"Read your fall": The signs of plague in The Last Man.

An, Young-Ok

How are we then to understand the message on each leaf, the doubly inscribed leaf that forces us from the botanical realm of organic continuity to that of the written text: how are we to read this volume of scattered pages?

--Carol Jacobs on Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1)

MARY SHELLEY'S THE LAST MAN, BEGUN IN 1824 AND PUBLISHED IN 1826, embraces a confluence of narratives that resists an interpretative closure or categorization: combining tales of multiple love-triangles, political debates, psychological struggles, historical vignettes, records of war, bits of travelogues, the text is cast as a dystopian vision invoking a classical myth. In addition, the novel enfolds the author's psychological state into the fabric of the narrative: the "Sibyline" prophecy of the war-torn, plague-ridden, desolate earth prophesied in the text reflects Mary Shelley's emotional inscape as she mourned Percy's death, a loss which threatened her sense of human agency. The novel's formal hybridity also calls into question various thematic or conceptual boundaries and fixed identities, including those of self, gender, class, race, religion, and nationality. The phantasmatic coalescing of personal tragedy with the apocalyptic extinction of humanity destabilizes hierarchical power dynamics and nullifies any illusory hope for humanistic redemption.

In light of such a textual explosion, it may be helpful to attempt to examine the rhetorical devices and ideological impulses that underpin the web of reality and fantasy, history and vision, destabilizing drives and (un-)conscious elisions. With the premise of apocalypse, the text relentlessly insists on radical freedom through the "decomposing figure" of the plague, "the vast annihilation that has swallowed all things--the voiceless solitude of the once busy earth" (193). (2) Despite the text's almost transcendental leap beyond fixed identities, however, the political unconscious of racialized British-Eurocentrism persists. This paper investigates the conjuncture, equivocation, and explosion of these two aspects. On the one hand, the textual deconstruction of human agency (the autonomy of the consciousness-of-the-self) in general and the British nationalist subject in particular propel the narrative towards the apocalyptic fall of the human race. On the other hand, the remnants of British white subjectivity manifest in racialized configurations of color. In other words, The Last Man's textual insights into the limits of (British, Eurocentric, Western, white) consciousness through the dystopian prophecy of the borderless society coexist with its blindness to a racial ideology that appropriates different races to maintain a wholesome oneness. Examining an array of textual figuration and disfiguration, this paper locates historically-specific, ideological moments couched in the futurist narrative of the post-human perspective and the textual rhetoricity of its delimitation.

Crossing Boundaries, Annihilating Identities

 The text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an
 overcrossing: thus it answers not to an interpretation, even
 a liberal one, but an explosion, a dissemination.

--Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text"

In The Last Man, plague is set up as the "other" to the logic and concomitant social relations that exist in the late 21st century, when the story begins, and it unleashes numerous literal and figurative boundary-crossings. The boundaries crossed have been essential to maintaining Eurocentric domination and conquest. When the plague breaks out, characters repeatedly assert that a breach has been made and that the Rubicon has been crossed (188). The plague rapidly breaks loose various fixed identities or dynamics, unsettling, dislocating, and displacing the existing chain of identities and events. (3) With the plague, England's historical antagonism against Ireland and ambivalence towards America are displaced by awareness of humanity's common bond. As the pacifist leader Adrian declares, "You [the Irish and Americans] are dear to us, because you wear the fragile shape of humanity" (218). England itself becomes an empty theater of ruins as the survivors prepare to desert it to search for "other" space: "England is in her shroud--we may not enchain ourselves to a corpse. Let us go--the world is our country now ..." (237). (4) Verney reflects on changes the plague has brought to the ex-Queen, the embodiment of monarchical values such as rank, hereditary right, and wealth:

 To me this proceeding [the changed attitude of the Countess of
 Windsor, the ex-Queen] appeared (if so light a term may be
 permitted) extremely whimsical. Now that the race of man had lost
 in fact all distinction of rank, this pride was doubly fatuitous;
 now that we felt a kindred, fraternal nature with all who bore the
 stamp of humanity, this angry reminiscence of times for ever gone,
 was worse than foolish. Idris was too much taken up by her own
 dreadful fears, to be angry, hardly grieved; for she judged that
 insensibility must be the source of this continued rancour. This
 was not altogether the fact: but predominant self-will assumed the
 arms and masque of callous feeling; and the haughty lady disdained
 to exhibit any token of the struggle she endured; while the slave
 of pride, she fancied that she sacrificed her happiness to
 immutable principle.

 False was all this--false all but the affections of our nature,
 and the links of sympathy with pleasure or pain. There was but one
 good and one evil in the world--life and death. The pomp or rank,
 the assumption of power, the possessions of wealth vanished like
 morning mist. One living beggar had become of more worth than a
 national peerage of dead lords--alas the day! than of dead heroes,
 patriots, or men of genius. There was much of degradation in this:
 for even vice and virtue had lost their attributes--life--life--the
 continuation of our animal mechanism--was the Alpha and Omega of
 the desires, the prayers, the prostrate ambition of human race.
 (212; my emphasis)

In the face of the plague, the dividing "principles" that mask privileged people's interests and prejudices seem pointless and false. Human existence in the aftermath of the plague is understood as merely "the continuation of our animal mechanism," whose essence is "sympathy with pleasure or pain" (212). While the faculty of sympathy has been defined as a fundamental human quality, (5) here it is seen as primordial and animalistic. Plague eludes human(ist) attempts to identify and control and, subjecting itself to nothing, it becomes an impossible moving target. It displaces the human subject as a driving force of human action; human life--"the Alpha and Omega of desires, the prayers, the prostrate ambition of human race"--is subjected to the absolute indifference of the plague.

The plague introduces ambiguity and paradox on a massive scale. The religious interpretations it invites, especially with the thematic crux of Apocalypse, do not lead to clear-cut answers. On the one hand, plague is seen as an act of God, divine justice responding to years of corruption and war. If human life began with one man, The Last Man reverses the creator-destroyer's creation process, leaving us with one man. On the other hand, the plague is seen as Satanic or demonic. In language that recalls Frankenstein, Verney speaks of the plague as the monster that annihilates the harmony of divine law: "That same invincible monster, which hovered over and devoured Constantinople--that fiend more cruel than tempest, less tame than fire, is, alas, unchained in that beautiful country--these reflections would not allow me to rest" (160). Challenging the existing social hierarchy, plague leads the survivors to shift, reexamine, and displace their firmly held values. Beyond the traditional apocalyptic sublime (the revelation of the divine will), and beyond good or evil, the plague transcends human law and consciousness and becomes the inevitable counterpart to human will and consciousness. The textual premises of apocalyptic annihilation and post-humanity supersede the humanist agenda for identity-construction as quintessential to establishing norms and ideologies, identities, or consciousness. Goldsmith argues that these textual premises unleash a radical political impetus against ideological norms and displace the "human" with narrative (Goldsmith 311).

As deciphering the plague takes urgent priority over any other matter (such as territorial domination), the text thematizes the interrogation of language, questioning the transparency of language as representational and human subjectivity as self-representational:

 Thus, losing our identity, that of which we are chiefly conscious,
 we glory in the continuity of our species, and learn to regard
 death without terror. But when any whole nation becomes the victim
 of the destructive powers of exterior agents, then indeed man
 shrinks into insignificance, he feels his tenure of life insecure,
 his inheritance on earth cut off. (166-67)

This passage typifies the textual movement that displaces images of violence and catastrophe with questions that interrogate "intricately contradictory rhetorical operations." (6) Although the characters are continually compelled to read the signs of the plague, which are fundamentally contradictory and uncertain, they continually misread them. In other words, as the plague and the language of the novel become analogous (Goldsmith 301), even the word "plague" takes over the human voice that tries to assume power over it. Vexing characters and readers alike, the plague becomes an opaque, inscrutable, and yet performing sign: "When I [Verney] inquired for them [the missing men], the man to whom I spoke, uttered the word 'plague,' and fell at my feet in convulsions; he also was infected" (292). These episodes suggest that the epidemic carries as much a discursive effect as a clinical one. Prompting the interpretive predicaments that signs of disfiguration engender, the text urges us to decipher "both a rhetorical and physical process or effect" that leaves "uncertain the relationship between them" (Chase 6).

As the plague keeps frustrating human expectations to pin it down, it emerges as the agent of radical change:

 O death and change, rulers of our life, where are ye, that I may
 grapple with you! What was there in our tranquillity, that excited
 your envy--in our happiness, that ye should destroy it? We were
 happy, loving, and beloved; the horn of Amalthea contained no
 blessing unshowered upon us, but, alas!

 [la] fortuna
 deidad barbara importuna,
 oy cadaver y ayer flor,
 no permanece jamas!

 [Importunate fortune, / the barbarous deity, / today a cadaver and
 yesterday a flower, / forever changes! (Calderon de la Barca)] (186)

This passage recalls Percy Shelley's political radicalism. His "Necessity of Reform" makes clear that change is inevitable; and Prometheus Unbound contains, along with Demogorgon's memorable statement, "the deep truth is imageless" (2.iv. 116), the idea that human beings are subject to "chance, and death, and mutability" (3.iv.201). In Queen Mab, Shelley likens power to a pestilence: "Power, like a desolating pestilence, / Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, / Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, / Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame, / A mechanized automaton" (3-176-80). The Last Man pushes the notion of human power in the face of inevitable change to its extreme, chronicling its disintegration into a vast, empty (and emptied out) futurity. Verney, the last human, becomes the emblem of post-humanity, chronicling the process of dissolution of ego-boundaries and fixed identities. Instead of human agents controlling the story, the plague controls it, as human experiences are cast and recast as its effects.

Encore: The Story of the Plague

 ... perhaps it was, that we regarded the Alps as boundaries between
 our former and our future state of existence, and so clung fondly to
 what of old we had loved. Perhaps, because we had now so few
 impulses urging to a choice between two modes of action, we were
 pleased to preserve the existence of one, and preferred the prospect
 of what we were to do, to the recollection of what had been done.

--The Last Man 312

Rebuffing human efforts to define and regulate it, the plague remains elusive, even as it becomes all-pervasive. The novel speaks of its origin and the course of its movement minimally: "this enemy to the human race had begun early in June to raise its serpent-head on the shores of the Nile" (127). It "spreads throughout Asia, conquering Constantinople," laying waste to China, advancing east to the Americas, before it turns on Western Europe (139). Yet the plague enters into the consciousness of the main characters at a critical juncture, when a united Christian front is about to vanquish the Mohametans in Constantinople. The fact that it appears to claim the celebrated Christian conqueror Raymond as one of its earliest victims upends the moralism of the Judeo-Christian belief system. Plague comes first to the region where the fate of warring nations is decided (Constantinople) and claims the celebrated conqueror of the war (Raymond) as one of its most dramatic early victims. This entry point clearly draws on the similarities between plague and war: both launch enormous violence against people, innocent or guilty, who turn into faceless, nameless victims. The inhumanity of war is expounded in detail before war gets displaced with plague--the soldiers accept the suffering of the people as an inevitable part of war: "Famine and blockade were certain means of conquest; and on these we founded our hopes of victory" (137). The mentality of conquest--"conquer, or be conquered"--proves pointless, however, as soon as the ultimate conqueror, the plague, enters the scene. As nationalist and imperialist ideologies falter before the common enemy of plague, the enemy is no longer one demonized race but random, indiscriminate destruction. When Verney addresses a victim of the plague, he uses the rhetoric of war: "So the plague killed you. How came this? was the coming painful? You look as if the enemy had tortured, before he murdered you" (188). Plague takes over the narrative from the mid-point of the novel, eclipsing dramas of love, war, and politics.

Before plague is unleashed, Raymond's self-sacrifice to the Byronic espousal of "unit[ing the English] with the Greeks, tak[ing] Constantinople, and subdu[ing] all Asia" as "a warrior, a conqueror" (40) is glorified rather than questioned. Raymond's overidentification with the exclusionist logic (based on the "imagined community") of Pan-Europeans is almost naturalized, along with the unquestioned distinction between barbarians (Turks) and nobles (Greeks, English, Europeans) based on racial identities. Yet, once the savage plague collapses the very foundation of civilization in whose name Raymond has embarked upon war, his heroism proves vainglorious and futile. Fear takes over each soldier in the face of the brutal force of pestilence (the real conqueror), and "the army disband[s] itself. Each individual, before a part of a great whole moving only in unison with others, now bec[omes] resolved into the unit nature ha[s] made him, and [thinks] of himself only" (142). In Constantinople, the news of plague devastates the land and its inhabitants, and the colonial power-struggle and the "Greek cause" become moot. Now Raymond embodies Eurocentric imperialism's blind spot as he marches into the vacated palace, into certain death. By contrast, a manufacturer's son who embodies the hegemonic rise of the middle class (41), Ryland sums up the position of the entrenched individualist who abandons social responsibility for self-preservation: "When I am a plague-spotted corpse, where will my duties be? Every man for himself!" (177); "there is no help!--great God, who talks of help! All the world has the plague" (175).

As "the enemy of the human race," plague blurs the hitherto antagonistic barriers between Turks and Europeans, between Irish and British, and between classes within Britain. Temporal and spatial boundaries are crossed and dismantled. As plague spreads, "Even the source of colonies [dries] up, for in New Holland, Van Dieman's Land, and the Cape of Good Hope, plague [rages]" (170). Only through the equalizing force of plague does republican Adrian's youthful dream "to effect a greater equalization of wealth and privilege, and to introduce a perfect system of republican government into England" (30) come to pass. Adrian wonders pointedly, "Shall man be the enemy of man, while plague, the foe of all, even now is above us, triumphing in our butchery, more cruel than her own?" (218). Ryland exposes a different perspective based on the same reality: "Death and disease level all men. I neither pretend to protect nor govern an hospital--such will England quickly become" (176).

