“vaulted over by present”, melancholy and sovereignty in mary shelley’s “the last man”

7/30/2019 Vaulted over by present, melancholy and sovereignty in mary shelleys the last man

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''Vaulted Over hy the Present":Melancholy and Sovereigntyin M ary Shelley's The Last M anJONATHAN ELMERIn 1826, Mary Shelley published The Last Man and James Eenimore Cooper published The Last of the Mohicans. Both authors were hardly blazing new ground, aindeed the sniping directed against Shelley indicates that the theme of the "last"had becom e hackneye d. Both novels are gloomy affairs, but Cooper p uts the proj-ect of mourning the "last" to nation-building purposes, while Shelley's vision ofthe last is so radical that mourning is rendered moot. Who is there to mourn forLionel Verney? Nobody. He is the "last man"end of storyand not merely the"last Mohican," who is a symbol of m an, to be sure, but one tha t is to be ab sorbedvia his extinction into the Natty B ump pos of the world an d all those he harbinge s.There is an archaic verb "to harbinger," meaning to presage, but I prefer my mis-use because it reminds me of Jean-Jacques Dessalines's great neologism when hedeclared Haitian independence in 1804 by observing how "le nom Franais lugubrenos contres""the Erench nam e lugubres ou r co un try " (D ubois 298). Ideologicallspea king. Coop er's novel harbing es, while Shelley's lugub res. Cooper's novel usesthe them es of mo urn ing and ex tinction as an engine of sequence, a way of imagin-ing the unfolding in space-time that twe nty years later wou ld be labeled ManifesDestiny. Shelley's novel, much more forthrightly political than Cooper's, is notabout sequence and unfolding but about withdrawal and implosion. By adopting adifferent approach to the problems of empire, race, and historical melancholy thanCooper does, Shelley is forced, as it were, into greater formal innovation than theAmerican, and she also reveals something important about the volatile isomor-phism of imperium and individual in the romantic politics we still inhabit.In May 1824 Shelley wrote in her Journal: "The Last man! Yes, I may w ell descrthat solitary being's feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, mycompanions extinct before me" (Shelley xiv). When she uses the term race herShelley m eans her im med iate family. She had retur ned to England the previousyear with her sole remaining child after Percy's death by drowning. In the eighyears of her marriage to Percy, she had weathered two suicides, a miscarriageand the deaths of three of her children and her husband. But in the novel thaelaborates this refiection of private grief, the meaning of race is very expansivem bracing first the sen se of race as aristocratic, indee d royal lineage, then race anation or ethnos, ultimately expanding to mean species, that human race that iannihilated by plague in her novel.How does Shelley get from her private sorrow to global catastrophe? W hat w arrants this self-aggrandizement? Erom its initial publication, critics have w onde redhow exactly to assess the we ight of the autobiographical in The Last Man. Althougthe novel purports to be an incomplete transcription of ancient Sibylline leaveNovel: A Forum on Fiction 42:2 DOI 10.1215/00295132-2009-027 2009 by Nov el, Inc.


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Shelley is, then, quite sensitive to England's im perial reach, a nd we can call theplotting of the book, as the plague creep s from the periphery to the mtropole, quiteliterally "Anglo-centric," in the sense that N evil Shute's On the Beach is Australocentric. But the plagu e is not a figure for race, not an "other " that can be understoodas some world-historical antagonist: the only way the p lague p articipates in w orldhistory is to end it. W hat comes from withou t in The Last Man is finally imm anentrather than transcendent. As Barbara Johnson puts it: "[T]he universal empire ofthe Plague wouldn't be .. . wha t is excluded from Western huma nism; it would alsobe its inverted image" (263). Shelley's vision of radica l melan cholia revea ls an otheness internal to the West, to England, to the sovereign self, and ultimately to thehuman. Questions of race and empire are not so much excluded by this vision asswallowed up, revealed to be inverted projections of an un stable core.This is not to say that Shelley has set out to perform such an ideological orpolitical "anatomy," as Lee Sterrenbu rg called it some y ears ago. As I have alreadyhinted, the novel read s like a record of a wo m an testing a range of received values,determined to know the worst, rather than as an allegory or expos of valuesalready found to be corrupt. Shelley spends much of the first volume discussingthe political m aneu vering in post-mon archic En gland at the end of the twenty-firstcentury, eventually giving us portraits of three very different "Lord Protectors":the power-hungry and aristocratic Raymond, the republican arriviste Ryland, andthe saintly Adrian , rightful heir (if such can be said) of the thro ne h is father abdi-cated before the novel begin s. On balance, Shelley favors the aristocratic values ofRaymond and Adrian to the every-man-for-himself egalitarianism of the canineRyland. The plague that destroys hum anity makes irreversible inro ads in Englandunde r Ryland's watch, and h is pusillanim ous respo nse outrages both Adrian, w hopromptly relieves him of the protectorship, and Shelley, who consigns him to anignominious death: having deserted both nation and family, he is found "half-devoured by insects . . . with piles of food laid up in useless superfiuity" (252).Shelley is rather more ambivalent about Raymond. Like his model Lord Byron,Raym ond is an "adve nturer in the Greek w ars " (31) of liberation against the Turks,a figure of Rom antic heroism as projective power. As I have m entioned, however,Shelley dfites Raymond's heroism by having him reach the gates of Constan-tinople, that bastion of "slavery and barb arism " (138), only to discover that theplague has stolen his thunder. Raym ond is the romantic individual as despot: he"looked on the struc ture of society as but a par t of the ma chine ry w hich sup porte dthe web on which his life w as traced " (35). But Raymon d has n o sei/-government:although he "seemed to govern the whole earth in his grasping imagination, [he]quailed when he attemp ted to rule himself" (45). Shelley's analysis is clear: projective power, the quest for control, the desire to impress oneself on the world, is aform of despotism , wh ether in the service of Greek liberation or not. She avails her-self here of an established political psychology according to which it is a leader'sinability to govern the self, his susceptibility to "arbitrary" w him s an d passions,that sends him down the path to tyranny.

