Crumbling visions: Mary Shelley's The Last Man

'Where was the plague? 'Here-every where!' Mary Shelley imagines the decay of human civilisation by plague in her 1826 novel The Last Man. Protrite observations on the thematic applicability of Shelley's novel during COVID-19 aside, Shelley should indeed be revisited in 2021. The novel depicts a world crumbling at the hands of a communicable disease but it more importantly captures the solitary thoughts of one who's belief in imagination, art and popular political individuals fails.

On one level, the novel itself was born through the grief of Shelley for her husband: the recent death of the literary Percy Shelley. The novel's obituary status telescopes from an ellergy to her dead lover, to the death of the entire human race. The death of a loved one feels like the end of the world. Similarly, the death of such a literary influence on Shelley might betoken the death of a belief in the literary world itself - noticeably Shelley tried to revive Percy's memory through publishing a number of his works in the months to follow The Last Man's publication. 

The grip of the plague in the novel is reminiscent of a destructive world of grief, but it is also destructive of any future hope in the pastoral and Rousseauian world many of the Romantics envisioned. Shelley's work smacks of Voltaire's Optimism in its defience of hopeful expectation, either of a political positivity or of a successful dénouement to the world of the novel and the earth. The characters thus reel from country to country witnessing the effects of the plague. The travellers, like Voltaire who finds no philosphical or political refuge, ceaselessly find only death in the world they visit. The grip of the plague is total and just as it gradually extinguishes the members of the social group of protagonists in the novel, so it dampens any hope of revival by the hands of caring and revolutionary individuals. 

As destructive a plague evidently exists in today's global epoch. Shelley's novel speaks not only of the spreading physical malady, but also of the dying hope in the Romantic sensibility. Ardent and total belief in political ideology at the expense of religious, cultural and historical traditions cannot be the answer to the crisis of decay that we ourselves experience. More lasting, historical and traditional truths must be unurthed in our day in order for our civilisation to outlast devastation.