As nationalism and territorialism are assaulted by the plague's progress, various kinds of dichotomous thinking are reconfigured and subsumed into the ultimate binarism--life or death. Changing individuals' usual fates into nothingness, the plague equalizes people, striking down all barriers, killing all and surrendering to no one. On the other hand, amid the progress of universal destruction and catastrophe, the poor and the marginalized are more vulnerable to the onslaught of the plague since they have limited mobility and resources. The oppressed can easily become the prey of the exploiters. (For example, the false prophet takes advantage of women and the disenfranchised.) In that sense, the novel also demonstrates how the plague intensifies existing prejudices and socio-economic conditions. (7) Eventually, the social hierarchies are disrupted and reversed, and any dividing markers become meaningless. The plague turns into a "destroyer" of all power, rank, and wealth:

 Poor and rich were now equal, or rather the poor were the superior,
 since they entered on such tasks with alacrity and experience;
 while ignorance, inaptitude, and habits of repose, rendered them
 fatiguing to the luxurious, galling to the proud, disgustful to all
 whose minds, bent on intellectual improvement, held it their dearest
 privilege to be exempt from attending to mere animal wants. (223)

In the space where the authority of human law is eradicated (due to the deaths of those who make and enforce the laws), and the interpretation of divine law becomes tenuous (due to the deaths of the clergy who differentiate good and evil), social boundaries become porous, and norms cannot be enforced. Literally, people leave their homes, traverse the walls of other cities, and go abroad to seek shelter. An inversion of the history of civilization takes place: the plague erodes, eradicates, and annihilates existing law and power, becoming the "law of Necessity" itself.

The enigmatic threat of the plague hangs over people, and they fiercely fight against it. The narrator repeatedly asserts that plague does not necessarily spread by contact, either physical or respiratory. In reaction to the spreading plague, people respond in a humanist way, not just Machiavellian or religious ways: "[Adrian] knew that fear and melancholy forebodings were powerful assistants to disease; that desponding and brooding care rendered the physical nature of man peculiarly susceptible of infection" (181); "the sweet medicine of hope, or the opiate of despair" (180). In a moving humanist effort, people muster intangible barriers against the plague. In Verney's words, "If manly courage and resistance can save us, we will be saved. We will fight the enemy to the last. Plague shall not find us a ready prey; we will dispute every inch of ground and, by methodical and inflexible laws, pile invincible barriers to the progress of our foe" (178; my emphasis). Yet even this spirit of humanity is then rendered ineffectual. Savage anomaly replaces normalcy, and a self-reflexive parodic mode displaces self-will:

 What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many
 that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible
 mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident. Day by day we
 are forced to believe this. He whom a scratch has disorganized, he
 who disappears from apparent life under the influence of the hostile
 agency at work around us, had the same powers as I--I also am
 subject to the same laws. In the face of all this we call ourselves
 lords of the creation, wielders of the elements, masters of life and
 death, and we allege in excuse of this arrogance, that though the
 individual is destroyed, man continues for ever. (167).

Wrestling further with the delimitation of human consciousness, Verney realizes that human beings, himself included, are but figures subject to the same laws of decomposition and dissolution.

To complicate the signification process, even though death and plague often seem coterminous, the text distinguishes them. At times, death and plague seem identical: "Death, which had in our younger days walked the Earth like 'a thief that comes in the night,' now, rising from his subterranean vault, girt with power, with dark banner floating, came a conqueror" (197). But at other times, the two are not represented as the same--while plague induces massive deaths, many main characters, strictly speaking, do not die of the plague. In fact, despite contracting the plague, some of them either survive or die of different causes. For example, although plague has a role in Raymond's death, the real cause is ambiguous. Martha, the villager of Marlow, is said to have overcome the plague. When the plague strikes her town and wipes out its people, she never loses her composure. Instead of hiding from it or giving up, Martha instills faith in the people that the plague can be beaten: "she betrayed no fear, and inspired all who saw her with some portion of her own native courage.[...] She showed them how the well-being of each included the prosperity of all" (196). The countess makes a point that she is dying of old age, not plague. The causes of Idris' and Lucy's deaths are unclear. And, of course, Verney survives his initial infection with plague to become the sole survivor. When it is declared that the plague has "vanished from the earth" (310), the characters still die of typhus (Evelyn) or shipwreck (Adrian and Clara).

Confronted with the elusive signifier, what can the survivors do in their precarious state between life and death? Some decide upon courses of action based on their individual wills and the whims of the moment; the validity of their decision-making is indeterminable at best. The efficacy of the human will is thus severely challenged, and the exertion of will brings random and arbitrary consequences. For example, Verney's various decisions do not necessarily bring consistent results: his obdurate decision against Perdita's wish to stay on in Athens leads to her suicide; his compliance with Idris' wish to go back to Windsor to rescue Lucy hastens Idris' own death; he is impotent in the face of Raymond's suicidal march into Constantinople; yet, Verney does make a grand entry into Versailles in time to rescue Adrian from the rebellion of the cult-followers.

Amidst confusions and frustrations, the last fifty survivors become more reflexive and strive to read the signs of the plague: they "assembled to read in the looks of each other ghastly plague, or wasting sorrow, desperation, or worse, carelessness of future or present evil" (303). Also, Verney notes that "Adrian stood leaning against a tree; he held a book in his hand, but his eye wandered from the pages, and sought mine; they mingled a sympathetic glance; his looks confessed that his thoughts had quitted the inanimate print, for pages more pregnant with meaning, more absorbing, spread out before him" (304). Verney intimates,

 What would become of us? O for some Delphic oracle, or Pythian
 maid, to utter the secrets of futurity! O for some OEdipus to solve
 the riddle of the cruel Sphynx! Such OEdipus was I to be--not
 divining a word's juggle, but whose agonizing pangs, and
 sorrow-tainted life were to be the engines, wherewith to lay bare
 the secrets of destiny, and reveal the meaning of the enigma, whose
 explanation closed the history of the human race. (310-11)

Verney relates himself to Oedipus, who, in his final stage, has been deprived of all authority, that based on social status and that based on personal kinship network. Immersed in the question of human destiny, which all the sorrowful knowledge of his past cannot solve, Oedipus-Verney reaches a subjectless state, where he becomes a wandering figure, stripped of all representational identity. As the last man, he embodies the enigma, the floating sign whose meaning he now renounces.

In this apocalyptic zone, the humanistic narrative viewpoint gives way to a pervasive sense of futility and doom. Verney embraces human mutability, while embodying a post-human perspective. If human identity is formed through differentiation of (one)self from the other (through what Lacan calls "the mirror stage," in which, for example, the little boy is "alienated" from his mother and separated from his father) and through subjection to a symbolic network including the kinship structure (buttoning up, or quilting--point-de-capiton), the breakdown of the chain of human relations goes hand in hand with disintegration of identity. Obviously, the notion of "the last man" nullifies the concept of an individual identity: could everything else go on unaffected, "when man, the lord, possessor, perceiver, and recorder of all things, has passed away, as though he had never been?" (301).

