The Atavism

The word Sarkoja uses for Sola is "atavism."

She uses it as an insult. "There would be more leisure for that kind of thought," she tells Sola, "if you were back in the time when all the hollows of the land were filled with water and the peoples were as soft as the stuff they sailed upon." An atavism is a throwback—the reappearance of a trait that evolution has discarded. In Sarkoja's view, Sola's capacity for tenderness is a regression to an earlier, weaker, inferior form.

Burroughs presents this as wrong. But he doesn't quite explain what's right.

The green Martians centuries ago made a collective decision to eliminate the softer sentiments from their social structure. No family bonds, communal child-rearing, mating controlled by the council for the improvement of the stock. The theory was that individual attachment weakened collective cohesion. If you love a specific person, you might make decisions that benefit them at the expense of the horde. So they bred out the specific and kept only the collective.

The result is a society of beings who hate each other.

Not metaphorically—literally. The Tharks fight duels constantly. Communities war with communities. Within communities, individuals fight amongst themselves. They have no concept of friendship. They have no word that corresponds to "wife." The council breeding program has produced beings who are absolutely virtuous in a technical sense—no adultery is possible when mating is entirely communal—but who experience every social interaction as a transaction in the hierarchy of dominance.

This is what "optimizing for collective cohesion at the expense of individual attachment" produces. Not cohesion. Constant fragmentation.

Sola's origin is the counter-argument made flesh.

Her mother was too small to be assigned to maternity by the council, which breeds primarily for size. She met a young warrior in the hills, and they talked about their thoughts and wishes—a conversation so alien to Thark custom that merely having it was a capital crime. Over six years they loved each other in secret. Her mother hid the egg in the highest tower of ancient Thark and visited it once a year for five years.

Sarkoja found them out. The mother was tortured to death under the laughter of Tal Hajus and his chieftains. She never revealed the father's name. The daughter was hidden in the general crèche and grew up knowing who she was and saying nothing.

The father returned from a four-year expedition and heard what had happened. He gave no sign. He became, from that day, the cruelest of the cruel.

"I have ever thought that his great love is as strong in his breast as when it first transfigured him," Sola tells Carter, "as I am sure that he but waits the opportunity to wreak a terrible vengeance."

He was Tars Tarkas. He got his vengeance. He stood over the body of Tal Hajus and became Jeddak of Thark, and his first act as ruler was to acknowledge Sola publicly as his daughter.

What the Tharks thought they were eliminating when they eliminated love was a weakness—the vulnerability of caring about something specific that could be taken from you.

What they actually eliminated was the capacity for loyalty, sacrifice, and alliance. The very things an army needs.

Sola's parents violated the law and paid for it with their lives, their separation, and decades of secret grief. But the love itself didn't disappear. It went underground and became something harder and stranger than it would have been if allowed to exist openly. Tars Tarkas spent forty years becoming the most feared warrior in Thark, waiting for the moment he could kill the man who tortured and murdered the only person he had ever loved.

That's not weakness. That's a different kind of strength—the kind that doesn't go away because it's been forbidden.

Sola tells Carter she is "lost" because she has known love. She cannot be a true green Martian. She cannot live without feeling, but her people have no place for feeling. She is a person without a category.

Carter, who is himself a category error—too strong, too gentle, from the wrong planet—immediately recognizes her as kin. His first real alliance on Barsoom is with the atavism.

The book ends with Tars Tarkas, who was forced into cruelty by the suppression of love, becoming ruler of the most powerful green horde—and using that power to ally with the red men and the man from Earth who taught him friendship exists.

You can suppress the softer sentiments. You can build a civilization on the premise that they're evolutionary baggage. But they don't go away. They go underground and wait. And in the end, every significant act in this story—every alliance, every sacrifice, every moment of genuine loyalty—is powered by exactly the thing the Tharks spent centuries trying to eliminate.

The atavism wasn't a regression. It was the survival of what mattered.

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