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We Must Live Elsewhere: The Social Construction of Natural Immunity in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10509585.2011.544931

1740-4657

Fuson Wang,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

Abstract This article takes as its premise that personal and political catastrophes inform but do not determine the political and poetic texture of Mary Shelley's apocalyptic plague narrative, The Last Man (1826). Despite charges of nihilism and anti‐Romantic conservatism, Shelley offers several sites of social resistance to natural disaster that renovate, rather than reject, the idealism of the earlier generation of Romantics. In particular, this article explains the development of Shelley's lifelong struggle with the ideal of androgyny through the narrator of the frame tale and the critically neglected Evadne. Further, the author uses Kant's concept of cosmopolitanism as "unsocial sociability" to track a discourse of race and species in Verney's encounters with a diseased "negro half clad" and an abandoned dog. Through this sustained narrative genealogy, Shelley employs a shrewdly revisionist strategy that continuously rewrites notions of community and companionship in the variable terms of gender, race, and species. The central metaphor of inoculation manages these volatile terms through its invocation of a long material history of medical science, from Montagu's Turkish inoculation to Jenner's cowpox vaccine. In the end, Shelley models a cogent politics of possibility and articulates a mature evolution of the transformative agency of the Romantic imagination. Notes 1. Unless otherwise stated, references to The Last Man come from the Paley edition and will be cited parenthetically. 2. Throughout, I will use "cosmopolitan" in the Kantian sense. See Kant's "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" and "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch." In these two pieces, Kant explains the paradox of man's "unsocial sociability" ("Universal History" 44). The fourth thesis of "Idea for a Universal History" claims that "The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men" ("Universal History" 44). The cosmopolitan end of history, then, is the slow, dialectical development of moral laws through various antagonisms between men. 3. Paley even makes the strong claim that "Ultimately The Last Man is a repudiation of what might simplistically be termed the Romantic ethos as represented, for example, in the poetics and politics of Percy Bysshe Shelley" ("Apocalypse" 111). This paper references four essays (including Paley's) from the important collection The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein: see Paley (107–23), O'Sullivan (140–58), Johnson (258–66), and Fisch (267–86). 4. Johnson explains that "The story of The Last Man is in the last analysis the story of modern Western man torn between mourning and deconstruction" (265). Mellor proclaims The Last Man "the first text to base itself on the philosophical concept we now call Deconstruction" ("Introduction" xxii). Fisch expands on the novel's politics of deconstruction: "The question of the politics of the novel might be read also as a parable of deconstruction" (278). 5. "Ambivalence" is indeed the watchword here. See Barbara Jane O'Sullivan's discussion of Shelley's "ambivalence about female self‐assertion" (155) in Valperga. See also "the ambivalence that had begun to cloud her [Mary's] feelings about Percy" (Poovey 149). Even Paley moves inexplicably from a rejection to mere "ambivalence toward millenarianism" ("Apocalypse" 117). Shelley's almost universally acknowledged ambivalence in The Last Man should cast suspicions on purely nihilistic or anti‐political readings of the novel. At the same time, though, mere ambivalence is not enough to reclaim a politics of possibility or a compensatory poetics from Shelley's apocalypse. 6. Charlotte Sussman foregrounds the novel's concerns with cosmopolitanism and overpopulation. She articulates an important paradox in Shelley's narrative: "Although The Last Man is named for the ultimate solitary individual, Mary Shelley's novel devotes much of its energy to representing human aggregates, to imagining populations" (286). Through an examination of Shelley's models of companionship – ungendered, androgynous, cosmopolitan, cross‐species – I will demonstrate the redemptive viability of these "human aggregates." 7. Here, Adam asks the archangel Michael whether "Famine and anguish will at last consume" (Milton XI.778) and "whether here the race of Man will end" (Milton XI.786). Michael's famous answer in which he foretells the Son's redemptive sacrifice – "One man except" (Milton XI.808) – is notably absent. Shelley's novel has no recourse to Michael's reasoned reassurance, and Adam's question remains open‐ended. 8. In addition to Veeder's discussion of androgyny, see William Patrick Day's In the Circles of Fear and Desire where he claims that "Central to the treatment of these [Gothic] themes are the problem of sexuality, the relation of sexuality to pleasure and identity, and the possibilities and problems of androgyny as a response to the concept of identity and family that dominated nineteenth‐century middle‐class life" (5). 