In fact, at various moments, not only "the last man" but other major characters enunciate something akin to "the language of the dead." Perdita, a character invested with the author's grief for her spouse, undergoes multiple transformations. Starting as the namesake "abandoned" orphan, Perdita in her relatively uneducated, savage state attracts a man with royal ambition, Raymond. A devoted partner, she fills the role of wife for the Lord Protector. After she loses Raymond's devotion, she becomes an emblem of melancholia. In Verney's view, "[s]he had been reserved and ever stern in childhood; but love had softened the asperities of her character, and her union with Raymond had caused her talents and affections to unfold themselves; the one betrayed, and the other lost, she in some degree returned to her ancient disposition" (98).

Figuratively, she loses her husband multiple times: first, when he betrays her love and exiles himself] secondly, when he is captured by Turkish forces and his life is threatened; and finally, when he dies a warrior-hero. After the loss of his undivided love, she falls into melancholia: "her exultation [becoming] as cold as a water quenched ember" (98). Then, between Raymond's symbolic death and his actual death, she arms herself with sheer will and determination and resurrects him as a heroic warrior. Finally, after she witnesses his actual death, she becomes the epitome of the sacrificial widow, resolutely identifying with the dead, relinquishing all desire to live. She pleads with Verney: "Look on me as dead; and truly if death be a mere change of state, I am dead. This is another world, from that which late I inhabited, from that which is now your home. Here I told [sic] communion only with the has been, and to come" (152). Enacting the perverse desire of the other (i.e., a temporality other than the present, and the mode other than life), Perdita would not hear Verney's rational plea to revive her attachment to homeland and to her daughter, Clara. When she finds herself in the ship heading back to England, she plunges into the ocean clenching a note, "To Athens." As she stated earlier, it is her imperative to "hold communion" with the dead Raymond.

Of all the otherworldly characters, Evadne certainly is the most enigmatic. Evocative of Sibyl in the "Author's Introduction," she is almost as mysterious, powerful, and paradoxical as the devastating disease itself. In youth, an exotic other (a Greek princess), she is adored by her ardent lover (Adrian); yet, she leaves England to disentangle herself from him, leaving him dejected. She comes back as a poor widow hopelessly in love with Raymond, with whom she claims a "fatal bond." Endowed with qualities that would make her a successful social being, such as heritage, intelligence, beauty, and artistic faculty, Evadne is nonetheless identified by others not only as "the cause of the ruin" of her own marriage but as that of the Lord Protector's family also, and hence, symbolically of the nation itself. When he goes into exile, she follows him to the battlefield in Constantinople. Overwhelmed by grief at her certain loss, she begins to embody the fiery, passionate, and destructive force of the plague. At her death, Evadne prophetically declares, "I have sold myself to death, with the sole condition that thou [Raymond] shouldst follow me--fire, war, and plague unite for thy destruction--O my Raymond, there is no safety for thee!" (131). Evadne's powerful prophecy forebodes not only Raymond's fate, but the shared destiny of all humanity.

If Perdita and Evadne strike the reader as not "typical" female characters, Idris at first sight might appear to be their opposite. Known for her "unalterably sweet" (65) temperament and tender heart, she is a prototypical "angel of the house." However, Idris undergoes remarkable changes both externally and internally. After experiencing the ravages and pain of the plague, Idris becomes a figure of grief and melancholia:

 She was uncomplaining; but the very soul of fear had taken its seat
 in her heart. She had grown thin and pale, her eyes filled with
 involuntary tears, her voice was broken and low. She tried to throw
 a veil over the change which she knew her brother must observe in
 her, but the effort was ineffectual; and when alone with him, with
 a burst of irrepressible grief she gave vent to her apprehensions
 and sorrow. She described in vivid terms the ceaseless care that
 with still renewing hunger ate into her soul; she compared this
 gnawing of sleepless expectation of evil, to the vulture that fed
 on the heart of Prometheus; under the influence of this eternal
 excitement, and of the interminable struggles she endured to combat
 and conceal it, she felt, she said, as if all the wheels and springs
 of the animal machine worked at double rate, and were fast consuming
 themselves. Sleep was not sleep, for her waking thoughts, bridled by
 some remains of reason, and by the sight of her children happy and
 in health, were then transformed to wild dreams, all her terrors
 were realized, all her fears received their dread fulfillment. To
 this state there was no hope, no alleviation, unless the grave
 should quickly receive its destined prey, and she be permitted to
 die, before she experienced a thousand living deaths in the loss of
 those she loved. (219)

Haunted by this nightmarish vision of apocalypse, Idris drifts from the mode of tireless, devoted, ideal mother and wife to that of melancholic mourner of humanity waiting for doom. Only the shock of Verney's brush with death reawakens her need for self-preservation. Having renounced all desire but the desire to rescue, she nurses him back to health, only to die while trying to save an ill-fortuned lower-class woman (Lucy Martin) and her mother from the plague.

By then Verney, the to-be humanity's sole record keeper, has witnessed the deaths of numerous close relations. Since Perdita's death (which recalls his mother's), he, like Idris, has been deeply affected by melancholia. In the wake of Evadne's enigmatic death, even without realizing the implications of her dying words, Verney faithfully executes the role of messenger. He grieves beside Raymond's dead body as he did beside Perdita's. Somewhere in the process of witnessing death after death, he begins to transform from active hero to "post-human" recorder of history. He wavers between ego-consolidation and ego-nullification. On the one hand, he emphasizes the importance of social identity by performing routines that support the existing order (a strategy many adopt to forget about the actual effects of the plague) and by imbuing others with hope. Even as the last man in the theater of post-human existence, Verney struggles to maintain now-useless social rituals. On the other hand, even while Verney asserts his social identity (his name) and national identity (Englishness) in his epitaph, he is struck by the emptiness of such gestures. He questions the point of fixing an identity when there is no humanity left.

As plague spreads and wipes out humanity, Verney exists in the liminal zone of recurring deaths. Apocalyptic visions visit him increasingly often, beginning in Volume 3. Verney attains a bardic voice that transcends individual ego:

 Suddenly an internal voice, articulate and clear, seemed to
 say:--Thus from eternity, it was decreed: the steeds that bear Time
 onwards had this hour and this fulfilment enchained to them, since
 the voice brought forth its burthen. Would you read backwards the
 unchangeable laws of Necessity?

