an awesome film of a dreadful book

[deird1]

Watched Disney's Tarzan (the one from the 90s). It was excellent.

Then googled the original book.

...I am never, ever touching the original book. It is horrifyingly racist.



I told my husband that the book was racist. He said "Yeah, probably", thinking I meant racist-because-it's-from-the-Victoria-era-so-of-course-it-is. I said "No, REALLY..." and explained that:
1) The book was about the nature/nurture debate.
2) The author deliberately took Tarzan away from his parents as a baby, so that "nurture" wouldn't apply.
3) The author deliberately made Tarzan an English noble because he "selected an infant child of a race strongly marked by hereditary characteristics of the finer and nobler sort". So that his "nature" would be as good as possible.
4) The point was to show how Tarzan would be superior to everyone because his nature was so wonderful, even though his nurture was horrible.

SO HORRIBLY, HORRIBLY RACIST, GUYS. Like, worse-than-Lovecraft racist. *boggles*

Comments

[conuly]

I'd stay away from his Mars series as well.

[out_there]

"Worse than Minecraft racist" made me crack up. Hee!

[katherine]

Bonus, gleaned from the first few pages of Jungle Tales of Tarzan is how very into the apes Tarzan is depicted as...

[shadowkat]

It was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs and written in the early part of the 20th century, around 1912. At that time -- 90% of the fictional novels were racist. [There's a reason I can't stand the Victorian Period or the Early 20th Century Fiction -- it's insanely racist and sexist. Also the writing style is flowery and feels like the mental equivalent of quicksand.) Some of the writers are worse than others. Virigina Woolfe was racist, although it wasn't quite as apparent in her writing as in others of the period, and various other major writers of that time period. (I don't know why this surprises people -- think of the time period? Text books up until roughly the 1970s, white-washed history. People back then were taught racism. South Pacific actually has a great song about it. Have you seen any of the early Disney films? Fantasia (before they fixed it?), Song of the South (although that wasn't as bad as people think) Lady and the Tramp, etc? Walt Disney was a Nazi sympathizer and a racist. They had to clean up his cartoons for release in the 1980s and 90s.)

Mark Twain got in trouble for satirizing and commenting racism in the late 1800s and his books were banned by various "white Allegedly Christian" groups up until roughly the 1970s for the relationship between a black man and a white boy. Now they are banned by the opposite side -- which is hilarious.

Think about this for a minute..Gone with the Wind by Margret Mitchell was a best-selling novel in 1936, and it's even more racist. (They have the Klu Klux Klan in it -- and Scarlett, the heroine is aiding them.) The movie is actually toned down a bit from the book.

I've avoided anything by Edgar Rice Burroughs, my mother warned me off of them -- because her sister read them and she figured out how racist they were. Although I hear the Mars stuff isn't that bad. Actually, I avoid a lot of stuff from that time period.

[thenewbuzwuzz]

Yikes! I'd heard it was racist but didn't know how.