9. Mellor offers an excellent and thorough history that cogently connects plot to biography (Mary Shelley 141–68). 10. The complicated history of "Lastness," including legal battles, bad reviews, and charges of plagiarism, is ably summarized in Paley's piece ("Apocalypse" 107–9). In Mellor's introduction to The Last Man, she hints at a corresponding concern with "firstness" when she suggests, "By fragmenting chronology, Mary Shelley may be writing not so much 'the end of the world' as the possibility of alternative beginnings" ("Introduction" xxiv). 11. Alan Bewell reads Evadne as "a dangerous moral contagion that is undermining British society" and a figure that "emblematizes their [the East and the West's] epidemiological link" (299) to illustrate his argument about the connection between plague and colonialism. 12. Evadne makes appearances in Euripides's The Suppliants, Virgil's Aeneid, Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy (1610), and Richard Sheil's Evadne, or, The Statue (1818). See the explanatory note about Evadne in Anne McWhir's edition of the novel (The Last Man 25). 13. For a more detailed discussion of the play's stage history, see T.W. Craik's introduction to The Maid's Tragedy (26–33). See also the short passages from The Maid's Tragedy in Charles Lamb's Specimens (347–54). 14. Several studies of Frankenstein hinge upon the good scientist/bad scientist dichotomy of the novel. Any recent account of Frankenstein will likely include a discussion of Shelley's mostly positive interest in science. 15. Contrast Beatrice's vengeful curse against Count Cenci with Prometheus's renunciation of his curse against Jupiter in the very first speech of the poem: "The curse / Once breathed on thee I would recall" (I.58–9). See both pieces in the Norton edition of Shelley's Poetry and Prose (138–286). 16. Many have noted the social potential of Verney's inoculation. Mellor suggests "If one were forced to embrace the Other rather than permitted to define it exclusively as 'foreign' and 'diseased,' one might escape this socially constructed plague" ("Introduction" xxiv). Similarly, Bewell concludes his chapter on The Last Man by suggesting that "biological diversity – the 'foreignness' – that caused so much pain and suffering in the colonial world might also hold within it something that will preserve at least some of us somewhere from the coming plague that Shelley prophesies" (313–14). More recently, Peter Melville offers a medically‐informed corrective to these readings of Verney's inoculation (825–46). No one, though, has taken into account Evadne's earlier inoculation, which could account for the unnecessarily tentative conclusions about the redemptive possibility of inoculation. 17. Melville corrects the silence on Alfred's familial presence in this scene, but he also misreads Verney's "forcible exclusion of all those outside the family circle" as a reason to reject the redemptive possibility of his encounter with the "negro half clad" (Melville 837). 18. For two representative studies about eighteenth‐century notions of race and species, see Rawson (92–182) and Brown (221–66). 19. This significant echo of Verney's earlier cosmopolitan embrace seems to have escaped critical notice. Peter Melville, for example, rejects Verney's inoculating embrace of the negro partially because he misses Shelley's stunning recapitulation of the scene at the novel's conclusion (Melville 835). 20. For an insightful look at Shelley's species discourse, see Cynthia Schoolar Williams's article on the novel's "bestiary" (138–48). She argues, as I do, for a destabilizing discourse of species that challenges humanistic ideologies and categories. 21. See Anne McWhir's article for relevant nineteenth‐century debates about contagion (23–38). 22. For a fuller account of Godwin and Percy Shelley's belief in the social construction of disease, see Bewell's chapter on Percy Shelley's "revolutionary climatology" (205–41). 23. In general, Shelley's "future" is quite similar to her nineteenth‐century present. She describes a "sailing balloon," one of the only technological advances in The Last Man: "The machine obeyed the slightest motion of the helm; and, the wind blowing steadily, there was no let or obstacle to our course. Such was the power of man over the elements; a power long sought, and lately won" (The Last Man 71). 24. For some useful close readings of Godwin and Percy Shelley in this respect, see Bewell's chapter on Percy Shelley (205–41). 25. For example, Paley takes "the failure of the imagination" as the novel's theme. He opposes Mary Shelley's pessimism to Percy Shelley's belief that "imagination is a creative and even a redemptive agency" ("Introduction" xi). 26. See McGann's explanation of "Romantic Ideology" in his introduction (1–14). 27. For biographical correspondences concerning similar amorous entanglements in the Shelley circle, see Mellor, Mary Shelley. 28. Shelley may have had Torquato Tasso's epic woman warrior Clorinda in mind when she pits the heterosexual love story against Evadne's failed androgynous ideal. Like Clorinda, Evadne eventually casts off her characteristic hybridity in favor of amorous sacrifice.