 Mother of the world! Servant of the Omnipotent! eternal,
 changeless, Necessity! who with busy fingers sittest ever weaving
 the indissoluble chain of events!--I will not murmur at thy acts.
 If my human mind cannot acknowledge that all that is, is right;
 yet since what is, must be, I will sit amidst the ruins and smile.
 Truly we were not born to enjoy, but to submit, and to hope.
 (290-91)

Verney relinquishes his limited (human) view in the face of inanimate or inhuman "Necessity," in which death and life are not absolute opposites but the rhythms of iteration. Even if he retains hope in the midst of humanity's ruin, by the time the survivors dwindle to three (Verney, Adrian, and Clara), who then contemplate passage to Greece, it becomes clear that Verney has crossed the last boundary of human consciousness. When the rest of the survivors are gone, he reflects on his state of existence, broken from all human ties:

 I awoke in a painful agony--for I fancied that ocean, breaking its
 bounds, carried away the fixed continent and deep rooted mountains,
 together with the streams I loved, the woods, and the flocks--
 it raged around with that continued and dreadful roar which had
 accompanied the last wreck of surviving humanity. [...] How dreadful
 it is, to emerge from the oblivion of slumber, and to receive as a
 good morrow the mute wailing of one's own hapless heart--to return
 from the land of deceptive dreams, to the heavy knowledge of
 unchanged disaster!--Thus was it with me, now, and for ever! The
 sting of other griefs might be blunted by time; and even mind
 yielded sometimes during the day, to the pleasure inspired by the
 imagination or the senses; but I never look first upon the
 morning-light but with my fingers pressed tight on my bursting
 heart, and my soul deluged with the interminable flood of hopeless
 misery. Now I awoke for the first time in the dead world--I awoke
 alone--(325)

The apocalyptic sublime dawns on Verney as the light of the day--his first day as the last man--breaks in against his dark thoughts. While he suffers the utter devastation of his soul, his fragmented existence projected into the broken continents and ravaged natural environs, the unceasing rhythm of the sun draws him in. The only way he could continue existing is through becoming part of this inhuman world. He is doomed to wander, as a floating sign crossing various geographical boundaries which, stripped of any "meaning" of power, are now nothing but empty markers on the map. He plans a journey to the East, unchained from his past, towards Africa, roughly reversing the plague's route. He is moving toward, and perhaps turning into, the other.

The Color of Death: Racial Significations

 And feeling, in a poet, is the source
 Of others' feeling; but they are such liars,
 And take all colours--like the hands of dyers.

--Don Juan III, st. 87

By illustrating the agency of plague, which subordinates the human subject to its random, arbitrary power, The Last Man deconstructs the notion of human agency in general and the British nationalist subject in particular. At the same time, it resurrects a racial scapegoat, thus locating a complex ideological juncture of racial(-ized) power dynamics. Examining the tension between these two stances from a historico-political perspective will reveal not only the aporetic point of the text (its susceptibility to the racial ideology of the time) but also the text's openness to reconfiguration.

Obviously, the British colonialist presupposition was engrained in literary-cultural production in the early 19th century. Yet the degrees to which various writers conformed to, reinforced, or undermined the pervasive nationalist (and colonialist) ideology ran a range, and The Last Man is a fascinating case in point. Despite all its radical questioning of fixed signifiers, at a critical point, the novel falls back on the available racial ideology.

One of the pivotal moments in the narrative and for the narrator himself takes place in Volume 3, when the plague is spreading like wild fire and gets too close to Verney's home. On the fatal day, depressed Idris learns about Alfred's impending death by plague and leaves home in search of Verney, who has been out patrolling the town with Adrian. Idris gets caught in a storm, gets lost, and nearly dies. Verney, on the other hand, arrives back home at Windsor Castle to encounter the plague personally for the first time. The plague is depicted as mysterious, and the carrier of the disease serves as a critical figure for it:

 There was an assemblage of persons under the portico of our house,
 in whose gestures I instinctively read some heavy change, some new
 misfortune. With swift alarm, afraid to ask a single question, I
 leapt from my horse; the spectators saw me, knew me, and in awful
 silence divided to make way for me. I snatched a light, and rushing
 up stairs, and hearing a groan, without reflection I threw open the
 door of the first room that presented itself. It was quite dark;
 but, as I stept within, a pernicious scent assailed my senses,
 producing sickening qualms, which made their way to my very heart,
 while I felt my leg clasped, and a groan repeated by the person
 that held me. I lowered my lamp, and saw a negro half clad, writhing
 under the agony of disease, while he held me with a convulsive
 grasp. With mixed horror and impatience I strove to disengage
 myself, and fell on the sufferer; he wound his naked festering arms
 round me, his face was close to mine, and his breath, death-laden,
 entered my vitals. For a moment I was overcome, my head was bowed
 by aching nausea; till, reflection returning, I sprung up, threw
 the wretch from me, and darting up the staircase, entered the
 chamber usually inhabited by my family. A dim light shewed me
 Alfred on a couch; Clara trembling, and paler than whitest snow,
 had raised him on her arm, holding a cup of water to his lips. I
 saw full well that no spark of life existed in that ruined form,
 his features were rigid, his eyes glazed, his head had fallen back.
 I took him from her, I laid him softly down, kissed his cold little
 mouth, and turned to speak in a vain whisper, when loudest sound of
 thunderlike cannon could not have reached him in his immaterial
 abode. And where was Idris? (244-45; my emphasis)

In a matter of half a day, Verney's return home turns too uncanny for him: as the narrative unfolds at a dizzying speed, he is exposed to the plague, deprived of his son, and realizes his wife is missing. The dying black victim of plague, labeled "a negro," the widely accepted identity denominator in the early 19th century, works as the single source of contamination of the plague to Verney. As the face of the dreaded pestilence, a reified embodiment of the alien force, the "negro" also conjures up the "Black Death" in European cultural memory. Thus the "Africanist presence" (as Toni Morrison calls it) "enables" and propels the novel's plot, precisely as the agent who brings the plague to the forefront. By contrast, Clara, who has inherited the role of angel-of-the-house from Idris, is depicted as a polar opposite to the black figure: "paler than whitest snow." Thus the text perpetuates and reinforces the colonialist anxiety--one can interpret that the black figure is the dark burden of British colonialism, against which the British white soul needs to be protected. (8)

In the midst of the breakdown of social order, personal bonding between the spouses and family members (Verney and Idris; Clara and her nephews; Lucy and her father) becomes the only ground for identity-constitution and affirmation. Through various tropes of belonging, "destiny" or "fate" persists despite (or because of) crises, crossings, or severings. Such paradoxical moves echo Percy Shelley's proclamation: "all hope is vain but Love" (Prometheus Unbound 1.824). This intensified emphasis on personal bonding coincides with the identity crisis (brush with plague-induced death) provoked by the surfacing and banishment of the racial other. While the proper British Verney's white body quickly repels and disengages from the diseased body of the black man, he has already inhaled destruction. Obviously, Verney's having contact with plague might be inevitable, but it is notable that a particular race is selected to dramatize the contagious and destructive force of the plague. Even as Verney stumbles into a dying man in an obscured chamber, he immediately identifies the bearer of the plague as "a negro," victim-turned-lethal-enemy to be shunned.

