"In the mean time, what did Perdita?": Rhythms and Reversals
in Mary
Shelley's The Last Man
by Richard S. Albright
[Albright, Richard S. "'In the mean time, what did
Perdita?': Rhythms and Reversals in Mary Shelley's The Last Man."
Romanticism On the Net 13 (February 1999) <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/perdita.html>]
All plot summaries of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's 1826 novel, The
Last Man, begin with two elements: the novel is set in
the closing years of the twenty-first century and it concerns a plague
which destroys all human life on earth except for one man.
Although the novel contains a series of intricate puzzles concerning
time, of which Shelley's setting in the distant future is only the
first, the novel has usually been read as a roman à clef, with
the author's late husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron
among the contemporary figures modeled. Other critical readings have
focused on Shelley's projections of her own guilt, anger
and emotional loss into the novel or on the tradition of the Last Man
theme.
Lionel Verney, the narrator of the tale, looks back upon the final decades
of the human race's existence from the year 2100.
Yet his narrative was prophesied thousands of years in the past by
the Cumæan Sibyl, who recorded the prophecy (in various
ancient and modern languages) on "Sibylline leaves" in a cave visited
in 1818 by the "Author" (who may or may not be Mary
Shelley, as Audrey A. Fisch has observed). (1) It falls to this individual
to translate the Sibyl's account, which is "scattered and
unconnected," to fill in gaps, to "transform" the leaves since "they
were unintelligible in their pristine condition." (2)
Verney's account thus consists of his recollection of events (from a
point when time has already lost its former meaning), a
series of events prophesied by the Sibyl, recorded as she remembered
her prophecy, translated and edited by the frame
narrator and finally interpreted by the reader. (Even the individual
who entered the cave and scattered the Sibylline leaves has
influenced the narrative). This framing process allows Shelley, absent
the time machine that H.G. Wells would not "invent" until
nearly seventy years later, to use the past tense and establish what
Giovanna Franci has termed "one of the most widely used
models in science fiction; the use of the past in the narration to
describe things which are supposed to happen in the future." (3)
Gregory O'Dea has observed that "The Last Man is founded upon complex
puzzles of time and history; indeed Shelley
constructs a basis for the novel so perplexing as to cast its shadow
over almost every aspect of the work itself," and proceeds
to discuss the "intricacies of source, subject, and authorship" as
a means to explore the problem of historical perspective which
the novel presents. (4) Yet there is another aspect of Shelley's use
of temporal perspective which has not received any critical
attention: Besides the "simple" temporal framing of ancient prophecy/future
events/recollection in flashback, the novel is
permeated by narrative rhythms that work to complicate constantly the
reader's perception of time. Consider Verney's
auspicious beginning:
I AM the native of a sea-surrounded nook, a
cloud-enshadowed land, which, when the surface of the globe, with
its shoreless ocean and trackless continents,
presents itself to my mind, appears only as an inconsiderable speck in
the immense whole; and yet, when balanced
in the scale of mental power, far outweighed countries of larger
extent and more numerous population. (5)
Shelley's use of "I AM," (in small capitals), to begin Verney's narrative,
suggests the ancient Hebrew name for God. Verney has
created this history, his own as well as his country's, and in fact
has created this entire world, symbolically dividing the waters
from the land. His view of space is vast enough that England is a mere
speck to him (when it presents itself to his mind) and his
perspective of time is comparably vast. His "I am" affirmation also
calls to mind Coleridge's concept of the imagination:
The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as
primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to
be the living Power and prime Agent of all
human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal
act of creation in the infinite I AM. The
secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co existing
with
the conscious will...It dissolves, diffuses,
dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered
impossible, yet still at all events it struggles
to idealize and to unify. (5)
In The Last Man we see multiple levels of primary and secondary imagination
at work: Verney's act of perception and then
recreation is enclosed within the Sibyl's perception and recreation,
which in turn is enclosed within the Author's perception of
the tale written on the Sibylline leaves and his or her efforts to
"model the work into a consistent form" (4); the modeling efforts
are equivalent to Coleridge's "struggles to idealize and to unify."
