The Abduction of Tarzan
John Clayton, a British colonial official lost in the African jungle, is caught unawares by Kerchak, the gorilla.
1888
John Clayton, a British colonial official lost in the African jungle, is caught unawares by Kerchak, the gorilla.
1888
In 1888 (so begins Tarzan of the Apes) colonial official John Clayton and his pregnant wife Alice took ship for west Africa, only to be put ashore in the uncharted jungle by mutineers. For a year after baby John was born, his father defied repeated attacks upon the family’s rough hut by a troop of gorillas. But last night Alice died; and this morning her grieving husband was caught unready.
WHEN the king ape released the limp form which had been John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, he turned his attention toward the little cradle; but Kala was there before him, and when he would have grasped the child she snatched it herself, and before he could intercept her she had bolted through the door and taken refuge in a high tree.
As she took up the little live baby of Alice Clayton she dropped the dead body of her own into the empty cradle; for the wail of the living had answered the call of universal motherhood within her wild breast which the dead could not still.
High up among the branches of a mighty tree she hugged the shrieking infant to her bosom, and soon the instinct that was as dominant in this fierce female as it had been in the breast of his tender and beautiful mother — the instinct of mother love — reached out to the tiny man-child’s half-formed understanding, and he became quiet.
Then hunger closed the gap between them, and the son of an English lord and an English lady nursed at the breast of Kala, the great ape.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.