Tarzan And The Shame Of Jane ((free)) May 2026

Modern retellings, such as the 2016 novel Tarzan and the Forbidden City or various comic book arcs, have tried to reclaim Jane, often giving her a bow and arrow and making her a warrior. But these actions miss the point of the "shame" keyword. The shame isn’t about physical weakness. It is about The True Moral of the Lost Chapter If “Tarzan and the Shame of Jane” were to be written today, it would not be a story of rescue. Tarzan would not swing in to save her from embarrassment. It would be a story of reckoning.

Depending on who you ask, this story is either a forgotten 1920s serial, a suppressed manuscript from the Great Depression, or a modern apocryphal tale that reflects our changing views on gender and colonialism. While no canonical story by this exact title appears in the official Burroughs bibliography (which spans 24 novels), the phrase has become a powerful critical lens used to analyze the darker, psychological undertones of the Tarzan mythos. tarzan and the shame of jane

But as a critical concept, a fan theory, and a cultural meme, it is very real. It represents the gap between what pulp literature gave us and what we wish it had. It is the ghost of a story that asks the question Edgar Rice Burroughs never dared to ask: What happens to the woman after the adventure ends? Modern retellings, such as the 2016 novel Tarzan

Whether Burroughs actually wrote such a scene is debatable. It feels too psychologically nuanced for the pulpy, action-driven style of the 1920s and 30s. Why does this keyword resonate so powerfully decades later? Because it taps into three distinct layers of shame that permeate the original Tarzan canon. 1. The Shame of Female Desire In early 20th-century literature, a "good" woman did not have primal desires. Yet Jane explicitly desires Tarzan because of his savagery. In Tarzan of the Apes , she watches him kill a lion and feels a "thrill of admiration." The shame here is narrative punishment. Throughout the sequels, Jane is repeatedly kidnapped, silenced, or left behind. Her desire for the wild must be atoned for through suffering. 2. The Shame of Colonial Regression Tarzan is a nobleman. He is white, British, and educated. Jane’s "shame" in the eyes of their peers is that she chose to regress. In the logic of the 1910s, civilization was a ladder moving upward. Jane climbed down . She chose the ape over the aristocrat. The lost story would likely force Jane to confront this accusation head-on, questioning whether "progress" is truly superior to the brutal honesty of the jungle. 3. The Shame of Obsolescence Perhaps the most tragic interpretation of "Tarzan and the Shame of Jane" is that the story is about a woman who realizes she is no longer the protagonist of her own life. In the early novels, Jane is active. By the middle of the series (e.g., Tarzan and the Golden Lion ), she is a prop. Tarzan leaves for adventures; Jane stays home and worries. The "shame" is the quiet humiliation of the adventure heroine who has been domesticated off-screen. She is ashamed that she let it happen. Why the Story Doesn't Exist (But Should) The reason Edgar Rice Burroughs never wrote “Tarzan and the Shame of Jane” is simple: he wasn't interested in internal conflict. Burroughs wrote adventures. His heroes acted; his villains schemed; his heroines were imperiled. A story about Jane’s psychological shame would require introspection, dialogue, and a slow-burn examination of gender roles—none of which were Burroughs’ strengths. It is about The True Moral of the

But among die-hard Burroughs scholars and collectors of rare pulp fiction, there exists a controversial, quasi-mythical reference to a lost narrative:

Russ posited that the greatest "shame" of Jane was not her own, but the shame projected onto her by the author and the reader: the shame of loving a "savage," the shame of abandoning civilization for the flesh, and ultimately, the shame of becoming obsolete once Tarzan’s manhood is proven.

Jane would sit down with her ape-man husband in their treehouse and explain that his constant disappearances, his inability to see her as anything other than his "mate," and the way the civilized world sneers at her has broken something inside her. The shame, she would realize, is not hers to carry. It belongs to a world that sees a woman's love for a wild man as a degradation, rather than a liberation.