(6)
From his view of eternity, Verney quickly narrows his spatial perspective
and returns to his youth ("In my boyish days she
[England] was the universe to me") before, in the second paragraph
of the novel, beginning his own history by describing his
father's origins, youth and downfall, and the birth of Verney and his
sister, Perdita, thus narrowing his temporal perspective as
well. He has entered his own history, the Word made flesh. In her first,
brief chapter, Shelley establishes a narrative rhythm
which she employs throughout the novel. Her narrator repeatedly employs
the technique of taking up an account from a
particular point in time, perhaps several months or a year after a
previous major event in the novel, briefly summarizing what has
occurred in the interim, and then providing greater detail through
analepsis; sometimes these detailed accounts involve multiple
characters' viewpoints. Instead of employing what Gérard Genette
calls the classical rhythm of detailed scene for strong,
dramatic portions of the narrative, alternated with summary for the
weaker, nondramatic actions, (7) Shelley uses both
summary and scene for many of her particularly dramatic events.
A good example of this technique occurs in chapter 9 of volume 1 , a
very complicated chapter, temporally. The preceding
chapter concluded on the night of the celebration of the anniversary
of Lord Raymond's election as Lord Protector, October
19. On that fateful night Lord Raymond forsook the celebration (and
hence his official duties) and remained by the side of the
stricken Evadne. Chapter 9 begins "soon after the festival" (98) and
it is noted that "We" (i.e., Verney, Idris and Adrian) "in our
retirement, remained long in ignorance of [Perdita's] misfortune."
The phrase "long in ignorance" implies some length of time,
perhaps several months. A visit of Lord Raymond and Perdita to Windsor
is arranged, but "it was May before they arrived,"
thus, some seven months after the night of the anniversary. On the
occasion of the May visit, Perdita and her daughter arrive
first, early in the morning, and Raymond arrives soon after. Idris
and Perdita spend the day with the children while Raymond
talks of his plans as Lord Protector to Adrian and Verney. In the evening
Perdita plays and sings the music of Mozart, then
suddenly, while Idris is playing a "passionate and sorrowful air in
Figaro" (99), she leaves the group, sobbing. Verney follows
her and Perdita subsequently confides in her brother, recounting the
weeks immediately following the October anniversary, and
the exchange of letters between Raymond and herself which seemed to
spell an end to their relationship. We then return to the
"present" (i.e., May), and learn that "in the mean time, Raymond had
remained with Adrian and Idris" (104). We have returned
to the time just after Verney left the group to hear Perdita's tale,
which itself was an analepsis, all enclosed within Verney's
extended flashback. Raymond proceeds to narrate the events of the preceding
October from his viewpoint, a discussion "which
lasted for several hours," and he subsequently departs alone, leaving
Perdita "to follow him with her child" (106). An
unspecified amount of time then passes as Raymond seeks consolation
in a dissolute life style while Perdita endeavors to fulfil
his duties as Lord Protector in his place. Verney and Adrian eventually
confront Raymond, who reveals that he is about to
return to Greece as a soldier and asks Adrian to accompany him. He
goes on to say that he has reflected on this step "the
live-long summer," so obviously several months have passed since the
May meeting.
A temporal analysis of this chapter according to Genette's methodology
reveals some 140 changes of position in story time,
more than twice the number of shifts per page of narrative than most
other chapters in the novel. (8) The number of temporal
shifts and the multiplicity of viewpoints (i.e., Verney's, Lord Raymond's,
Perdita's) are disconcerting and produce a sense of
fragmentation that contrasts with the unity of the idyllic period three
chapters earlier, five years that Verney describes iteratively:
Sometimes we passed whole days under the leafy
covert of the forest with our books and music...When the
clouds veiled the sky, and the wind scattered
them there and here, rending their woof, and strewing its fragments
through the aërial plains--then we rode
out, and sought new spots of beauty and repose. When the frequent rains
shut us within doors, evening recreation followed
morning study, ushered in by music and song...Then we were as
gay as summer insects, playful as children.
(64)
The narrative structure of volume 1, chapter 9, pointedly dramatizes
what has been lost. Where there had been one viewpoint
and one temporal perspective, and a sense of timelessness conveyed
through the use of the iterative, there is now the confusion
conveyed by multiple perspectives and a rapidly shifting time line.
Time has now become plastic and unreliable.
