Degeneration, Gender, and American Identity in the Early Fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs

Abstract

Edgar Rice Burroughs rendered a particular construction of womanhood as a remedy for national degeneration and neurasthenia. Progressive-era Americans like Burroughs wondered whether the developmental forces that shaped industrial society might also threaten the character and institutions upon which they believed American society and civilization functioned. Middle-class American observers worried that the character traits responsible for the rise of American greatness were undermined by that very success. In particular, they thought the demands of urban life resulted in neurasthenia, the loss of “nervous energy.” Burroughs employed the powerfully symbolic Pocahontas narrative to construct a vision of womanhood that offered the possibility of redeeming a degenerate and neurasthenic civilization. Burroughs’s construction of womanhood shares much with the traditional ideology of domesticity, yet at the same time challenged Progressive notions of femininity. Burroughs’s female characters are muscular and beautiful, aggressive and independent, and able to handle themselves in dangerous situations. For all of their independence, however, they ultimately perform the traditional roles of wife and mother. Burroughs women fulfill a domestic role, but their muscularity, self-assurance, and independence are seen as a panacea for the perceived problems of degeneration and neurasthenia, not as a threat to gender identity and roles. Soon after the end of the Great War, Jefferson Turck, an American naval aviator, returned home to a hero’s welcome. Accompanied by his young English bride, Lieutenant Turck had just completed a tour of duty that took him through Europe, North Africa, and eventually East Asia, returning home by way of the Pacific Ocean. Turck witnessed firsthand the physical, psychological, and moral effects of the First World War, and shortly after his return published his observations as a memoir of his exploits in the Old World and as a commentary on American characteristics and traits. In his memoir, Turck confidently wrote, I am glad it was given to me to be an instrument in the hands of Providence for the uplifting of a benighted Europe, and the amelioration of the suffering, degradation, and abysmal ignorance in which I found her. I shall not live to see the complete regeneration of the savage hordes of the Eastern Hemisphere – that is work which will require many generations, perhaps ages, so complete has been their reversion to savagery; but I know that the work has been started, and I am proud of the share in it which my generous countrymen have placed in my hand. A new epoch for Europe has been inaugurated, with enlightened China on the east and an enlightened Pan-America on the west – the two 1 Biggs: Degeneration, Gender, and American Identity in the Early Fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs