Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s final novel, The Last Man, is often interpreted by scholars as being critical of humanistic ideology. Humanism is a philosophical belief that stresses the value of rational thought and reasoning, putting humans atop the natural hierarchy. Beginning with Renaissance humanism from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, it was “an attitude of thought which gives primary importance to human beings” which developed “as a reaction against the religious authoritarianism of Medieval Catholicism.” Humanism “emphasized human dignity, beauty, and potential, and affected every aspect of culture in Europe, including philosophy, music, and the arts.” (New World Encyclopedia) And yet, these artistic achievements that put forth a universality of the human condition existed within a predominantly patriarchal context: historical retellings were centered on men as the subject. Men’s experiences were viewed as universally human whereas women were designated to the ‘other’—a difference predicated on an acknowledgment of a culturally constructed definition of the ‘default’ human. In The Last Man, Shelley crafts an intricate meta-narrative that disrupts this view of men as the universal subject by discrediting and complicating the legacy of her male narrator. Shelley wears Lionel’s masculinity as a mask that permits and protects her criticisms while questioning the validity of humanity’s artistic and intellectual accomplishments in the face of absolute devastation.
The narrator and our titular last man, Lionel Verney, is the sole survivor of the plague. The reader is privy to Lionel’s inner thoughts, emotions, and biases as a character in the story, but due to The Last Man’s narrative framework, Lionel loses much of his credibility. The story is a fictionalized prophecy rather than Lionel’s words written directly on the page. Lionel’s story is interpreted a female oracle in ancient times who foretold the future, called a sibyl. The sibyl wrote this future on organic materials such as leaves and bark. These remnants were left in a cave and then translated by tourists who stumble upon the cave hundreds of years after the story was foretold, and hundreds of years before the events of the novel.
The state of the cave—the vegetation protecting the leaves within it—underlines nature’s power over this story within its pages as a deadly force, but also an entity outside of human control that can destroy or permit our artistic expression:
“the whole of this land had been so convulsed with earthquake and volcano, that the change was not wonderful, though the traces of ruin were effaced by time; and we probably owed the preservation of these leaves to the accident which had closed the mouth of the cavern, and the swift-growing vegetation which had rendered its sole opening impervious to the storm.” (5-6)
The writer, prefacing the story, says that the leaves “suffered distortion and diminution of interest and excellence in my hands. My only excuse for thus transforming them, is that they were unintelligible in their pristine condition” (7). Their condition is noted to be “pristine” and yet “unintelligible,” which points towards the writer’s awe that these organic materials managed to survive through the ages at all.
The translator also notes that the translation itself could be flawed; not only due to the weathering of the leaves and the bark, but also because the prophecy is written in many languages, some of which they are not fluent in: “On examination, we found that all the leaves, bark, and other substances, were traced with written characters. What appeared to us more astonishing, was that these writings were expressed in various languages: some unknown to my companion.” (5) Furthermore, they write: “We made a hasty selection of such of the leaves, whose writing one at least of us could understand” (5-6). This “hasty selection” also begs the question of whether or not all of the leaves were even taken out of the cave, and if the entirety of The Last Man is known to the reader. With all of these factors considered, Verney’s account is not reputable or concise.
By framing the novel in abstractions, Shelley denies Lionel his universal subjectivity; Lionel’s thoughts, feelings and perceptions are abstracted through several language barriers, divine prophecy, non-linear time, and the weathering and aging of natural forces in the cave. His story of being the last man is inherently flawed, which points towards a skepticism of individual authorship, and the preservation of art as a whole throughout time. The destruction of organic materials over time is a biological reality; much like the plague destroying humanity, the leaves were destined to disintegrate and lose their form. Yet, the sibyl’s myth contradicts the biological destiny of the leaves, much like Lionel’s storytelling contradicts his fate and allows him to hold onto his humanity. With this introduction to the text, Shelley begins to undermine the importance of human-centric constructions such as language and writing in opposition to the forces of nature and deities. She shows how humanity’s own myths—the myth of a heroic man and sole survivor as the universal subject—are eclipsed by life, death, and ecological disintegration.
The Last Man’s framing device, as well as Lionel’s perceptions, illustrate how human history is limited, biased, and inaccurate based on who is recollecting the information and how that information is being conveyed to the audience. Lionel’s story is deeply personal and based on his own perspective of the events of the novel, but Shelley encourages readers to question his authority over the text from the beginning. The illusion of Lionel’s subjectivity brings us to question who is affected by these limitations. In the humanistic and romantic traditions that Shelley was reacting to in her writing, who gets to be the subject of their own story? Who exists in relation to that subject? Much of humanism’s tenants predicate themselves on humanity’s intellectual achievements on our own merits outside of divine intervention, and yet, a sibyl is a legendary Greek figure whose prophecies come directly from the gods and goddesses. Humanism and romanticism both underscore the creative imagination of the individual, but The Last Man only gives the illusion of being one man’s magnum opus. The story being a collaborative effort shows Lionel’s inability to mythologize his own heroic narrative without the assistance of higher powers.
