In recent history, there has been a surfeit said about what it means to be a man. Indeed, presently, there exists a veritable deluge of perspectives and opinions informed by everything from biology to psychoanalysis. The result of this has been a range of beliefs which span from antipathetic to quixotic in their assessment of manhood and masculinity, making it exceedingly difficult to see what being a man actually means. However, literature, and Pulp Fiction, specifically, might be the key to recovering a robust and rousing vision of masculinity from the present cacophony, and thus, this paper will examine how the male leads in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, Zane Gray’s Riders of the Purple Sage, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes, respectively, are portrayed in the hopes that a survey of their commonalities and distinctions might elucidate (and encourage!) masculinity in the present day.

At first glance the main men of Red Harvest, Riders of the Purple Sage, and Tarzan of the Apes, are almost laughably distinct. The Continental Op is a middle-aged, fleshy, private eye with a penchant for getting other people to fight (and to die). Lassiter is a loner with a quick draw and a bone to pick with Utah’s Mormons. And Tarzan is an English lordling raised by apes who finds enjoyment in hurling pineapples at his lion nemesis’ face. And yet, despite their manifold and manifest differences in personality, place, and circumstance, there is one thing that all three men possess: power. Per Oxford English Dictionary, power is defined as “the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events,” and in Red Harvest, Riders of the Purple Sage, and Tarzan of the Apes, power, so defined, is something all of the men, have in spades, though, admittedly, it manifests in different ways.

For the corpulent Continental Op, his principal power lies in rhetorically stirring things up: “Plans are alright sometimes… And sometimes just stirring things up is alright—if you’re tough enough to survive and keep your eyes open so you’ll see what you want when it comes to the top.” To his fellow operatives, he contends, “If we can smash things up enough—break the combination—they’ll [the crooks of Personville] have their knives in each other’s backs, doing our work for us.” That is precisely what occurs, proving that the Continental Op’s first and best weapons are his words. However, Riders of the Purple Sage’s Lassiter is notably taciturn, his power resting in his commanding presence and fearsome reputation rather than in being a backroom provocateur. Indeed, his bellowed surname alone can make a gaggle of gun-toting Mormons tuck tail and go home. Finally, Tarzan is the consummate man of action who can subdue a whole village of cannibals on his own and dispatches a lion, single-handed, with only a knife and bit of rope. All three men, despite their differences, have the capacity to realize their desired ends, whether through words, reputation, or physical force and acumen. From this, we can glean that Hammett, Grey, and Burroughs all agree: when it comes to the leading men in their stories, power, in one form or another, is a necessity. Indeed, its absence, in men, is a personal failing. 

This is made clear across all three books through the inclusion of male characters who, despite having the correct equipment, so to speak, are all, in some way or another, weak. In Hammett’s Red Harvest, the most egregious example of this is Dan, a man who, enamored with the irrepressible and avaricious Dinah Brand, permits her to beat him: 

She caught one of his thin wrists and twisted it until he was on his knees. Her other hand, open, beat his hollow-cheeked face, half a dozen times on each side, rocking his head from side to side. He could have put his free arm up to protect his face, but didn’t. 

Dan could move to defend—or even merely protect—himself, yet he stays his hand, taking the beating in silence. In the aftermath, he does attempt to shoot the Continental Op, the lone witness to his humiliation, but he doesn’t stand a chance. With barely any effort, the Continental Op knocks him unconscious, demonstrating another of Dan’s shortcomings: impotence. Impotence, the desire but inability to realize one’s preferred ends, is a trait Dan shares with Bern Venters from Riders of The Purple Sage, who, at the outset of the novel, is shown to be no match for Mormon Elders on a whipping rampage: “‘Will you take your whipping here or would you rather go out in the sage?’ asked Tull [one of the Elders]. ‘I’ll take it here—if I must,’ said Venters.” While he doesn’t passively submit to being beaten like Dan, Venters is too weak to take on the Mormons. Nevertheless, while he doesn’t have the physical capacity to fend off the whipping, he does refuse to abandon Jane Withersteen to save his own skin, showing that he possesses both a sense of honor and personal grit. In contrast to this, Professor Porter in Tarzan is willing to essentially sell his daughter in order to settle his debts, saying to her potential purchaser/suitor, Mr. Canler, “Jane is a most obedient daughter. She will do precisely as I tell her.” Professor Porter is a feckless parasite, even a pimp, willing to capitalize on and debase his daughter in order to make life easier for him.

