Tarzan's struggle to balance his human and animal identities serves as a metaphor for the human condition. The character's relationships with Jane Porter and other characters represent the tension between civilization and the natural world.
Tarzan first swung into the public consciousness in the magazine All-Story Weekly before the 1914 publication of Tarzan of the Apes . Burroughs crafted a "feral child" narrative that flipped the script on Victorian anxieties. By making John Clayton II, the Lord Greystoke, an English aristocrat raised by Mangani apes, Burroughs suggested that "noble" heritage combined with "savage" conditioning created the ultimate human specimen. TARZAN XXX.3gp