Another example of Shelley's summary/scene rhythm occurs in the subsequent
chapter, chapter 10 of volume 1. Verney, Idris
and Perdita spend a year traveling around England, Scotland and Ireland
to take Perdita's mind off her husband's flight. Adrian
then returns from Greece, "after the lapse of more than a year" (the
same year, presumably that Verney, Idris and Perdita were
traveling [115]). Adrian now proceeds to narrate the intervening events
since he and Raymond had left England--the truce that
had existed when he and Raymond arrived in Greece, the subsequent attacks
of the Turks, and the horror and brutality of a
Greek massacre of a Turkish city. Back in the primary narrative's "present,"
more time passes as the four await tidings from
Greece, and they learn of Raymond's heroic exploits before he is captured
by the Turks. Perdita and Verney resolve to travel
to Greece, and they depart in May.
Similarly, after the death of Idris, the unforeseen arrival at her tomb
of her mother, the Countess, and the reconciliation between
her and Verney, the Countess narrates the story of her last parting
from Idris and her presentiments of Idris's death which lead
to her return to Windsor.
The Last Man also contains a series of stories within Verney's account,
which interrupt the flow of the narrative and draw us
backward. Most prominent of these is the poignant story of Juliet,
whom we meet several times. We first learn of her history,
and that of her family's, in volume 2, chapter 8, where she is reunited
with a lost lover after the deaths of everyone in her family.
She reappears early in volume 3 as the rescuer of Idris, who had been
wandering the streets of London, distraught by the death
of her son. Later, we are drawn back to her story yet again; at this
point, her husband has died of the plague, and both she and
her infant daughter become the victims of the impostor-prophet in France.
A similar pattern is employed in volume 3, chapter 3, where Verney tells
the story of Lucy Martin, whose lost first love returns
to find her unhappily married, but who dies before they can be reunited
when Lucy's husband deserts her. She is nearly left
behind in England as a result of nursing her invalid mother, and Verney
and Idris are on their way to rescue her when Idris dies.
We are reminded of Lucy's story several chapters later, when she in
turn succumbs to the plague.
These narrative rhythms mirror the larger structure of the novel within
which they are enclosed; we already know from the
outset that it is a story of the last man alive on earth and any suspense
can only be associated with the intermediate events. By
using the rhythm of flashbacks within the larger flashback ("In the
mean time, what did Perdita?" 118), Shelley continually
reminds us, on a subliminal level, that the ultimate outcome has already
been fixed, even before we arrive at Verney's
speculations on fate which occur with increasing frequency during the
final chapters of the novel. Occasional intrusions by the
narrator from his vantage point at the end of time also reinforce the
tragic conclusion.
These elaborate temporal and narrative frames seem to have served several
purposes. As Hugh J. Luke, Jr., has observed,
they provided Mary Shelley with a means to fictionally memorialize
her dead husband while circumventing Sir Timothy Shelley's
prohibition against publishing Percy's poetry or biography. Further,
her desire for "the release of self-revelation without its
consequences" required "a fragmentation of the complex personality
of [Percy] Shelley" (among several characters, including
the astronomer Merrival as well as Adrian) and a similar fragmentation
"of the complexities of her attitude toward him." (9) In
the same light, Anne K. Mellor believes that the framing provides sufficient
distance from Mary Shelley for her to deal with the
magnitude and complexity of her pain, including her "unfinished emotional
business" with her husband, her relationship with her
father and others such as Byron, and even her views on conflicting
political philosophies. (10) Paradoxically, though Shelley's
elaborate system of frames may have been a means for her to deal with
emotional pain from a safe distance, one effect upon the
reader is the relentless building of suspense toward the most ultimate
of outcomes, what Giovanna Franci called "a constant
awareness of an after, an ending." (11)
Adding to the complexity of the temporal structure of the novel is the
fact that, superimposed upon the rhythm which leads the
reader inexorably toward the future, there is a theme of "turning back"
that occurs throughout The Last Man. Some of these
reversals are physical: For example, after they have left Windsor,
presumably never to return, Verney and Idris turn back
toward Datchet to rescue Lucy Martin and her ailing mother, and, when
Idris dies, Verney returns to Windsor to inter her with
her ancestors. Later, when Adrian is detained in Versailles in an attempt
to prevent the "accursed Impostors" (292) from
seducing any more of Adrian's people to their cause, the officers refuse
to obey Verney when he wants to return to Versailles.
