Mary Shelley's Bestiary: The Last Man and the Discourse of Species

Abstract

Abstract This essay won the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Romanticism Section. Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man richly rewards inquiry through the discourse of species, for it poses the question, “Is the human that which is not the animal?” By subjecting an entire species to the plague, Shelley reveals the extent to which human being is defined over and against the irreducible animal other. In so doing, her text exposes the predation that lies at the root of Western humanism. Considering how Shelley tests the limits of the human, this essay pursues such issues as her handling of the plague itself (for contrary to historical record, the illness in this novel preys only on people) and her critique of the civilizing process that the eponymous narrator undergoes (a process that seems to require the killing of animals and the killing of people as if they are animals). In addition, it traces the decentering of man as the raison d’être of nature and the taxonomic crisis that ensues when Lionel Verney is indeed the sole remnant of humankind. In the twenty‐first century, when the uncontrollable holds the foreground of our own imaginations, Shelley's deployment of the plague – that literalization of all that is incommensurable – speaks to us with renewed force, and the discourse of species offers a particularly useful lens through which to view Shelley's destabilizing of foundational binaries. Drawing on the work of Cary Wolfe, Maureen McLane, Jacques Derrida, and others, this paper argues that Shelley's work offers a radical interrogation of subjectivity itself. Examining the relationship between human and non‐human animals in The Last Man reveals that the novel is more than a critique of imperialism or Romanticism; rather, it is a profound inquiry into the insufficiency of categories, the ephemeral nature of form, and the sacrificial economy that subtends our culture.