glance, to be far removed from the offensive original text. The gorillas and their habitats seem to be drawn based on research done on primates, though they are anthropomorphized through Disney’s animation and dialogue. Jane is spunky, funny, and mildly feminist, and some critics say that her voice-over portrayal by Minnie Driver is the highlight of the first film. The villain of the 1999 film—marked clearly as the bad guy the moment he enters the space of the screen—is a gun-wielding, macho hunter whose name, Clayton, becomes synonymous with the rifle he shoots off numerous times throughout the film. Tarzan, on the other hand, is the ideal sensitive man of the twenty-first century: nonviolent and in tune with nature yet hunky enough to hold Jane with one arm while he swings from a vine he grasps with the other hand, loyal to his mother but willing to follow the woman he loves, and a strong leader who also cares about his family, his community, and the environment.

Disney’s Tarzan is an attempt to represent a newer version of masculinity that will appeal to modern moms and dads, who will take their young children to the cinema knowing that Disney will not offend, and who will later rent or buy the Tarzan video for their child to watch over and over again, committing favorite scenes to memory. In this way Disney’s Tarzan represents a newer version of dominant masculinity that is most definitely reified through repetition and for a much younger audience than the original novels, films, and comic books. However, Disney’s Tarzan is filled with contradictions and paradoxically presents hegemonic masculinity as a problem, while simultaneously subtly working to reinforce hegemonic masculinity in ways not very far removed from the original narrative. Robyn McCallum argues that Disney’s Tarzan is more conservative in its representations of masculinity than some other Disney films of the 1990s such as Hercules (1997) and Mulan (1998), and may be so because “Tarzan is an iconic figure within popular culture where he is the epitome of hard-bodied muscular masculinity, and hence perhaps does not offer much scope for experimentation with gender representation” (McCallum 2002: 125). Although Disney’s version of the Tarzan story works very hard to distance itself from the original narrative’s unsavory origins, it is unable to do so and works to perpetuate older versions of hegemonic masculinity. But, as I will discuss later in this chapter, it is precisely these contradictory portrayals of masculinity that are key to the film’s commercial success.

Of course, this may be the case with quite a few contemporary, popular children’s texts. After studying thirty popular novels written between 1940 and 1997, some of which initially appear to present challenges to hegemonic masculinity, Tami Bereska concluded that within the field of young adult and children’s literature, “a significant portion of the discourse surrounding masculinity has remained unchanged for more than 50 years, despite other social changes having occurred” (Bereska 2003: 162). Bereska argues that, on the whole, this body of texts illustrates that the world of boys

is supposed to be a heterosexual world, comprised of active male bodies, where no sissies are permitted entry. It is characterized by particular types and degrees of emotional expression, naturalized aggression, male hang-out groups, hierarchies within those groups, competition, athleticism, adventure, and sound moral character. (Bereska 2003: 161)

She argues that in fiction written for young readers, depictions of masculinity are changing only in superficial ways and only in reaction to the changing roles of women and girls and that, at their core, representations of masculinity have changed very little over the past fifty years. Tarzan is an ideal starting point for Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture, because the historical evolution of this popular cultural icon can be used to make visible the ways that portrayals of contemporary hegemonic masculinity are in many ways tied—albeit in subtler and more contradictory ways—to the same constructions of race, social class, sexual orientation, empire, American individuality, and depictions of the abject that have characterized mainstream representations of masculinity for decades.

FROM PULP TO PAP: THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF AN AMERICAN ICON

Even though most Americans probably have not read Burroughs’s original Tarzan books, most Americans have some sense—however far removed from the original text—of the Tarzan legend. Why does the Tarzan story—retold in variation after variation, reinvented so many times that some versions are retellings of retellings—resonate so with Americans? What does our affection for this character and story tell us about our cultural and political values? And how are we in turn affected by it and its repetitions? An analysis of the Tarzan legend can reveal much about the ways masculinity is perceived in the United States.

Despite some critics’ attempts to claim literary merit for Burroughs’s original Tarzan books, the stories have a decidedly lowbrow origin and history.² Of course, the texts that boys most often enjoy and read, and the texts that most alarm the well-meaning adults in their lives, often share this characteristic, something discussed at length in other chapters. The Tarzan story first appeared in 1912 in the pulp magazine All-Story and was titled “Tarzan of the Apes—A Romance of the Jungle.”³ The story was later serialized in the New York Evening World, where it “reached an enormous readership, including members of the working class, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. Its hero became a cultural icon before the story ever appeared in book form and for readers who would never enter a bookshop” (Kasson 2001: 215, 217). After the success of the first story, Burroughs wrote twenty-three more sequels, which were adapted (often loosely) into movies, television shows, comic books, picture books, toys, underwear, shoes, and computer and video games.

