At the end I shall be Mowgli the Man. Ho!’ and he slid his thumb along the eighteen-inch blade of his knife” (p. 338). The evolution Mowgli describes is linked to his rise to power in the jungle. Mowgli’s sixteen years in “nature” make him a recapitulationist version of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, the boy raised in an enclosed “garden” apart from corrupt human civilization: an ideal “natural man.” Like Émile, Mowgli is allowed to play freely in nature, instructed only by the rules guiding the natural world and by direct experience with nature. Kipling makes it clear that Mowgli’s period in the jungle ultimately transforms him into a demigod. Mowgli’s transformation into “Mowgli the Man” in “Red Dog” is a prelude to his final and decisive departure from the jungle.

If The Jungle Books begin with an evocation of Kipling’s own abandonment in England as a child, they conclude with an evocation of Kipling’s return to his family; Mowgli’s exit from the jungle at sixteen mirrors Kipling’s exit from England at the same age and his reunion with “the family square” in Lahore. As in Kim, in the Mowgli stories Kipling creates a coming-of-age saga in which the protagonist seems to move toward joining normative adult society, but does so without losing the wildness of boyhood. This aspect of Kipling’s child heroes anticipates a tendency in modernist fiction. While nineteenth-century novels often focused on the development, or Bildung, of a central youth, tracing that character’s integration into society, the figure of the youth in modernist novels often resists such integration. In this resistance to growing up, Mowgli resembles J. M. Barrie’s eternal child Peter Pan. Like Peter Pan’s Neverland, Mowgli’s jungle is—for Mowgli—an arena of childhood innocence about sexuality. Moreover, like Neverland, it is a place outside of human society in which a band of brothers share adventures. Barrie’s “lost boys,” who, though they are not animals, don animal skins and live in a burrow, possess an unending childhood as long as they remain in Neverland. Mowgli remains master of the jungle—just as Peter is master of Neverland—until the final story of The Second Jungle Book, “The Spring Running,” in which he enters the world of adult sexuality. Sexuality is here presented as the only jungle language the growing boy cannot understand. At the precise moment that he can understand this language, he sees that he must leave the jungle.

The Jungle Books conclude somberly with advice given to Mowgli by his surviving mentors—Bagheera, Kaa, and Baloo—as he leaves the jungle. Their parting words, which describe how the boy will be “Prisoned from our Mother-sky,” conjure Wordsworth’s sorrowful account of maturation in “Intimations of Immortality”: “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy.” Their reference to “toil [he cannot] break” implicitly depicts Mowgli’s jungle childhood as an Eden that must inevitably be lost. Mowgli, like the adolescent Kipling, must enter the world of human work. In much late-Victorian and Edwardian writing, as here, childhood is represented as a world of play, defined against the adult world of work.

KIPLING’S LEGACY

The Mowgli stories have had many imitators, the first appearing in the years just after The Jungle Books were published. In Something of Myself, Kipling observes, “My Jungle Books begat zoos of [imitators]. But the genius of all the genii was one who wrote a series called Tarzan of the Apes.... He had ”jazzed“ the motif of the Jungle Books and, I imagine, had thoroughly enjoyed himself.” Edgar Rice Burroughs, ten years Kipling’s junior, published the first book in his series, Tarzan of the Apes, in 1914. Tarzan, like Mowgli, remains an iconic figure; but he differs from Kipling’s jungle boy in his “noble” heritage, which, the stories suggest, make him innately superior to others. Just as Kipling focused on the common British soldier in his early stories about the camp life of the British military, in The Jungle Books he fixes his attention on an ordinary boy with extraordinary talent. While Burroughs asserts the superiority of his upper-class hero, Kipling celebrates the meteoric rise of a mere woodcutter’s son.

Other versions of the stories—plays, films, and spin-off books—have been produced over the decades. The Walt Disney Company alone has produced dozens of picture books featuring Mowgli and his cronies. The Jungle Book tales have been made into films several times.