Why Tarzan didn't have a beard


When Edgar Rice Burroughs created the character of Tarzan, in 1912, he was creating what we would now call a fantasy superhero. And I learned a long time ago to not look too critically at these characters, because they weren't supposed to be real - that's what fantasy is all about, the're an escape from reality. But of course as a nerdy kid I had a lot of questions, and it wasn't until I was a teenager, and started reading the books that I realized that many of the questions were answered - including why Tarzan didn't have a beard.

First of all, let's be clear, the character was meant to be Anglo-Saxon, like me. I realize that some men in the world don't grow beards, but my people do - sometimes straggly, but beards. Speaking for myself, even when I gave myself a close shave in the morning, I always had stubble by the evening, or the afternoon. That used to be called "5 O'Clock Shadow" in the old ads, by the way, and wasn't considered attractive on men until the 1980s, when Don Johnson did it on purpose in the TV show "Miami Vice".

But Tarzan was always very clean-shaven. His hair was long, but he never had a scruffy beard, or as far as I can remember, even any stubble. And he slept in the jungle, in a tree! Yeah, I know, calm down, it was just a fantasy character. But there really was a reason given in the books, and that was that when he started getting old enough to have hair growing on his face, he feared that he would turn into an ape.

Although Tarzan had great affection for the apes that raised him, he decided that he really wasn't one of them. And because of this, he took the knife that he had found and scraped the hair off of his face. Ouch! That had to hurt! Of course it must have hurt to fight gorillas, and lions!

Of course, men IRL (In Real Life) at the turn of the century were using the new invention, the safety razor. Of course, there had been razors before, but Gillette made them affordable to the average man. And suddenly clean-shaved faces were very popular. Having a hairy face made you look like an old man, maybe from the '80s (the 1880s), and being "shaved to the bone" became the standard for men, who wanted to look modern, and civilized. And that included Tarzan.
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