In the first novel of the series, Tarzan of the Apes, Burroughs creates a feral white boy with aristocratic origins. British John Clayton, who holds the title Lord Greystoke, and his pregnant wife, Lady Alice, are abandoned on a remote, deserted African shore by a group of cutthroat, mutinous sailors. Lord Greystoke adeptly demonstrates his “genetic superiority” by building a well-crafted cabin and by providing for his weak, dependent wife, who lives long enough to nurse their baby for a year. Shortly after her death, Lord Greystoke is brutally murdered by Kerchak, king of the apes. Kala, an ape who has just lost her baby, adopts the baby British lord who will become Tarzan. The apes depicted in the novel are not any species of gorilla or chimpanzee we might be familiar with today but instead seem to be a strange invention of Burroughs’s imagination; half human, half ape, they seem almost to represent for Burroughs African people and are often portrayed as being more human than the caricatures of native Africans Tarzan encounters later in the story. Tarzan, which means “white skin” in the language of the apes, grows up as a feral jungle child who has to fight with apes, the elements, and wild animals to survive. His childhood is a violent one but in adherence with many of our ideals about what boyhood ought to be. Instead of scarring or crippling him, his brutal childhood builds his character so that he becomes a strong young man: a perfect specimen of (white, Western, heterosexual, aristocratic) manly brawn, intellect, and chivalrous morality. As a boy, once he has mastered survival in the jungle, he discovers his father’s cabin and collection of books and manages to teach himself to read, write, and use human weapons and tools. As he comes of age, he kills several of the alpha-male apes, murders native Africans, and terrorizes an entire African village by stealing from them, lynching several inhabitants, and making public spectacles of the dead bodies. Tarzan finally meets a group of white explorers, the American middle-class professor Archimedes Porter, his daughter Jane, Tarzan’s aristocratic British cousin Clayton, and others in their party in a chapter titled “His Own Kind.” He proceeds to rescue them from various jungle threats, and they all admire the body and physical prowess of this mysterious jungle man. Through a series of convoluted, melodramatic events, Tarzan makes his way out of Africa, through Paris, and then finally to Wisconsin, where he saves Jane from a forest fire.

The various adaptations of the Tarzan narrative have mostly only loosely adhered to the original story, some bearing little resemblance to Burroughs’s books. For example, with the exception of Hugh Hudson’s Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (which depicts a troubled Tarzan in Africa and then in Britain, unable to reconcile his dual identities), most of the filmic versions of the story depict Tarzan as being vaguely American. Indeed, Walt Morton argues that Johnny Weissmuller’s famous 1932 depiction of Tarzan is distinctly American: “classless, ruggedly individual, stoic” (Morton 1993: 118). In some ways, Americanized portrayals of Tarzan can be seen as being more true to the spirit of the original than a British Tarzan, because these more directly portray the ideal American man Burroughs created. For example, in the famous 1932 film Tarzan, the Ape Man, Tarzan’s origins are ignored and even dismissed. We enter the narrative when Jane comes to Africa and meets an adult Tarzan. When another character says to Jane, “I can’t make it out, how did he get here?” she replies, “Oh, what does it matter?” In Burroughs’s stories, Tarzan’s ancestry is key to his identity, not only in terms of his nobility but also in terms of what Burroughs calls his “superior genetics.” On the surface, the Americanized film Tarzan can be seen as being more classless or democratic, but he also portrays a myth of assimilation and forgetfulness that allows many Americans to claim that they are “just American” and to ignore the fact that it would matter to Jane if Tarzan’s skin was a darker shade or if his features were African or if his accent was marked as foreign. Therefore, the Americanized film Tarzan—the 1999 version as well as earlier versions—seems democratic but maintains many of the remnants of the original, some of which go unmarked and are taken for granted. However, these remnants do matter, and just like the American Jane of the 1932 film, we sometimes like to pretend they do not.

MODERN MALE FANTASIES: “WE WOULD EACH LIKE TO BE TARZAN”

Burroughs, born in Chicago in 1875, was the youngest son of a successful businessman and Civil War veteran. He felt pressured to follow his father into business but was miserable and ineffectual as a white-collar worker. In his book Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America, John Kasson writes that Burroughs wrote the Tarzan stories as “an act of self-liberation,” as a fantasy for himself (p. 159). He quotes Burroughs as saying about Tarzan:

We wish to escape not alone the narrow confines of city streets for the freedom of the wilderness, but the restrictions of man made laws, and the inhibitions that society has placed on us. We like to picture ourselves as roaming free, the lords of ourselves and of our world; in other words, we would each like to be Tarzan. At least I would; I admit it. (quoted in Kasson 2001: 159)

This quote from Burroughs is telling because it draws on several cultural assumptions about hegemonic masculinity. For instance, when Burroughs says “we would each like to be Tarzan,” he makes several assumptions about the universal “we,” here marked as male, white, and middle class, trapped by the confines of American business and the feminizing influences of modern, industrialized civilization. The assumption, too, is that men and boys should be wild and out in nature, not merely as inhabitants but as lords of it. Finally, these wild white men of privilege are not blue-collar workers in the employ of another man; they are “roaming free” and in control of their own destinies. These fantasies represent not only personal dissatisfactions of the author but also dissatisfactions expressed by many white, middle-class men of the period, and ultimately they contain several of the paradoxes still inherent in hegemonic versions of the ideal American male that are depicted today.