The only place where "negro" appears in the entire book, this scene of a sudden black presence (especially surprising since the setting of the novel is the future-perfect moment of the last decade of the 21st century) traumatically renders race relations both at the authorial and the cultural levels. This imaginary racial encounter screens and reveals the state of the real (historical) British colonialist domination of the black slaves of early 19th-century England. While the text does not explicitly address the slave discourse of the time, British colonialism lies at the core of the novel's premise. Raymond, the charismatic hero, embodies the many faces of British national identity whose doom (as well as that of "the Greek Cause") was prophesied by none other than Evadne, the vitiated Greek princess. One might recall the fleeing Turk's curse, which revealed the problematics of Judeo-Christian philhellenism infused with British nationalist ambitions: "Take it, Christian dogs! Take the palaces, the gardens, the mosques, the abode of our fathers--take plague with them; pestilence is the enemy we fly; if she be your friend, hug her to your bosoms. The curse of Allah is on Stamboul, share ye her fate" (139; my emphasis). In a sense, the Turk's prophetic curse is realized, when Verney's embrace of the racially different other leads him to share the fate of and become equal to the dark-skinned victim. (9)

This trace of black presence attests to the materiality of British colonialism, and invites the reader to find seams of racial disturbance. How does the signification of color meet racial connotations? How is the unknowable, mysterious, and thus threatening other manifested in a racially-specific character? As a sign of the materiality of the black slaves and British colonialism, of a radically different racial other at a point of resistance, and of the British imagination scapegoating the black, "a negro" intrudes into the text, forming a textual knot, resisting clear interpretation and failing a firm resolution. The reader has to search for more clues that might be linked to this aporetic point, examining the entire textual production. Shelley's inscription of racial ideology, used as a kind of "metaphorical shortcut" points to "the hopelessness of excising racial considerations from formulations of white identity" (Morrison x, 21).

As the rising imperial center, London bustled with darker-skinned foreigners (blacks and Middle-Easterners) as well as other Europeans (note Wordsworth's description of London in The Prelude). (10) The late eighteenth century saw Blake's graphic illustrations of Stedman's Narrative (11) and references to the multi-racial presence in "The Song of Liberty" of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "O / African! Black African! (go. winged thought widen his forehead)" (pl. 26: 6-8). By 1824, when Shelley began writing The Last Man, Britain had just seen a period of revitalized antislavery discourse after decades of abolitionist movement and parliamentary debates. (12) Abolitionist pamphlets, slavery narratives, and anti-slavery poetics circulated among the literati and religious circles. (13) Amelia Opie's "The Black Man's Lament; or, How to Make Sugar" was published in the same year as The Last Man (1826, two years after her 1802 poem "The Negro Boy's Tale" saw a new edition with the vividly illustrated last drowning scene as the frontispiece) (Eberle 85). Amid enhanced awareness of blacks in Britain, The Last Man's elision of the "negro" character's identity (in contrast to exhaustive explanations of the background of minor characters such as Lucy, Juliet, Merrival, Martha, the imposter prophet, etc.) can be explained as a symptom of uneasiness towards the African colonial subject. It also reveals complex anxiety toward the other within.

Displacements: the Unlikely Doubles

 ... I strove to escape from thought--vainly--futurity, like a dark
 image in a phantasmagoria, came nearer and more near, till it
 clasped the whole earth in its shadow.

--The Last Man 185-86

The textual signs of racial ideology prompt the reader to configure the ways in which The Last Man sets up and deconstructs the subjectivity of "the last man" in relation to British national identity and its role in Eurocentric colonialism, especially through various effaced/defaced racialized figures. Certainly, the color black is ideologically invested in the narrative in rhetorically intricate ways, that is, revealing only through its concealment. Marks of effacing or burying racial struggle recur in disfigured forms.

In their journey from Paris towards Switzerland, the remaining survivors, led by Adrian, march on. Here, the narrative turns into half travelogue-half-gothic fantasy, introducing an array of adventures with commentary. Shelley mingles realistic descriptions with anecdotes that read like ghost stories, betraying anxieties of various kinds--colonialist, gendered, and classicist. Then comes a strange episode involving a fantastic object. Verney narrates,

 At another time we were haunted for several days by an apparition,
 to which our people gave the appellation of the Black Spectre. We
 never saw it except at evening, when his coal black steed, his
 mourning dress, and plume of black feathers, had a majestic and
 awe-striking appearance; his face, one said, who had seen it for
 a moment, was ashy pale; he had lingered far behind the rest of his
 troop, and suddenly at a turn in the road, saw the Black Spectre
 coming towards him; he hid himself in fear, and the horse and his
 rider slowly past, while the moonbeams fell on the face of the
 latter, displaying its unearthly hue. Sometimes at dead of night,
 as we watched the sick, we heard one galloping through the town;
 it was the Black Spectre come in token of inevitable death. (299)

The crowd calls this mysterious figure "the Death," until he himself is stricken by the force he has represented. The figuration of the Black Spectre (prefigured in Raymond's final moment) recalls not only the Biblical image of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, but a more specific cultural emblem of "Death on the Pale Horse" by Benjamin West. West's painting accrued strong cultural currency in British literary circles. In Keats's famous letter to George and Thomas Keats (dated Dec. 1817), where he expounds on "intensity" and "negative capability," he also mentions his viewing of "Death on the Pale Horse." (14) Byron alludes to it in his Alpine journal around Manfred's inception, and Percy Shelley invokes the same painting in his "Mask of Anarchy." (15) Mary Shelley's "majestic and awe-striking" Black Spectre appears to illustrate her engagement with West's apocalyptic figure. The story behind the Black Spectre is rendered as follows:

 He was a French noble of distinction, who, from the effect of the
 plague, had been left alone in his district; during many months, he
 had wandered from town to town, from province to province, seeking
 some survivor for a companion, and abhorring the loneliness to which
 he was condemned. When he discovered our troop, fear of contagion
 conquered his love of society. He dared not join us, yet he could
 not resolve to lose sight of us, sole human beings who besides
 himself existed in wide and fertile France; so he accompanied us in
 the spectral guise I have described, till pestilence gathered him to
 a larger congregation, even that of Dead Mankind. (299)

The figure for plague and death, the "Black Spectre" signifies the dying breed of French nobility ("plume of black feathers") in the post-Revolutionary era. The "unearthly hue" of the ashy pale face contrasts with the overwhelmingly black paraphernalia, especially "his coal black steed" and his mourning dress, evocative of the "Black Death." This fantastic, apocalyptic figure amounts to a rhetorical condensation that combines the snow-white Clara and the black plague victim of the previous scene. As the last vanguard of the dying French nobility, the horseman turns out to be the echoic figure of the black patient Verney encounters inside his home (nothing less than Windsor Castle). Both have outlived their culturally imposed identities, and both fantastically cross over into the realm of the Other.

The link between the "choked representation of an African presence" (Morrison 17) and the narrator (an embodiment of British national identity) needs further investigation. In his commemoration of the ex-Queen, Verney refers to her as, among other things, "the last tie binding us to the ancient state of things" (303). The black victim, evoking the unknowable and darkness, and even evil (as in the "Black Death" of the 1347 epidemic), becomes one of the most important figures for plague and death in the novel. Shelley's description of the plague, while written with the memory of the 1665 London Plague still resonating, (16) recalls Boccaccio's Decameron based on the plague that ravaged Florence in 1348 (Shelley mentions Boccaccio in the text: 193). In The Decameron, "the Black Death" comes out of the East (China) through the Black Sea in 1347, reaching Europe in 1348. (17) According to historian Robert Gottfried, the plague's victims manifested telltale signs of black or purple spots (buboes), which were a certain sign of death, hence the appellation. (18) But was it only the clinical symptoms that gave the plague its name? Did not the very term blackness lend itself to the British ideological construct of the plague?

