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

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.