타잔의 “하얀 피부”

Abstract

Tarzan, one of the most widely known cultural icons, came into being in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes. Since then, critics have read him variously as embodying heroic imperialism, violent racism, or white exclusionism. Unlike those critics who assume that Tarzan is undoubtedly white, however, this essay claims that Tarzan’s whiteness is problematic at best. Tarzan’s identity is ambiguous from the outset. Whether Tarzan is human or animal, whether he is a hybridized product of both, is not determined until the end. From other whites’ perspective, moreover, Tarzan is also divided between a civilized man able to read and write and a primitive superman unable to communicate in human language. Such ambiguity of identity culminates in the doubts that Tarzan might be a fake white who, living among savage Africans, would betray his own race, and that he might also be an undesirable and unassimilable white in the civilized society. Ultimately, I claim, the questionable whiteness of Tarzan’s “white skin” frustrates all his sedulous attempts to be integrated into core whiteness.