Despite the fact that at this point the plague has resumed its deadly
toll with the advent of warmer weather and their only
salvation seems to lie in reaching Switzerland, Verney denounces the
refusal of the officers to go backward in the strongest
terms, calling them "dastards" and "selfish and lawless men" (293).
He alone returns to Versailles in a night-long ride (the
exertions of which prove fatal to his horse) and arrives just as the
false prophet shoots himself.
These reversals of physical direction mirror a kind of temporal reversal.
Brian Nellist has pointed out that in The Last Man
"history goes into reverse. Survivors from the U.S.A. land in Ireland
and the Irish savagely invade England. The few English
survivors muster under Adrian to seek warmer lands to die in and in
effect invade Normandy." (12) Yet the temporal reversal is
far more extensive, literally constituting a "rolling back" of the
tides of civilization, as the plague progresses and the population
declines. Distinctions of economic class are lost when the plague renders
rich and poor equal, for "The grave yawned beneath
us all..." (231). The declining population causes the survivors to
become equal also in the labor which must be done--in fact,
where the tasks of daily life are concerned, "the poor were the superior,
since they entered on such tasks with alacrity and
experience" (223). This theme of the dissolution of economic classes
is echoed in references to rich and poor exchanging
stations in death, in yet another reversal:
The wretched female, loveless victim of vulgar
brutality, had wandered to the toilet of high-born beauty, and,
arraying herself in the garb of splendour,
had died before the mirror which reflected to herself alone her altered
appearance. Women whose delicate feet had
seldom touched the earth in their luxury, had fled in fright and horror
from their homes, till, losing themselves
in the squalid streets of the metropolis, they had died on the threshold
of
poverty. (232)
Shelley's theme of the unraveling of civilization (and the reversal
of the progress of time) is depicted especially dramatically in
two chapters which contain a series of "farewell to" statements in
which civilization appears to lose attributes approximately in
the reverse order of their acquisition. First comes the farewell to
"the patriotic scene" and to nationalism; then to:
the giant powers of man--to knowledge that
could pilot the deep drawing bark through the opposing waters of
shoreless ocean,- to science that directed
the silken balloon through the pathless air,--to the power that could put
a barrier to mighty waters, and set in motion
wheels, and beams, and vast machinery, that could divide rocks of
granite or marble, and make the mountains
plain! (233)
Then Verney bids farewell to "the arts,--to eloquence...to poetry and
deep philosophy" and to architecture, sculpture, music,
drama and finally to joy. Later, Verney states that:
We had bidden adieu to the state of things,
which, having existed many thousand years, seemed
eternal...government, obedience, traffic,
and domestic intercourse...patriotic zeal, to the arts, to reputation,
to
enduring fame, to the name of country...all
expectation, except the feeble one of saving our individual lives from
the wreck of the past... (300)
There appears to be a definite sequence in what is lost: nationalism
(when all her inhabitants have left her, Verney observes that
"England remained, though England was dead" [264]), then scientific
knowledge, then the arts. Poetry, sculpture, music and
drama, presumably being the most "primitive" of civilization's attributes
(or at any rate the longest held), the arts are the last to
be lost. William Walling suggests Pope's The Dunciad was most likely
the source for Byron's poem "Darkness," which in turn
influenced Shelley, and calls attention to line 640 of that poem, "Art
after art goes out, and all is Night." (13) The sequence of
attributes lost at the end of The Dunciad is: Fancy, Wit, Art, Truth,
Philosophy, Metaphysics, Mathematics, Religion, Morality,
until finally, "Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!" (14)
But in Shelley's version, the arts continue with Verney's
recording of his history, before he abandons writing altogether at
the end of the novel.
