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Woman at Sunset (1818), Caspar David Friedrich

Interchange – The Journey Through Sorrow: Mary Shelley’s Post-Apocalyptic Novel The Last Man

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Just as so many of us know the story of Frankenstein’s Monster without having read the novel that birthed him, so too we know the story of Lionel Verney, the last man on earth. The fear of being left totally alone and the sorrow of loss are powerfully depicted in Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man.

The Last Man is a futuristic story of tragic love and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague. With intriguing portraits of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, the novel is said to offer a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, and to demonstrate the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem the doomed characters. But that’s not how today’s guest reads this important book.

Shelley’s The Last Man might be read as a kind of version of the 12th century Persian epic “The Conference of the Birds.” In this poem, the birds are figures that represent human faults which prevent humanity from attaining enlightenment. Trapped in singular perspectives, and individual versions of truth, the birds cannot evolve. And so a perilous journey to seek wisdom must be undertaken. In the poem there are seven valleys that must be crossed along the way in order to cast aside dogma and learn the inadequacies of worldly knowledge and desires, and in confronting, with sublime awe, the depths of human ignorance realize a kind of self annihilation.

This is the journey undertaken by Lionel Verney, the narrator of the novel and the titular “last man.”

And Verney is Mary Shelley, who, after the successive losses of three children and her husband, the poet Percy Shelley who drowned in a sailing accident, must surely have felt as alone and lost as any last human. She was deeply depressed. Percy had written of this period in his notebook:

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—
But thou art fled, gone down a dreary road
That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode.
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee
Do thou return for mine.

When Mary’s father, anarchist philosopher and novelist William Godwin, learned of the news of the death of her daughter, Clara, he “called her to stoicism,” writing in a letter that “it is only persons of a very ordinary sort…that sink long under a calamity of this nature.” And then when her son William died in June the very next year, Godwin urged her to accept her fate and return to work, insisting “she was formed ‘by nature’ to belong to those who can ‘advance their whole species one or more degrees in the scale of perfectibility.”*

We can class The Last Man as one of those works.

*William Godwin: Philosopher, Novelist, Revolutionary by Peter Marshall

Eileen Hunt Botting (Photo by Peter Ringenberg/University of Notre Dame)

GUEST
Eileen Hunt Botting, a political theorist and professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame whose work focuses on political thought from the 17th century to the present. She’s the author of Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, and of the forthcoming Artificial Life After Frankenstein, both from Penn Press.

RELATED
In the Name of the Future: Life After the Human Catastrophe
Our Father Frankenstein
Opinion | Mary Shelley Created ‘Frankenstein,’ and Then a Pandemic by Eileen Hunt Botting

MUSIC
Conference of the Birds, Dave Holland Quartet (1972)
“Conference of the Birds”
“Four Winds”
“Interception”
“See-saw”
“Now Here (Nowhere)”

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young

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