I hate Jane, and I'm not alone

You know who royally annoys me? Jane from the Tarzan novels.

What did she ever do to deserve him, anyway? Apart from being the first white woman he ever saw.

The character suffered character-defining irreparable damage in the very first Tarzan book, Tarzan of the Apes, when she was confronted by a lion and fainted. That was one of the first really stressful situations she was ever introduced to, and that was how she was introduced to the audience. There were other books later on where the author, Edgar Rice Burroughs, tried to repair his obvious mistakes by making her a "little toughie," but never, really: Tarzan's sidekick Mugambi, a guy that unlike Jane was an interesting character the book series never did anything with, practically sacrificed himself to save her useless hide in Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar. There was even one book where Jane, finally, got an opportunity to help a safari, and that worked out about as well as you'd think it would. Apparently, there's nothing Jane can't ruin.

Jane's sense of privilege kept Tarzan from the things he loved. Tarzan was a misanthrope that hated civilization and its hypocrisies and would rather be away from it in his wilderness where he had the one thing he wants most in the world: freedom. But Jane was too much of a high maintenance Princess to live in trees and whatnot, and insisted that Tarzan wear human clothes like a gentleman and live with her in a giant estate house in Africa. Obviously Tarzan wasn't totally happy but he did it because it pleased her.

This isn't some unfair slant or reinterpretation of perfectly innocuous events. This is exactly what happened!

And it gets even worse! In Tarzan's Quest, Tarzan and his allies obtain the secret of immortality from a race of white savages. Which means she'll live forever and he'll never be free of her while more worthy mates for Tarzan grow old and die alone without him.



Thankfully, I'm not the only person in the world that hates Jane. I'm in good company: Jane Goodall was a big fan of the Tarzan books growing up and thought "she'd be a better mate for Tarzan than that other Jane." This is actually on her website, incidentally. Wow, and I thought I hated Jane. I find a lot of characters irritating but not enough to insert it into my official biography! Actually, Tarzan hooking up with an anthropologist and scientist is actually a really great idea and I'm surprised fanfiction never did anything with that.

(How about it, real person fic writers?)

Not only do I not like Jane that much, but neither did her creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs! Now that's really saying something, isn't it? He actually really wanted to kill her off back in Tarzan the Untamed, when Germans attacked and destroyed Tarzan's home (during the First World War). The whole book was about Tarzan getting sweet revenge on the Germans, history's great villains. However, there was an outcry from the audience (seriously?) and Burroughs revealed her death had been faked and she was actually a prisoner of the Germans.



This was awful, as there were many other women in Tarzan's novels that would have been worthier and more interesting: Bertha Kirschner, a competent, cool German superspy mystery woman that was a match for Tarzan. Because no good people could ever really be working for the Germans in these kinds of stories, she turned out to have been a double-agent all along. (For some unknown reason it's entered into Tarzan fans' heads that Bertha had these Princess Leia buns despite the fact her hairstyle was never really described. Talk about "fanon!")



Then there was La, who is every Tarzan fan's favorite character: a powerful queen of a lost civilization, she was a rip-off of H. Rider Haggard's She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, but this is not unique. An entire library could be filled with rip-offs of She, Dr. Fu Manchu, and Sherlock Holmes. As proof of La's popularity, I submit that I looked up La of Opar on google image search and found approximately five billion pieces of fan-art. Apparently, Frazetta's legacy is alive and well.

And why not? La adds ever-popular bondage dominatrix human sacrifice stuff to a series and concept that is already drenched with sublimated sex and hormones. That's what I always found interesting about Tarzan, that made him different from other squeaky-clean adventure characters: there was an element of sexuality and passion about it all that was made even more interesting by the fact it was all below the surface. The fact the Tarzan stories passed muster as young adult stories through censors despite the fact they were filled with bloody savage violence and barely controlled and not-explicit sexuality is a tribute to how dysfunctionally insane censorship laws are, and how neurotic American culture is on these subjects. Naked women performing human sacrifice on bronzed naked jungle studs is alright as long as no dirty words are spoken.



In one novel, Tarzan loses his memory and decides to live with La, something every fan wants to see. Naturally this was too good to last and the status quo was restored. Amnesia is one of those illnesses that happen a million times more frequently in adventure stories than real life, like Multiple Personality Disorder. Though it does happen in reality. Steve Wozniak, inventor of Apple, got amnesia after a plane crash.

There were strong implications La was, like Ayesha, an immortal. In fact, there were rumors of a legendary crossover story in the 1950s, licensed by the Burroughs estate, called Tarzan on Mars that would have featured Tarzan on the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs's other less famous and less interesting creation, the dying Mars of John Carter. Tarzan On Mars was unfortunately never published, but supposedly it would have revealed that La was from Mars, which would have explained her tremendous longevity as Martians live over a thousand years.

I even liked how the recent animated Tarzan series based on the Disney Tarzan movie made use of La, but it was a thrill to see her. She had outright magical powers, which was irritating. One mistake made in the Star Wars prequels was that the Jedi, who previously rarely used their abilities to the point they had real mystique, had so much less coolness and subtlety when the special effects budget meant they now could hurl rocks with their minds. Though I did like the way they merged La with the Leopard-Men, a cult of African witch doctors that wore leopard skins for murder, an idea that was fascinating in concept but was doomed by being in easily the worst of all the Tarzan novels.


Finally, there was Nemone from Tarzan and the City of Gold, a horrible queen followed everywhere by an evil lion she feeds human flesh. Obviously she was too evil and unredeemable to be a serious mate for him but it is proof positive when I say these books were horny and sex-filled: Tarzan's enemies overwhelmingly tend to be powerful women that want to have sex with him. These books, passed on for generations as popular wholesome adventure literature for boys and girls, are the greatest joke ever played on censorship lovin', uptight American parents.

Incidentally, I always had a fan theory that Nemone's lion was her daemon, like in the His Dark Materials books, a person's soul on the outside of their body. The horrible, bloodthirsty lion reflected who this glamorous but savage woman was at the core. And it would explain why she instantly died when her lion was killed.