Also lost in this great unraveling of civilization are generational distinctions:
The world has grown old, and all its inmates
partook of the decrepitude. Why talk of infancy, manhood, and old
age? We all stood equal sharers of the last
throes of time-worn nature. Arrived at the same point of the world's
age... (231)
In effect, all have arrived at what Verney called "the abyss of the
present" (337), or what Shelley herself termed "the tyranny of
the Present," in a journal entry from 31 December 1822. As she looks
back at the year in which she lost her husband, she
exclaims, "That the present should be the present!--that I should not
be able to fly from it as a beast from the hunter." (15)
In The Last Man, civilization evaporates as the remnant of humanity
reverts to primitivism, though there is a kind of
Wordsworthian celebration of this simpler life. During a long and particularly
cruel winter, society reverts to what Verney calls
"patriarchal modes," "as in ancient times":
Youths, nobles of the land, performed for the
sake of mother or sister, the services of menials with amiable
cheerfulness. They went to the river to break
the ice, and draw water: they assembled on foraging expeditions, or
axe in hand felled the trees for fuel. The
females received them on their return with the simple and affectionate
welcome known before only to the lowly cottage--a
clean hearth and bright fire; the supper ready cooked by
beloved hands; gratitude for the provision
for to morrow's meal: strange enjoyments for the high-born English, yet
they were now their sole, hard earned, and
dearly prized luxuries. (223)
Wandering across the Continent, the declining remnant of humanity is
reminiscent of the Biblical Israelites wandering in the
wilderness, but as if they were returning to slavery, rather than escaping
it. Moses-like, (16) Adrian is literally referred to as
"our lawgiver and our preserver" (272). Their "tribe" is organized
into "bands" and "at each of the large towns before
mentioned, we were all to assemble; and a conclave of the principal
officers would hold council for the general weal" (288),
which is again reminiscent of the gatherings of the congregation of
the Israelites. As they continue to wander and their numbers
continue to dwindle, they dream more and more of a kind of Eden:
In the beginning of time, when, as now, man
lived by families and not by tribes or nations, they were placed in a
genial clime, where earth fed them untilled,
and the balmy air enwrapt their reposing limbs with warmth more
pleasant than beds of down. The south is the
native place of the human race; (235)
Their hope is to find a place on earth which has not been touched by
the plague, and as this concept lays hold of their minds,
their visions grow increasingly romantic and utopian: "Perhaps in some
secluded nook, amidst eternal spring, and waving trees,
and purling streams, we may find Life" (237).
As the human population in The Last Man continues to dwindle, societal
concepts disappear. Time itself loses its meaning as
the four survivors of the plague wander through Italy, though they
do establish daily routines. (Verney notes that the four
survivors "made laws for ourselves, dividing our day, and fixing distinct
occupations for each hour" [313]). Even gender
disappears as an attribute, once Clara, who was the last to have all
the "feminine and maiden virtues" (328), is dead.
The ultimate unravelling of time occurs when Verney is left alone on
earth. As William Lomax has observed, "as the Last Man,
he is also automatically the First Man." (17) Once alone, Verney attempts
to keep a record of the passage of time by marking
the days on a willow wand, as did Robinson Crusoe (even comparing his
situation to Crusoe's) but gives up only twenty-five
days after the deaths of the others. In the absence of all human society,
there is no longer any need for objective time, which he
decisively rejects when he breaks his willow wand in despair. His own
voice begins to sound strange to his ears, so little does
he use it, and eventually all discourse ceases, including writing,
once he has committed his history to paper. In a sense he has
returned to a time before Adam could "write."
The turning back of time occurs also at a physiological level for Verney.
Verney first experiences an interruption in the progress
of time when, "on the third night" of his illness, "animation was suspended"
(249). In effect, he has died and has been reborn,
Christ-like, after three days. His recovery, remarkable for his being
the only person in the novel who contracts the plague and
does not die, is the more miraculous in that it results in his health
being significantly improved in comparison to what it had been
before his illness: "the wheels and springs of my life, once again
set in motion, acquired elasticity from their short suspension"
(250). He prospers in recovery, with "renewed vigour" and "cheerful
current" of blood, even while Idris's health fades
alarmingly. (18) Verney had previously used the same mechanical imagery
to describe Idris's consumption: "she felt, she said,
as if all the wheels and springs of the animal machine worked at double
rate, and were fast consuming themselves" (219). But
for Verney, the plague seems to have renewed him by first stopping
the progress of his life and subsequently resetting his
biological clock to a younger and more vigorous age. (19) He is almost
a superman:
methought I could emulate the speed of the
racehorse, discern through the air objects at a blinding distance, hear
the operations of nature in her mute abodes;
my senses had become so refined and susceptible after my recovery
from mortal disease. (250-51)
At the end of the novel, he describes his project to write the history
of the Last Man as an "occupation best fitted to discipline
my melancholy thoughts, which had strayed backwards, over many a ruin,
and through many a flowery glade, even to the
mountain recess, from which in early youth I had first emerged" (339).