To this vision of sovereign selfhood Shelley will counterpoise an ideal of poweras in retreat, self-isolating, and pastoral. "No two persons could be more oppo-site than Adrian and [Raymond]," we are assured. W here Raymond's psychic and


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domestic volatility are translated onto the battlefield, Adrian wants nothing morethan to retire to the domestic quietude of the royal domain at Windsor. The retir-ing heir of an abdicated throne, Adrian is an exemplar of power as the power topreserve, to let live. He takes "great delight in his park and preserves. He neversported, but spent hours in watching the tribes of lovely and almost tame animalswith which it was stocked, and ordered that greater care should be taken of themthan ever" (18). Only som eone fundam entally com mitted to the passive exercise ofpowera power to protect and care for rather than impose and changewouldsee the invasion of a global pandem ic as the career op po rtun ity of a lifetime: "O, Ishall be something now!" Adrian cries. "I cannot intrigue, or work a tortuous paththrou gh the labyrinth of men's vices and passions; but I can bring patience, andsymp athy, and such aid as art affords, to the bed of disease; I can raise from ear ththe miserable orphan, a nd awaken to new hop es the shut heart of the mourne rCongratulate me then that I have found fitting scope for my powers" (194-95).But of course Adrian's role as protector is as doomed as all the others. Adrian'spow er is archaic, in the sen se that it involves a retur n to the private seats of pow er,the homes of the archons: in place of projection and extension, we have retreatand isolation; in place of government, we have pastoralism; in place of London,Windsor. And instead of empire and the globe, England itself. All the more ironicthat it falls to Adrian to lead the su rviving English citizens on their fruitless wa n-derings across Europe. In the fate of Adrian, then, we have an image of radicaldeterritorialization.What we must emphasize now, however, is what we concluded about race ear-lier, nam ely tha t it is not the plagu e that cau ses this deterritorialization but a ten-dency inherent in the very structures and values Adrian embodies. Perhaps theclearest way to see this is to look once again at the question of Shelley's Anglo-centrism. Here are the novel's opening words:

/ am the native of a sea-surrounded nook, a cloud-enshadowed land, which, whenthe surface of the globe, with its shoreless ocean and trackless continents, presentsitself to my mind, appears only as an inconsiderable speck in the immense whole; andyet, w hen balanced in the scale of mental power, far outweighed countries of largerextent and more numerous population. So true it is, that man's m ind alone was thecreator of all that was good or great to man, an d tha t Nature herself was only h is firstminister. (7)This is a dream of sovereign extension, where the isolation of the "sea-s urroun dednook" amid the "shoreless ocean" is converted into a projective power greaterthan that of "countries of larger extent" and even Nature itself, now merely "firstminister" to man's mind. If England exerts a sovereign sway, an actual geopoliti-cal force em anating , via maritime prowess, from a "sea-surroun ded nook," it isbecause its isolation and individu ation are analog ous to the source of sovereigntyitself, "man's mind alone." When Verney exclaims later, "Thou, England, wert thetrium ph of man !" (256), what ma kes England and m ankin d look like synonyms isthis mod el of sovereignty as isolation leading to extension, individuation becomereduplication. But just as the chara cters' hope that E ngland's isolation will protec t


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them from the plague is dashed, so the ideal of "man's mind alone" becomes, inthe form of Lionel Verney adrift in h is ship, once again a n "inconsiderable speck"on a "shoreless ocean."The novel turns one after another to romantic ideals only to imagine theirpathetic inadequacy: it is finally a core concept of the human itself, in its essen-tial dignity as the irreducible, nonexchangeab le locus of sovereign agency, of thebasic right to be and to do and not to be done to, that is exposed as unfixed andunfixable, subject to drift and errancy. The political force of melancholy "encrypt-ing" (Baucom) is altogether lost when the earth itself "become[s] a wide, wide,tomb" (Shelley 196) "vaulted over by the omnipotent present" (282). Let "vaulted"have both its temporal and architectural connotations here: when the present isom nipotent, it has vaulted over its place in the successions of time, and this tem -poral dislocation is also a kind of absolute immurement, as though all the worldhas become a "vaulted" tom b. The same dark te rm inus can be described inversely,too: the ann ihilation of time that com es with being the last ma n is accompanied bya spatial dislocation or errancy: "A solitary bein g is by instinct a wa nde rer" (365).At the close of the novel, Verney climbs into his boat, but he is going no whe re. H isdestiny is not manifest.

Works Cited

Baucom, Ian. Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of HDurham: Duke UP, 2005.

Dubois, Laurent. Avengers ofthe New World: The Story ofthe Haitian Revolution. CambriHarvard UP, 2004.

Johnso n, Barbara. "The Last Man." The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein. Ed. AuA. Fisch, An ne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. 258-66.Richardson, Alan. "The Last Man and the Plague of Empire." . Accessed 16 March 2009.Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Ed. Ann e M cWhir. Peterborough : Broadview, 1996.Sterrenburg, Lee. "The Last Man: Ana tomy of Failed Rev olutions." Nineteenth Century Fict

33 (1978): 324-47


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“vaulted over by present”, melancholy and sovereignty in mary shelley’s “the last man”

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