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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2273613" data-attributes="member: 4937">No, not really.  Quite the contrary, if John Carter is just an idealized Anglo gentleman, wouldn't you expect him to be generic?   'A virginia gentlemen' is pretty darn generic as far as I'm concerned.  That he happens to be from Virginia is as close as we can come to distinguishing him from any other sort of gentlemen.  ERB was himself a Northerner, the son of a Union captain.  His father was an Anglophile, an abolutionist, and a staunch opponent of organized religion.  ERB very much carries his Father's sentiments forward in his stories.  I find it interesting that he choose for his hero a down and out Southern soldier of a Virginia family.  I have two theories on that.   First, that John Carter is very much a typical 'Western' hero of the day, and in the dime store novels the wandering gunslinger heroes were always ex-confederate soldiers.  Second, that the stories anti-racist messages would resonate more strongly if the hero was a man of the South himself.Absolutely.  But I don't really see how that argues against my point.   We'd come up with the same list regardless of whether we are talking 'An English Gentlemen' or whatever.No, but he was trying to make a point about what the characteristics of a gentlemen - whether Virgianian, Yankee, or English - should be.   ERB's own beliefs are expressed far too clearly in what he wrote - even when they defy the conventional thinking of the day - for this merely to be a message massaged to fit the expectations of his audience.But the two points aren't mutually exclusive.  ERB can be providing vicarious wish-fulfillment to his audience, AND providing an example of an exemplary hero.  Vicarious wish-fulfillment is probably intrinsicly tied to emulation - especially in young boys.  Do you recall in Huckleberry Finn (itself arguably an elevated boys story) where the character of Tom Sawyer demands that they break Jim out according to the rules set down in Dumas 'Count of Monte Christo' because, as he says, 'That is the way these things are done'?   Don't you think that at some level, showing the audience the way 'these things are done' is part of the point?  Vicarious wish-fulfillment, and creating an idolizable hero, are ends in themselves (they sell books), but they are also means to an end - or else John Carter wouldn't spend so much time lecturing the reader. I'm rather startled that you read the Barsoom stories and not see the influences from Victorian morality tales for boys.  I mean, to me (especially reading them as an adult) it hits me like a brick in the face that this is a instructional faerie tale for boys dressed up in clothing (or lack of clothing as is more likely on Barsoom) which the author feels is more suitably masculine than the often limb wristed fairie tales.     Nothing you've said has shown in any fashion that the Barsoom tales are not morality tales, that they are not tales of the fantastic, and that in fact these two things are not in some fashion connected.  Quite the contrary, the thing that you see to be providing as evidence against my point - that John Carter is a generic super hero roaming a fantastic stage of two dimensional cleanly heroic characters - seems to me to be arguing my point.</blockquote>

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