The First Last Man
Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination
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Beyond her most famous creation—the nightmarish vision of Frankenstein’s Creature—Mary Shelley’s most enduring influence on politics, literature, and art perhaps stems from the legacy of her lesser-known novel about the near-extinction of the human species through war, disease, and corruption. This novel, The Last Man (1826), gives us the iconic image of a heroic survivor who narrates the history of an apocalyptic disaster in order to save humanity—if not as a species, then at least as the practice of compassion or humaneness. In visual and musical arts from 1826 to the present, this postapocalyptic figure has transmogrified from the “last man” into the globally familiar filmic images of the “invisible man” and the “final girl.”
Reading Shelley’s work against the background of epidemic literature and political thought from ancient Greece to Covid-19, Eileen M. Hunt reveals how Shelley’s postapocalyptic imagination has shaped science fiction and dystopian writing from H. G. Wells, M. P. Shiel, and George Orwell to Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, and Emily St. John Mandel. Through archival research into Shelley’s personal journals and other writings, Hunt unearths Shelley’s ruminations on her own personal experiences of loss, including the death of young children in her family to disease and the drowning of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s grief drove her to intensive study of Greek tragedy, through which she developed the thinking about plague, conflict, and collective responsibility that later emerges in her fiction. From her readings of classic works of plague literature to her own translation of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, and from her authorship of the first major modern pandemic novel to her continued influence on contemporary popular culture, Shelley gave rise to a tradition of postapocalyptic thought that asks a question that the Covid-19 pandemic has made newly urgent for many: What do humans do after disaster?
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This erudite study by Hunt (Artificial Life After Frankenstein), a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame, examines plague motifs in the writings of 19th-century English novelist Mary Shelley. Examining Shelley's 1826 dystopian novel, The Last Man, Hunt argues that the story, which follows the solitary human survivor of a pandemic that originated in the squalid conditions created by Greece's wartime siege of Constantinople in 2092, dramatizes the "unjust social consequences associated with the repeated human failure to make peace, share love, and care for others." Plagues feature literally and "as a metaphor for disaster" in Shelley's journals, according to Hunt, who notes that three of the novelist's children died from premature birth, dysentery, and malaria between 1815 and 1819, followed by husband Percy Bysshe Shelley in an 1822 sailing accident. The tragedies led Shelley to compare herself in letters and diaries to Oedipus Rex, whom she viewed as a "human pollutant" who brought calamity to those around him. The sharp analysis sheds welcome light on lesser studied corners of Shelley's oeuvre, and Hunt's meditation on the final scene of The Last Man provides a stirring take on enduring in the face of calamity: "We should always act upon hope for retaining what makes us loving, humane, and connected to others, even in the face of total catastrophe." English literature scholars will consider this well worth their time. Photos.