Thus, it is clear that in Hammett, Grey, and Burroughs’ estimation, possession of male appendages is no guarantee of achieving a laudable form of masculinity. Being weak is an impinging, if not disqualifying, characteristic if one wishes to be termed a man because however it manifests, whether in passivity, impotence, and/or being a parasitic pimp, weakness ineluctably engenders pity and/or contempt. However, while demonstrable weakness in musculature and/or morals strains the grounds on which one can be called a man, there is a sense in which weakness and power are relative. In fact, among the three leading men—Continental Op, Lassiter, and Tarzan—there is a gradient, and the rest of this paper will be dedicated to determining which one exhibits the highest and most laudable form of masculinity. To best accomplish this, each man will be measured against two questions: 

1. Are they strong enough to provide others with protection?
2. Are they strong enough to overcome pernicious influences?

Embedded in these questions are the assumptions that men ought to do all they can to safeguard the people around them and that they ought to do so with integrity and discernment. In a word, men, in the normative sense, ought to be virtuous. Whether and to what extent the Continental Op, Lassiter, and Tarzan are will now be determined. 

When it comes to providing others protection, the Continental Op comes in dead last. Within hours of arriving in Personville for his latest assignment, his first client is shot dead. The man’s father, Elihu Willsson, quickly retains him, not only to investigate his son’s murder but to clean up the city on his behalf, saying, “‘I want a man to clean out this pigsty of Poisonville for me, to smoke out the rats, little and big. It’s a man’s job. Are you a man?’” The Continental Op assents, but the plan for Personville’s purification quickly becomes one driven by retaliation and revenge, with the Op admitting, “‘I don’t like the way Poisonville has treated me. I’ve got my chance now, and I’m going to even up.’” According to the late philosopher Rene Girard, 

Vengeance is an interminable, infinitely repetitive process. Every time it turns up in some part of the community, it threatens to involve the whole social body. There is the risk that the act of vengeance will initiate a chain reaction whose consequences will quickly prove fatal to any society of modest size. 

Sadly, Girard is right. Within a fortnight, the Continental Op has stirred things to the extent that the streets are running blood red, and one morning, he wakes up to find an ice pick buried in the breast of his quasi-romantic interest, Dinah Brand. She wouldn’t be dead but for events he set in motion, and the night before he’d admitted to her that he could have gone about cleaning up the city a different way: 

I could have [swung the play legally]. But it’s easier to have them killed off, easier and surer, and now that I’m feeling this way, more satisfying… It’s this damned town. Poisonville is right. It’s poisoned me.

Clearly, whatever his original intent, the Continental Op was unable to protect the people in his orbit or hold the line against Poisonville’s corrupting influence. 

Lassiter fares markedly better in comparison. His first act upon arriving in Cottonwoods is to protect Bern Venters from being whipped, and he quickly commits himself to keeping the Mormon Elders’ proverbial yoke from being sealed around Jane Withersteen’s neck, even when she tells him she’s willing to accept it.  Indeed, he goes as far as killing Bishop Dyer, the incarnation of the creed that was draining Jane’s vitality. At first, she doesn’t understand his motivations and pleads with him to stay his hand:

‘You’ll kill [Bishop Dyer]—for yourself—for your vengeful hate?’

‘No!’ 

‘For Milly Erne’s sake?’ 

‘No.’ 

‘For little Fay’s?’ 

‘No!’ 

‘Oh—for whose?’ 

‘For yours!’

Overcome with emotion shortly thereafter, Jane beseeches Lassiter: “Kiss me!… Are you a man? Kiss me and save me!” He does save her, but her salvation comes at tremendous expense, requiring not only the slaying of Dyer but the destruction of Jane’s home, a frantic flight from her community, and being entombed within a valley. Thus, while Lassiter wasn’t taken in by the Mormon creed or the Elders’ tyranny, he wasn’t able to overcome either completely. The best he could manage was to kill a personification of the creed, fire Jane’s property to keep the Mormons from benefitting, and seal himself, Jane, and Fay in a place where they couldn’t be reached, and while the valley appears to be a wonderful, prelapsarian place, the fact remains, Lassiter, for all his protective power, had to take the girls and run away. 