The Last Man illustrates how the physical symptoms or marks of illness can be invested with the racial ideology of the times. Because such expropriation is not limited to the key scene, as traces of color signification appear throughout the novel, an ideological fantasy seems to be at work in the text. Earlier in the novel, dejected, melancholic Verney intimates a permutation of the plague onto the deformed body of Raymond, the avatar of British national and philhellenistic heroism. In a nightmare he has during his expedition for Raymond's body, Verney says,

 To my diseased fancy [...] my friend's shape, altered by a thousand
 distortions, expanded into a gigantic phantom, bearing on its brow
 the sign of pestilence. The growing shadow rose and rose, filling,
 and then seeming to endeavour to burst beyond, the adamantine vault
 that bent over, sustaining and enclosing the world. The nightmare
 became torture. (146)

Even the ambiguity about the direct cause of his death (whether by fire, plague, or physical harm done by the palace's falling debris, or, all of the above, as Evadne's dying words suggest) weighs in to make this phantasm compelling. His body has been "thrown from his horse by some falling ruin, which had crushed his head, and defaced his whole person" (149; my emphasis). Evoking a fragmented image of "Death on the Pale Horse," Raymond has turned into blackened material when he is found burnt and disfigured in "the mutilated form" (149), against the backdrop of "black and cold" Constantinople. This haunting image seems to mark the British-born Greek cause at the heart of darkness.

If in Verney's dream Raymond could turn into a black form, couldn't Verney's racial identification at the moment he meets the "negro" be an effect of a thousand distortions of his "diseased fancy" as well? Could it be a case of mistaken identity? Indeed, the victim could be any ordinary British man, his skin blackened by the "Black Death." As sheer blackened material, Raymond flung from his horse, the dying "negro," and the Black Spectre on his coal-black horse all traverse historically specific spatial realms (the British philhellenist cause against the shrinking Turkish Ottoman Empire, British colonialism faced with the prolonged abolitionist movement inside Britain, and French aristocracy in the wake of the Revolution). The effaced presence of the racial other phantasmatically surfaces again and again, rising through the weight of British colonialism.

Recovering the historical specificity of "scapegoating" the "negro" in the service of the British subject proper also unlocks a curious path to Verney's eclipsed past. In youth, Verney in his savage-anomaly phase rebelled against the House of Windsor by game-poaching (16-17). According to E. P. Thompson, "The Black Act" of 1722 legislated a particularly severe punishment for the kind of crimes Verney repeatedly committed as "the merest ruffian that ever trod the earth" (17). (19) Since violators of forest property often disguised themselves at night by painting their faces, offenders of this crime were labeled "Blacks." With a history originating in medieval times, "Blacking certainly continued in certain parts into the nineteenth century" (Thompson 58). (20) Since gaming and hunting were closely linked to royal prerogatives, and in the eighteenth century the politicized "Blacks" were associated with Jacobites, Verney's deliberately subversive acts against his royal counterpart, Adrian, mark a politically radical gesture. Since in his third violation Verney waves a knife at a game-keeper, his offense under the Black Act of 1722 would have been punishable by death (Thompson 22). However, due to Adrian's influence, Verney immediately converts from flagrant outlaw to proper British liberal subject, silencing his previously radical discontent with society, masking the lower-class "Black" seething within him. The novel curiously elides the link between Verney's deeds and the Black Act, since the particular appellation of "Black(ing)" is never mentioned in depicting Verney's action throughout. That elision itself covers over the class anxiety of the proper white British subject Verney becomes. Does this "Black" past of Verney's come back in the body of the black plague victim, who is also the symptom of social ills?

Such textual figurations and disfigurations that come through "a process of recognition, a perception of the affinity between two [or more] different modes of presence, figurative and literal, of the same signification" (Chase 23) might explain the elaborate workings of the textual signification. Through reconfiguration, one can see the resurfacing of effaced figures in what at first seem like accidental colorings.

To this reconfiguration, one might add more seemingly fantastic images as signs. Just after the plague is introduced in the battleground of Constantinople, Verney returns to England and notes a strange cosmic phenomenon:

 A strange story was brought to us from the East, to which little
 credit would have been given, had not the fact been attested by a
 multitude of witnesses, in various parts of the world. On the
 twenty-first of June, it was said that an hour before noon, a black
 sun arose: an orb, the size of that luminary, but dark, defined,
 whose beams were shadows, ascended from the west; in about an hour
 it had reached the meridian, and eclipsed the bright parent of day.
 Night fell upon every country, night, sudden, rayless,
 entire. (162).

Evoking standard apocalyptic discourse of the time, especially Byron's "Darkness," Shelley casts a prolepsis of the end of the world. The Sun, the all-powerful Other, the indomitable Western presence, becomes black. Soon the eclipse of the sun will converge with the raging Plague in reconstituting the Other, and the imperial power will be faced with the "dark abiding presence."

As with "black plague," Verney also evokes and invokes personified "black Melancholy," an emotional state traditionally thought to be caused by excess of black bile. This takes place at another crucial moment, when he attempts to cope with his solitude as the last man and struggles to sustain the position of the writing subject:

 Now--soft awhile--have I arrived so near the end? Yes! It is all
 over now--a step or two over those new made graves, and the
 wearisome way is done. Can I accomplish my task? Can I streak my
 paper with words capacious of the grand conclusion? Arise black
 Melancholy! quit thy Cimmerian solitude! Bring with thee murky fogs
 from hell, which may drink up the day; bring blight and pestiferous
 exhalations, which, entering the hollow caverns and breathing places
 of earth, may fill her stony veins with corruption, so that not only
 herbage may no longer flourish, the trees may rot, and the rivers
 run with gall--but the everlasting mountains be decomposed, and the
 mighty deep putrify, and the genial atmosphere which clips the
 globe, lose all powers of generation and sustenance. Do this, sad
 visaged power, while I write, while eyes read these pages. (318)

The figure of black Melancholy is conjured up to epitomize the mourning self of the solitary survivor, to evoke the theme and the condition of his writing one last time. As he experiences the ultimate finale, the writer desires nothing but to be enfolded into its hellish mode of decomposition. He must relinquish his human will to Melancholy's dark force, even as he supposes to conjure it up; along goes, furthermore, the cultural hegemony of the white imperial subject. He opens his body and soul to the "corrupting" breath of "Black Melancholy," invoking it to enter the feminized body of nature and earth. The human subject itself, having come to the end of the trail of the feminized plague, collapses into a purged substance. The human consciousness, commemorating itself, surrenders to the force of decomposition:

 Man existed by twos and threes; man, the individual who might sleep,
 and wake, and perform the animal functions; but man, in himself
 weak, yet more powerful in congregated numbers than wind or
 ocean: man, the queller of the elements, the lord of created nature,
 the peer of demi-gods, existed no longer. (233)

As substance that eludes substantiation, Verney realizes, "my person, with its human powers and features, seem to me a monstrous excrescence of nature" (340). (21) On this post-human figure who has been reduced to "nothing" in his referential status, the future dawns.

