A Princess of Mars and Victorian Anthropology

Note: The book is nearly 100 years old, but I'm still going to strive to remain spoiler-free here as much as possible, especially since I'm only halfway through.

When I was a kid, Speedy Gonzalez was still part of the Looney Tunes line-up and I found the earlier version of the Mary Poppins novel in which they go to Africa where American stereotypes of rural blacks lived.  Little House had its characters constantly worried about attacks by "savage Indians", much in accordance with my history texts and just about everyone in the fantasy books I tended to prefer were white and English.  Frances Hodgson Burnett's novels are pretty fucking condesending towards India.  Stephen King, while a good writer, is a font of Magical Negro characters and I was reading him from the age of 9 until I got really bored with Wizard and Glass.  I'm also really familiar with Lovecraft's work.  Works from the Victorian era and just afterward like to talk about the savage races and how uncivilized and lazy and strong they are.  So at this point, if it was written before the Civil Rights Movement and it's not King and there's casual racism peppered about, I simply sigh, think to myself, "What a damned asshole," and read on.

Let's not even pretend that A Princess of Mars isn't racist with it's depiction of Native Americans and when I started reading Burroughs/Carter's account of the Green Men of Mars (aka Barsoom) it was highly reflective of the usual Victorian Anthropology attitude of, "Yay the civilized white people, especially the English ones! (or in this case, Virginian)"  The Green Men are described as savage and brutish, without compassion, things are held in community, and the only laughter comes from witnessing death and violence.  I read it and I give my usual sigh.



Then a bit more in, he does something I wasn't expecting: He explains why the Green Men are this way and it's not because they're Green.  It's how they survive on a dying Mars.  Mars is so hostile and brutal that becoming the very same is the best way to survive.  The Green Men are under constant attack from other groups and hostile creatures.  They can't afford to stay in one place to incubate their eggs for five years.  They choose the strongest among them to breed so that the tribe can continue.  In the meantime, they sacrifice love and art and science.  In short, it's just about every post-apocalyptic scenario we're familiar with from Fallout to Mad Max.  When the world is a brutal wasteland, so too will be its people.

But this isn't always the case.  There are those who retain the memory of emotion and affection and are trying to be different and this further makes the point that this isn't something innate to the Greens, it's a choice their society made long ago in order to survive.  John Carter turns out to have an advantage over them because he's stronger due to the lower gravity and because he has compassion.  Not only that, he's started to reawaken and teach compassion to the Greens, helping to improve their relations with their mount and thus mounted combat is improved as well.

When the eponymous Princess appears, Carter learns more of Mars history.  While its pale humanoid inhabitants were the most advanced (Fuck, who saw that one coming), they interbred with the other humanoids of darker and/or differing skin colors, yielding the red-skinned people, of which the Princess is um, a princess of, who have preserved the arts and sciences and are working to restore Mars.  This race-mixing is presented without condemnation and it's clear that this was a good thing.  I know Lovecraft was extreme for even his time, but compare that with his continuous stream of half-breeds trying to make way for the amoral Elder Gods.  Or that judge down in Louisiana.  So apparently (and this might change as I get deeper), race-mixing didn't destroy Mars, like some folks still think it'll destroy America, and it's apparently going to save it.

Huh.  Did not see that coming from a book written in 1912.


It's been an interesting read thus far.  Not only is it a quality adventure story (and I can forgive Carter's Gary Stu tendancies), but its subtext is very nearly modern thus far.  I'm not calling Burroughs enlightened by any means, but the lack of blatant, "Yay for White People!" is impressive.