Thus Verney's narrative itself constitutes a reversal of
time. At the end of the novel he is in a state quite similar to his
early, rebellious youth as a shepherd, as he prepares to roam,
not the fields and valleys of England, but the oceans of the world,
once again accompanied by a faithful shepherd dog. (Even
the dog, whom Verney had discovered still tending sheep long after
its master had died, has participated in the temporal
reversal as he too has reacquired a companion.) (20) For Verney and
his new companion, the "time after...is an image of the
time before." (21)
In one of the many paradoxes that add dramatic tension to The Last Man,
all these examples of the apparent reversal in the
flow of time occur in opposition to repeated statements that time cannot
be rolled back. The concept of the inability of mortal
man to reverse time is first introduced in the context of interpersonal
relationships, specifically when Lord Raymond realizes that
he is in love with Evadne:
Genius, devotion, and courage; the adornments
of his mind, and the energies of his soul, all exerted to their
uttermost stretch, could not roll back one
hair's breadth the wheel of time's chariot; that which had been was
written with the adamantine pen of reality,
on the everlasting volume of the past; nor could agony and tears suffice
to wash out one iota from the act fulfilled.
(87)
After Lord Raymond departs suddenly for Greece, Verney attempts to console Perdita:
...until I could persuade her that the Past
could be unacted, that maturity could go back to the cradle, and that all
that was could become as though it had never
been, it was useless to assure her that no real change had taken
place in her fate. (112)
Later, man's inability to reverse the flow of time is demonstrated even
more dramatically when Perdita drowns herself and her
body is pulled aboard the vessel: "No care could re-animate her, no
medicine cause her dear eyes to open, and the blood to
flow again from her pulseless heart" (155). Similar echoes of this
frustration occur as loved ones die throughout the novel.
When Idris dies, Verney lifts her from the carriage where she had slumped
over and observes that "her heart was pulseless, her
faded lips unfanned by the slighted breath." Yet he still brings her
into the cottage, lights a fire and chafes her "stiffening
limbs...for two long hours" in a futile attempt to revive her (258).
Mary Shelley's own experience with the death of her first child
lends this description authenticity and power. Compare her journal
entry dated 19 March 1815, less than two weeks after she
finds her baby dead: "Dream that my little baby came to life again--that
it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire &
it lived--I awake & find no baby..." (22)
In a sense, what Verney achieves by the end of the novel is a kind of
temporal reversal, a qualified version of what he had
earlier used as an example of the impossible, that "the past could
be unacted, that maturity could go back to the cradle, and that
all that was could become as though it had never been" (112). But unlike
his early days as a rebellious shepherd boy, this time
his hair is "nearly grey" (340) and he has the full and painful knowledge
("self-knowledge...tenfold sadness" [337]) of what he
has lost, much as Wordsworth revisiting Tintern Abbey.
Even nature participates in the temporal reversal. The seasons rarely
behave as they should, from the first moment of the
"Author's Introduction," where the winter is actually spring-like ("Though
it was winter, the atmosphere seemed more
appropriate to early spring" [1]). Phenomena such as a black sun that
rises in the west and sets in the east depict occasional
reversals of the normal progress of the celestial bodies. At several
points in the novel, the narrator achieves an ultimate
perspective which encompasses all of time and history, as is the case
shortly after his first encounter with a plague victim, a
solitary cottager, and while looking out over England on a wintry midnight
following the discovery of the plague among Idris's
servants. Verney's narration, from a vantage point which takes in all
of history, yet is actually a prophecy from ancient times, (a
subsequent narrative embedded within a prior narrative) represents
still another reversal of perspective. The numerous temporal
and spatial reversals are held in tension against the signs of time's
inexorable forward movement: deaths, recurrent descriptions
of ruins, and small details such as the rotting meal in the deserted
Italian cottage, or the discovery of Lord Ryland's body
devoured by insects.