Tarzan is a different case. From the moment he lays eyes on his Jane, her protection and well-being become his singular aim: “He knew that she was created to be protected, and that he was created to protect her.” He won’t be run off for anything. In fact, even when Jane herself appears to abandon him, Tarzan resolves not to do the same: 

‘What are you, Tarzan?’ He asked [himself] aloud. ‘An ape or a man?… If you are a man, you will return to protect your kind. You will not run away from one of your own people, because one of them has run away from you.’

Indeed, elsewhere the other jungle visitors testify that this is true: “‘He had ample opportunity to harm us himself, or to lead his people against us. Instead, during our long residence here, he has been uniformly consistent in his role of protector and provider.’”  Of the three leading men, Tarzan is the most capable, competent, and consistent in coming to others’ defense. And not only in the physical sense. At the conclusion of the novel, having asked Jane to marry him only moments after she’d promised herself to another man—his cousin, as it happens—Tarzan, always with her welfare in mind, asks her how they should proceed because he doesn’t want to make her a pariah in society:

‘You have admitted that you love me. You know that I love you; but I do not know the ethics of society by which you are governed. I shall leave the decision to you, for you know best what will be for your eventual welfare.’ 

When Jane admits that to jilt his cousin would be ruinous to her reputation, Tarzan concedes, refusing to admit even to Jane his true identity as rightful Lord of his cousin’s title and estates:

Here was a man who had Tarzan’s title, and Tarzan’s estates, and was going to marry the woman whom Tarzan loved—the woman who loved Tarzan. A single word from Tarzan would make a great difference in this man’s life. It would take away his title and his lands and his castles, and—it would take them away from Jane Porter also. 

Tarzan could have brought his cousin’s world down around his head. More than overcoming, Tarzan could have overtaken him. He had more than enough power to do it. The laws of British high society would have honored his rightful claim. He may have even been able to one day be with Jane. But doing so would have brought her to shame, and because he’d committed himself to a higher end than his own satisfaction—her protection—he chooses to take the supererogatory course of action: self-renunciation. Self-renunciation, or sacrifice, as Rene Girard describes it, is “a deliberate act of collective substitution performed at the expense of the victim and absorbing all the internal tension, feuds, and rivalries pent up within the community.” When Tarzan refuses to claim his true identity, that is exactly what he’s doing. It is an act of total self-donation, an abnegation of his title, his estates, and his romantic satisfaction, all for Jane’s sake because as he’d told her elsewhere, “‘I would rather see you happy than to be happy myself.’” And when it comes to “being a man,” a real man, total self-donation is what it’s all about. 

The relevant proof of this is the paradigmatic man of Western literary canon Jesus of Nazareth who not only gave up His divine privileges as God but His very life in order to secure others’ salvation.  In John 10:18, He says, “No one takes my life from me. I lay it down. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again,” and a little earlier, in John 10:10, He explains His purposes: “I have come that they might have life and have it in abundance.” Jesus was never powerless nor was he ever corrupted. His entire life was one of self-emptying—kenosis—and His example stands as the example of what it means to be a man, redounding through the centuries and leaving an indelible mark on our imaginations. 

In the twentieth century, British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch made the observation that while our words are stable, their related concepts often change, making it difficult, at times, to comprehend the meaning of what’s being said and, indeed, to communicate. When it comes to manhood and masculinity, this has certainly been the case, with countless voices, particularly in the hard and soft sciences, struggling to articulate what “being a man” means today. However, in the literary world, there seems to have been very little change, which should come as no surprise given that the literary paragon of manhood said in Hebrews 13:8, “I am the same, yesterday, today, forever.” The ideal man has not changed, and every man, fictional or otherwise, can be measured against the example Jesus set. The closer they are, the more manly they get. And thus, when it comes to discerning what it means to be a man today, it’s not a revolutionary but a reminding process that needs to take place, and through reading the words great writers—pulpy or otherwise—have put to page, we can be reminded that for 2000 years, the answer has remained the same.

Pulp Fiction Spring 2022.