This study will discuss how ideas of race get wor

This study will discuss how ideas of race get worked out in an analogy between Africans and animals (primates or other animals) in the 1932 film Tarzan, the Ape Man (directed by W.S. Van Dyke and based on the characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs) and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (first published in 1937). The study will consider the ways the two works show how the relations of whites (colonizers) to Africans are similar to he relations of whites to animals. The argument will be that both works are similar in their views on the superiority of the "civilized" whites and the inferiority of both Africans and animals. Whites in both works, in general, see Africans as beings somewhere between animals and whites. Africans are shown to be slaves, servants, and beasts of burden. They are seen as violent, exotic, often emotionless, immature, stupid beings whose purpose is to serve whites. Both works also portray animals in the same light--exotic, violent beasts of burden whose sole purpose is measured by what they can do for whites. Despite the greater sophistication and subtlety of the writing of Dinesen, compared to the simplistic ideas of the film, both works, in general, assume that whites are superior to both Africans and animals, and that Africans and animals exist in order to serve whites.

In Tarzan the Ape Man, the goal of the whites, especially Jane's father and Harry, the white man who is love with her, is to find the elephant graveyard in order to make money from t

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, of course, once she realizes that Tarzan means her no harm, grows to love Tarzan, and in fact stays with him to live in the jungle. But the responses of Harry and Jane's father are more important in the way they reveal what whites--especially white males--think of both Africans and animals. Jane is touched by Tarzan's grief at the death of his ape friend, but her father mocks this thought. He speaks of Tarzan as if he were the same as Africans in his animal-like violence: "He's not like us." Jane says, "He's white." Her father says, "Whether they're white or not, these people, living a life like that, they've no emotions. They're hardly human." Jane thinks Harry was "cruel" to shoot the ape, but Harry laughs at the thought that an shooting any animal could be cruel. The white men see Tarzan as a blend not just of ape and man, but of ape and African, not white, not even human. As Torgovnick writes, drawing from Burroughs himself, "Tarzan . . . is the personification of primitive man" (Torgovnick 51). And to the white men, primitive man is black. Tarzan, on the other hand, sees animals as worthy of respect and affection, as friends. They help him on a number of occasions, when he saves a baby elephant from a pit, and when he and

Category: Philosophy - T