University of St. Thomas

(1.) Jacobs, "Unbinding Words," Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Bronte, Kleist (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989) 38.

(2.) Mary Shelley, The Last Man, ed. Hugh J. Juke, Jr. (Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, Bison Book ed., 1993). All subsequent references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text.

(3.) Influential readings of the text are found in Bryce Snyder, in "Apocalypse and Indeterminacy" (SiR 17 [1978]); Lee Strerrenburg, "The Last Man: Anatomy of Failed Revolutions," Nineteenth Century Fiction 33 (1978): 324-47; Barbara Johnson, "The Last Man" in The Other Mary Shelley 258-66 (originally in French, "Le Dernier homme," in Les Fins de l'homme a partir du travail de jacques derrida colloque de cerisy, ed. Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1980); Anne Mellor, "Love, Guilt and Reparation: The Last Man" in Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (NY and London: Routledge, 1989) 141-69, which is incorporated into her "Introduction" to the Bison edition of The Last Man; Audrey A. Fisch, "Plaguing Politics: AIDS, Deconstruction, and The Last Man" in Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor, ed. The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein (NY and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993) 267-86; Steven Goldsmith, "Apocalypse and Gender: Mary Shelley's Last Man," Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1993) 261-313; Morton Paley, "The Last Man: Apocalypse Without Millennium" in The Other Mary Shelley 107-23; Papers on the Romantic Circles MOO Conference, 13 (September 1997); Alan Bewell, "All the World Has the Plague": Mary Shelley's The Last Man" in Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999) 296-314; Charlotte Sussman, "'Islanded in the World': Cultural Memory and Human Mobility in The Last Man," PMLA 118.2 (March, 2003): 286-301.

(4.) Sussman focuses on the historical context of (disappearing) national boundaries and the mobility of populace, discussing state-sponsored emigration in the first three decades of the eighteenth century in "'Islanded in the World.'" Shelley also debunks the gender ideology imposed on women writers of the time. Whereas the majority of Romantic women writers privileged the discourse of domestic affections as a way to critique prevailing masculinist political discourse, Shelley fully engages with it in The Last Man, deploying a full-scale critique of militaristic nationalism, imperialist expansionism, and masculine Romantic ideology.

(5.) David Marshall in The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1988) shows how sympathy is an essential characteristic of the bourgeois humanist definition of humanity.

(6.) Cynthia Chase, Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986) 6.

(7.) Seeing the plague as the enemy to avoid, people are overtaken with fear. People's behaviors in reaction to an epidemic can be seen in the current reaction to AIDS or SARS. See Audrey Fisch's discussion of the discursive connection between the plague and the AIDS epidemic.

(8.) See Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993) 17. Among those who link The Last Man to British colonialism, see Alan Richardson (note 9) and Alan Bewell.

(9.) Anne Mellor notes the "unwilling but powerful embrace of the racial other" (xxiv) in her "Introduction" to the work, vii-xxvi. Alan Richardson, in "The Last Man and the plague of Empire," (RC MOO Conference) links this to the notion of "English disgust at the colonial other, a disgust inextricable from commercial domination--and dependence," following up on analysis by John Barrell, who has demonstrated De Quincey's colonialism.

(10.) Alison Hickey, "Dark Characters, Native Grounds: Wordsworth's Imagination of Imperialism," in Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, ed. Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1996) 283-310.

(11.) J. G. Stedman, Narrative of a five years' expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South Africa; from the year 1772 to 1777: elucidating the History of that Country, and describing its Productions, Viz. Quadrupedes, Birds, Fishes, Reptiles, Trees, Shrubs, Fruits, & Roots; with an account of the Indians of Guiana, & Negroes of Guinea (London: J. Johnson & J. Edwards, 1796). The book features a number of the plates by Bartolozzi and William Blake, some of the latter illustrating terrible tortures inflicted upon the "Negroes."

(12.) The Quaker societies (such as "Society of Friends") were active in evangelical abolitionism. See Roxanne Eberle, "Tales of Truth?: Amelia Opie's Antislavery Poetics," in Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen Behrendt, eds., Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1999) 71-98.

(13.) See Horrors of Slavery: the Life and Writings of Robert Wedderburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1992). The black Methodist preacher Wedderburn, a former slave, preached at his London "chapel," often glorifying Satan. Wedderburn thus garnered an affectionate appellation among his followers, "the Prince of darkness." Also see lain McCalman, Radical Underworld (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988).

(14.) Keats's comments are as follows: "It is a wonderful picture, when West's age is considered; But there is nothing to be intense upon; no women one feels mad to kiss; no face welling into reality, the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth...." See Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987) 42.

(15.) Byron, Journal, September 22, 1816, in Rowland E. Prothero, ed., The Works of Lord Byron, A New, Revised and Enlarged Edition, with Illustrations, Letters and Journals, 6 vols. (London: John Murray, 1898-1901) 3: 357-58. Shelley's lines read: "Last came Anarchy: he rode / On a white horse, splashed with blood; / He was pale even to the lips, / Like death in the Apocalypse" (29-32). See Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and Sharon Powers (NY: Norton, 1977) 302.

(16.) For instance, Blake produced his "Pestilence" series around 1795-1800 and 1805. In the Butlin Catalogue, No. 184 shows "Pestilence, Probably Great Plague of London" in pen and watercolor 1779-80, with the comment: "not specifically related to the London plague of 1665, but embod[ies] universal themes with revolutionary and apocalyptic implications." See Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1981).

(17.) The "Introduction" of The Decameron speaks of symptoms: "For in the early spring of the year we have mentioned, the plague began, in a terrifying and extraordinary manner, to make its disastrous effects apparent. It did not take the form it had assumed in the East, where if anyone bled from the nose it was an obvious portent of certain death. On the contrary, its earliest symptom, in men and women alike, was the appearance of certain swellings in the groin or the armpit, some of which were eggshaped while others were roughly the size of the common apple. Sometimes the swellings were large, sometimes not so large, and they were referred to by the populace as gavoccioli. From the two areas already mentioned, this deadly gavocciolo would begin to spread, and within a short time it would appear at random all over the body. Later on, the symptoms of the disease changed, and many people began to find dark blotches and bruises on their arms, thighs and other parts of the body, sometimes large and few in number, at other times tiny and closely spaced. These, to anyone unfortunate enough to contract them, were just as infallible a sign that he would die as the gavocciolo had been earlier, and as indeed it still was." See Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (London: Penguin, 1972) 42.

(18.) Robert Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1985).

(19.) Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (NY: Pantheon, 1975).

(20.) C. Kirby notes the great battle of "Blacked" poachers and gamekeepers near Berkeley Castle in 1816 in "English Game Law Reform," American Historical Review XXXVIII (1932): 364. Quoted in Thompson 58.

(21.) Goldsmith quotes Derrida's insight on the end of "man": "When the plague passes violently beyond man and humanism, the result cannot but look monstrous. The as yet unnameable can emerge 'only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity'" (Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference 293; qtd in Goldsmith 308).