Moreover, The Last Man critiques Lionel’s “universal subjectivity” by putting the myths that Lionel attempts to construct in his narrative in direct opposition with biological existence. Biological existence, especially in regards to the mortality and the plague, contradict the universality of Lionel’s story. We live by certain myths that are culturally manifested rather than being essentially true; in other words, patriarchal conventions dictate that Lionel’s claim as the universal subject or face of the human race is believable because men are viewed as the universal “default” socially. In reality, there is no “default human experience”. The novel’s criticisms of humanism juxtapose biological existence in reference to these culturally constructed realities. As if to say, the only universal truth to the human existence is life and death.
In her widely revered and influential work on feminist philosophy, The Second Sex, Simone De Beauvior discusses cis-gendered women’s treatment throughout history. She explains, in her work, that women’s delineation as the ‘other’ is a myth, and that men being considered ‘the default’ in terms of human experience, is circumstantial, rather than being rooted in biology or physiology:
There are different kinds of myths. This one, the myth of woman, sublimating an immutable aspect of the human condition—namely, the “division” of humanity into two classes of individuals—is a static myth. In place of fact, value, significance, knowledge, empirical law, it substitutes a transcendental idea, timeless, unchangeable, necessary. The idea is indisputable because it is beyond the given: it is endowed with absolute truth. The contrary facts of experience are impotent against the myth. To pose Woman is to pose the absolute Other, without reciprocity, denying against all experience that she is a subject, a fellow human being.
De Beauvoir mentions “the immutable aspect of the human condition” as men and women being separated and divided based on gender and sex; namely, men’s experiences being regarded as the reflective of the human condition whereas women’s experiences are not presumed to have the same universal value or standard. “Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not as herself but as relative to him” (De Beauvoir). Shelley deconstructs what it means to be the spokesperson for the entirety of the human race. Ultimately, she shows how Lionel’s perspective as the last man is an extension of these mythical, patriarchal attitudes that lead humanity deeper into desolation. Her resolution is to undermine his authority—to insert a meta-narrative that places the text within a feminine framework.
Barbara Johnson examines Shelley’s treatment of humanism in both Frankenstein and The Last Man; interestingly, she asserts that Lionel’s gender has no impact on the story: “In reality, although the narrator of this book speaks in the first person masculine singular, he belongs, like the monster, to a sort of third sex. He resembles neither the men nor the women of the novel.” To view Lionel as a “third sex,” harkens back to De Beauvoir’s consideration of men being viewed as the default; this point is especially pertinent with Johnson’s use of ‘he’ as a gender neutral pronoun in place of the reader throughout the article. From Lionel’s perspective, “he serves the function of witness, of survivor, and of scribe,” just as Johnson suggests. He is tasked with recording history, “I will write and leave in this most ancient city, this ‘world’s sole monument,’ a record of these things. I will leave a monument of the existence of Verney, the Last Man” (466), but Shelley’s criticism is that his experience is not absolute.
Morton D. Paley remarks that although women have a little role in the novel, “in another sense the feminine is mythologized here as the most powerful agency in the universe” (xix). One of these representations of the feminine is creative (the sibyl) whereas the other is tied directly with the plague, which is destructive. He writes that the leaves make the translator and writer of the text “empowered by an ancient feminine tradition to write her book” (xx). This oracle takes Lionel’s story away from him, putting it into a grander context outside of his narrow view of the world. The female characters in the story are intrinsically linked to not only the creation of the story itself through its framing device, but also to the plague, which is denoted with ‘she’ and ‘her’ pronouns: “At length the plague, slow-footed, but sure in her noiseless advance, destroyed the illusion, invading congregation of the elect, and showering promiscuous death among them” (406). Essentially, the sibyl and the plague mirror the cycle of life and death itself, placing these cycles within a feminine context. Idris’, in particular, experiences the plague through the constant anxiety and horror of losing her children. She deteriorates, as Diane Long Hoeveler suggests, because of the grotesque materiality of motherhood:
“Mary Shelley entailed the realization that women would always be life’s victims, not simply because social, political, economic, and religious conventions placed them in inferior and infantilizing postures, but because their own bodies cursed them to forever serve the wheel of physical corruption. Being a mother, bringing to life a child who would die, and perhaps would die soon, condemned women to serve a merciless god—the cycle of generation, birth, and death—in a way that men did not.”