The Last Man's emphasis on the desire to reverse time despite overwhelming
evidence that time cannot be rolled back owes
much to Mary Shelley's own circumstances, including the losses of her
husband, three children and half-sister during the
preceding years. Time continued to bring fresh tragedies, and the desire
to master it, to stand it on its head, is hardly surprising.
But it is so easy to see Mary Shelley's life in her fiction that one
can lose sight of her skills as an artist. As Gregory O'Dea has
observed, purely biographical readings of The Last Man "tend to ignore
the novel's philosophical and thematic content, and
implicitly resist the thought that Shelley had ideas to examine independent
of her circumstances and acquaintances." (23) On the
other hand, her life and her fiction were clearly interrelated, certain
significant events in her own life apparently serving as
catalysts for her writing, which provided a means of emotional survival
as well as financial support. In other words, The Last
Man isn't "about" Percy Shelley and Lord Byron- in the sense of a roman
à clef--as much as it is about Mary Shelley's
examination of the nature of time, though the lives and deaths of her
husband and Lord Byron may well have propelled her
inquiry.
Lionel Verney admits that he has used the writing of his history "as
an opiate; while it described my beloved friends, fresh with
life and glowing with hope; active assistants on the scene, I was soothed"
(192). The limbs of Verney's friends have been
chafed by the fire and they have lived, but their reanimation is transitory,
ending at the very moment in which he concludes his
task and the narrative approaches the story: (24)
I...recorded with sacred zeal the virtues of
my companions. They have been with me during the fulfilment of my
task. I have brought it to an end--I lift
my eyes from my paper--again they are lost to me. Again I feel that I am
alone. (339)
Verney's act of causing the past to live again by systematically recalling
it is reminiscent of Shelley's journal entry of 7 October
1822. Her old writing desk had just been shipped to her, and in the
course of reading the letters it contained, she notes:
My William, Clara, Allegra are all talked of--they
lived then- They breathed this air & their voices struck on my
sense, their feet trod the earth beside me--&
their hands were warm with blood & life when clasped in mine.
Where are they all? (25)
Verney's use of the word "opiate" and the dramatic rendering of the
moment at which his narrative ends and he experiences his
loss afresh, strongly suggest Shelley's awareness that the consolation
offered by narrative is limited. Yet despite its limitations as
an emotional outlet, she clearly had a fascination with the power of
narrative. Depressed after her return to England subsequent
to her husband's death, her depression deepened by her inability to
write, she recorded in her journal on 8 June 1824, just
three weeks after learning of Lord Byron's death in Greece:
The lamp of thought is again illumined in my heart--& the fire descends from heaven that kindles it...
I feel my powers again--& this is of itself
happiness--the eclipse of winter is passing from my mind--I shall again
feel the enthusiastic glow of composition--again
as I pour forth my soul upon paper, feel the winged ideas arise, &
enjoy the delight of expressing them--study
& occupation will be a pleasure not a task--& this I shall owe
to sight
& companionship of trees & meadows
flowers & sunshine... (26)
This Promethean entry reveals that for Mary Shelley, narrative is not
an opiate to assuage personal grief but is a power, and
there is pleasure in its exercise. She was soon to begin The Last Man,
in which she combined the work of grieving with the
exploration of new novelistic techniques. Where she experimented with
the "Chinese box" narrative structure in Frankenstein,
a variation on the Gothic style, in The Last Man, Shelley was more
ambitious: Instead of a symmetrical structure of interlocked
narratives, she experimented with multiple timescapes, with her own
recent past enclosing a remote past that in turn enclosed a
distant future. But The Last Man's framing is curiously asymmetrical
and all of its narratives are open ended. Verney's account
ends with his preparation to embark on his sea voyage; we never return
either to the time of the Sibyl or to the time of the
"Author." In fact, the Introduction has emphasized the possible unreliability
of the pattern formed by the Author's arrangement
of the leaves, rendering the "future...already in wait for us to reach
it" (27) uncertain. The closest we come to narrative
symmetry is Verney's experience of what we would call deja vu as he
gazes over the once familiar, now deserted, landscape of
Windsor to which he has returned so that Idris could be entombed with
her royal ancestors:
