ABSTRACT

In 1932, Edgar Rice Burroughs shared his thoughts about the overwhelming success of his Tarzan tales: “We wish to escape not alone the narrow confines of city streets for the freedom of wilderness, but the restrictions of man-made laws, and the inhibitions that society has placed upon us [ … ] in other words, we would each like to be Tarzan” (qtd. in Meyer 298). Setting aside for a moment the contentious claim that Tarzan ever finds freedom from man-made laws, I am interested in exploring the notion that all readers must identify first and foremost with the character of Tarzan in order to access Burroughs’s dreamscape. Because of this same assumption, most Tarzan scholars undermine or outright ignore the literary significance of female readers of the Tarzan series (Fenton; Torgovnick; O’Keefe; Vidal; Wannamaker). The logic seems to follow that because diving into the world of Tarzan involves identifying with Tarzan, and because Tarzan is male, the only reading or viewing experiences of the Tarzan series worth studying are those of boys and men.