Femininity, as stated by Paley, represents a dichotomy of creation and destruction; in addition, femininity in The Last Man also represents a dichotomy of mythology and biology. Female bodies, in particular, are tasked with a mystifying view of creation—an undeniable link to their children and a role of primary caretaker. Similarly, the sibyl’s cave is a distinctly female space, almost womb-like (Paley). In essence, the sibyl, as well as the translator, symbolically give birth to Lionel’s story, and the plague, a mystifying feminine force of death and destruction, takes life away.
On a deeper level, Lionel’s existential plight as the last human on earth paints a hopeless vision for the preservation of human culture and intellectual progress as a whole. Lionel writes his story, despite having no audience to read it, rather hopelessly: “To the illustrious dead. Shadows, arise, and read your fall! Behold the history of the last man.” (466) He writes the “world’s sole monument,” and yet, no one is left to read it. He walks the ruins of civilization, and no person alive is left to appreciate humanity’s achievements. Lionel, despite his role as the scribe, does not represent the human race. His inability to control his own story and his own words, point towards an existential dilemma of authorship. His imagination and creativity amount to nothing without the help of outside forces that are out of his control; his artistic vision and exploration of grief are not just his.
These cultural touchstones that humans cling to—gender norms, class differences and national borders—are all insignificant, social constructions. The artistic and scientific achievements that humans herald over all else are left as monuments for nobody to appreciate; human imagination and creativity is left forgotten and pointless. Lionel’s point of view is lain to waste—his words distorted and abstracted through time and prophecy.
The Last Man’s framing device criticizes a humanistic vision of the human experience: Artistic expression seems utterly hopeless in the face of death and devastation. Nature and the elements are stronger and unyielding, indifferent to humanity’s trials and tribulations. Lionel grieves over the loss of human civilization as a means to tame the elements. Lionel says, “[f]arewell to the giant powers of man,” which he later on constitutes as groundbreaking discoveries in science, art, and technology that transformed nature to bend to humanity’s whim. He says farewell
“to knowledge that could pilot the deep-drawing bark through the opposing waters of shoreless ocean,—to science that directed the silken balloon through the pathless air,—to the power that could put a barrier to mighty waters, and set in motion wheels, and beams, and vast machinery, that could divide rocks of granite or marble, and make the mountains plain!” (321).
Nevertheless, the world keeps moving forward, unaffected by the loss of human civilization. Eventually, the earth will be wild and untamed by human hands.
Humanity’s mythologies, much like Lionel’s perspective as that titular last man, center on an established literary and historical canon that denotes otherness in its universal subjectivity. These histories and stories, as chosen by humanists, were told by writers whose voices were not silenced and whose voices were meant to represent and stand-in for all of humanity. Undermining one man’s belief that he could even hope to represent human life, The Last Man points towards the importance of diversity of thoughts and experiences. These myths create a monolith of human experience, but there is no monolith. The Last Man criticizes the idea that any one person’s experience takes precedent over a community of different voices. Shelley’s denunciation of humanism in the novel points towards the falsity of patriarchal narratives as illusions of grandeur, hopelessly repurposing myths of human experience. These myths are in opposition with our mortality, as they paint us with everlasting importance, when in reality, we will eventually rot and wither away.
Works Cited
Originally written for the English MA graduate program at SUNY New Paltz. Spring 2019. ENG577: Studies in British Romanticism
Banjeree, Suparna. 2010. “Beyond Biography: Re-Reading Gender in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” English Studies, 91:5, 519-530.
Cove, Patricia. 2013. “‘The earth’s deep entrails’: Gothic landscapes and grotesque bodies in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” Gothic Studies. 15.2. Manchester University Press.
De Beauvior, Simone. 1949. The Second Sex. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. OverDrive App.
Francis, Elizabeth. 1982. “Feminist Versions of Pastoral.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly Vol. 7, Issue 4. 7-33.
Hoeveler, Diane Long. 2006. “Mary Shelley and Gothic Feminism: The Case of ‘The Mortal Immortal.’” Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein. Ed. Syndy M. Conger, Gregory O’Dea, and Frederick S. Frank. Teaneck, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. 150-166.
Johnson, Barbara. “The Last Man.” The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein. Ed. Audrey A. Fisch, Esther H. Schor, and Anne K. Mellor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. 258-266.
New World Encyclopedia. “Humanism”. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Humanism
Poetry Foundation. “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-wollstonecraft-shelley
Shelley, Mary. 1823. The Last Man. Oxford’s World Classics. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Morton D. Paley. (1994). Oxford University Press. Print.
Zolciak, Olivia. 2018. “Sublimating an Apocalypse: An Exploration of Anxiety, Authorship, and Feminist Theory in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” American Journal of Sociology. Vol 77, No. 5.
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