For instance, Kasson points out that fantasies of “natural” masculine wildness are often “explicitly tied to whiteness” (p. 212): the fantasy of being a wild white man represents a complicated negotiation of identity because the wild white man is seen not as a native or a primitive but as an individualistic master of his environment. He also is not a working-class man laboring in the wilderness but instead an aristocratic adventurer. In other words, the illusion of a return to the wilderness is, ironically, steeped in cultural constructions and systems of power. Burroughs’s Tarzan novels are set in a make-believe Africa,⁴ a colonist’s fantasy that represents “geographies of rugged masculinity: regions within which white men of northern European stock reassert their dominance over physical and moral ‘inferiors,’ including incompetents, malefactors, weaklings, and cowards” (Kasson 2001: 180). The wild white man is not part of the African jungle and is not native to it—on the contrary, Africa, the jungle, the animals, the African natives, women, and lower-class men all become inferiors against which Tarzan is allowed to test and assert his strength. Burroughs’s books work to maintain fantasies of wildness that are inexorably tied to fantasies of superiority and entitlement.

Burroughs’s Tarzan, on many levels, is a lengthy, intricate justification of the supposed superiority of the white, upper-class, Western male. Even the structure of the narrative, borrowing heavily from hero mythology, works to achieve this end. Tarzan of the Apes is part of a larger tradition and is not alone as a popular hero narrative that works to perpetuate white superiority. In her book Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature, Margery Hourihan writes, “The hero is white, and his story inscribes the dominance of white power and white culture. In those versions of the myth which belong to the last four hundred years or so, the period of European expansion and colonialism, white superiority is frequently an explicit theme” (Hourihan 1997: 58). She argues, for example, that in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe is so struck by the inferiority of the natives that he “thanks God he is not like them” (p. 58). Tarzan’s identity is similarly established largely by determining all he is not like. He is not like an ape, and he is not like the native Africans. When he first meets white explorers, he instinctively and immediately knows he is not like the African American servant accompanying Jane or the lower-class sailors with the party. Finally, although he instinctively knows that the white, Western, upper-class explorers are “his kind,” he also knows that Jane is something not like him and is to be desired and protected. Tarzan’s identity is established, in part, in comparison to all that he is not.

Tarzan’s identity as a cultural icon, however, is more complex than a simple list of negations because the character is also intrinsically tied to the jungle, to the Other that he longs to incorporate at the same time as he is repulsed by it and defined against it. Jacques Derrida writes in Of Grammatology, “Man calls himself man only by drawing limits excluding his other from the play of supplementarity: the purity of nature, of animality, primitivism, childhood, madness, divinity. The approach to these limits is at once feared as a threat of death, and desired as access to a life without difference” (Derrida 1976: 244). Derrida’s list of abjected Others, both feared and desired, places childhood alongside nature, animality, primitivism, madness, and divinity. This dance of negotiation with the Other—always approaching, always repelling—is what Tarzan’s growth out of childhood and out of the jungle represents. Childhood is conflated with what is wild, natural, and primitive. Tarzan’s manhood is defined in part by leaving the jungle. How...

Table of contents

• COVER
• HALFTITLE
• TITLE
• COPYRIGHT
• CONTENTS
• SERIES EDITOR’s FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PROLOGUE: The Rhetoric of the Current “Boy Crisis”
• INTRODUCTION: Beyond Stereotypes and Role Models: The Abject and the American Boy
• 1. ME TARZAN, YOU OTHER: The Evolution of an Icon
• 2. READING IN THE GAPS AND LACKS: (De)Constructing Masculinity in Louis Sachar’s Holes
• 3. “THE BATTLE OF THE BIONIC BOOGER BOY,” BODILY BORDERS, AND B.A.D. BOYS: Pleasure and Abjection in the Captain Underpants Series
• 4. AND MAJIN BUU SAID, “I’LL EAT YOU UP!”: Consuming Japanese Cultural Imports
• 5. MEN IN CLOAKS AND HIGH-HEELED BOOTS, MEN WIELDING PINK UMBRELLAS: Witchy Masculinities in the Harry Potter Novels
• CONCLUSION: Marking Masculinity
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX