[Catlady]

Originally Posted by Calenorn

Heh. You DID ask:

"Tarzan's First Love". Tarzan's courtship of the female ape Teeka ends in failure when her preference turns to their mutual friend, the male ape Taug. Tarzan wrestles with his humanness versus his ape-ness. The allusion to Helen of Troy enriches the story, making Tarzan and Taug's fight over Teeka take on symbolic proportions. Stan Galloway writes: "when Burroughs chooses to name Helen as an objective correlative for Teeka, he expects both literal and emotional connections to occur."[5] Tarzan's final claim of the story -- "Tarzan is a man. He will go alone."[6]—echoes the plight of Adam in the Garden of Eden.

That's from the Wikipedia article about "Jungle Tales of Tarzan", the sixth book, a short story collection.

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

He was confused about his true-birth mother and his biological makeup so I guess it makes sense that he courted a female ape. He learned concepts of love and hate from his relationships within the ape tribe and with other wild animals. I thought maybe he learned additional concepts of romance from the books that he read in the cabin.

That short story sounds just ... awkward. I'm not talking about love, though, but about sex. Not that I know what the mating habits of apes are that Tarzan would have grown up around.

Originally Posted by gmw

When I was a kid I did not have access to Jungle Tales of Tarzan, mentioned by Calenorn above, so when I finally did get to it I remember being surprised. I had always assumed his sex life was constrained by same reasoning given for not eating human flesh: "All he knew was that he could not eat the flesh of this black man, and thus hereditary instinct, ages old, usurped the functions of his untaught mind and saved him from transgressing a worldwide law of whose very existence he was ignorant."

I'm not saying the hereditary thing is convincing (maybe about as convincing as how much he learned - without help - from the books in the cabin ), but once you accept it for one thing, using it to explain away a few other troublesome details barely makes you blink.

As to not eating human flesh, Tarzan had a choice--he had other options available to him so he wasn't going to starve by being fastidious. But when it came to sex? His options were limited.

Going back to the racism issue--I didn't remember this before, but the indigenous tribe were cannibals; white boy Tarzan, though, had magically developed scruples against eating human flesh by virtue of his superior heredity.

The learning from books in the cabin was hard to believe. I can accept the deciphering of patterns of letters as names for pictured items, but I don't know how you get from that to abstract concepts without help.