To this painful recognition of familiar places,
was added a feeling experienced by all, understood by none--a
feeling as if in some state, less visionary
than a dream, in some past real existence, I had seen all I saw, with
precisely the same feelings as I now beheld
them--as if all my sensations were a duplex mirror of a former
revelation. (264, emphasis added)
The temporal framing that characterizes The Last Man, the tendency to
embed stories such as Lucy Martin's and Juliet's, and
the framing in Frankenstein all suggest a fascination with embedded
narratives; there is always one more level of embedding to
be discovered. A clue to this fascination may lie in Shelley's 1829
review of Anna Brownell Jameson's The Loves of the Poets:
[A Poet's] soul is like one of the pools in
the Ilex woods of the Maremma, it reflects the surrounding universe, but
it beautifies, groupes, and mellows their
tints, making a little world within itself, the copy of the outer one;
but more
entire, more faultless. (28)
Thus, the monster's narrative in Frankenstein is more "idealized" (as
Coleridge would have put it), more "faultless" or true, than
Victor's (and Safie's letters are even more so), (29) and Verney's
narrative in The Last Man , and the stories it encloses, are
themselves faultless, but the medium on which they are recorded, and
the process of ordering the events, are corruptible,
because they belong to "the surrounding universe." The secondary imagination
struggles, as Coleridge noted.
Shelley's fascination with metanarrative may have been informed by unfulfilled
childhood desire. Motherless, in a relationship
with her stepmother that was anything but nurturing, worshipping a
father who apparently loved her but who was remote in his
affection, (30) a desire to be enfolded in the arms of a loving parent
may have found its way into a desire to enfold stories
within stories. Part of her joy in narrating, what she calls the "enthusiastic
glow of composition," may stem from the enfolding of
her "little world[s]."
That Shelley could realize joy in the midst of the profound personal
sorrow she experienced at the time she wrote The Last
Man was remarkable, and the novel's characters sometimes reflect this
spirit. Although Verney, Adrian, Clara and Evelyn are
alone, they have complete freedom: "Of what consequence was it to our
four hearts, that they alone were the fountains of life in
the wide world?" (312). And at the end of the novel, Lionel Verney
is determined to face his future and improve himself through
study, much as Shelley in 1823 was determined to continue to improve
herself in the face of widowhood, financial difficulties
and her rejection by polite society. Resolving to "sit amidst the ruins
and smile" (290-91), to create his own future, and
accompanied only by his dog and his books, Verney sails away on the
same ocean that took his companions from him, a way
of confronting his fears that was characteristic of Mary Shelley as
well, who used her emotional conflicts to energize her fiction.
In The Last Man, Shelley envisions a world stripped of all human relationships,
and through Verney, she even allows herself to
imagine a future without her "powers." When Verney abandons writing
and sails away into myth, he also abandons the
secondary imagination. It has served its purpose. All that remains,
all that he needs, it would seem, is Imagination in its pure and
primary form: "I shall witness all the variety of appearance, that
the elements can assume" (342). But he will not write of it.
When he abandons discourse, Verney re-emerges from history and also
abandons the past tense. His plan to sail away to the
south is yet to happen at the time of his last writing--it is the future
tense, the tense of the Sibyl, and hence one more
representation of the myriad uncertainties which permeate the novel.
During the sea voyage which claimed the lives of Adrian
and Clara, Verney was terrified by his vision of the smallness of their
craft upon the vast ocean:
The vast universe, its myriad worlds, and the
plains of boundless earth which we had left--the extent of shoreless
sea around--contracted to my view--they and
all that they contained, shrunk up to one point, even to our tossing
bark, freighted with glorious humanity. (321)
The contraction of Verney's universe to a single point hauntingly anticipates
the twentieth-century cosmological view of the
universe in the moments before the Big Bang--the ultimate unraveling
of time and space, and thus the ultimate dissolution. Yet
another cycle of creation is implied here; now Verney embraces what
he then feared, using the same terms. Abandoning his
"height from which [he] can comprehend the past as a whole" (192-93)
in favor of sea level and a future he comprehends not at
all, no longer "I AM," he is only the "freight" of a "tiny bark," beneath
the "ever-open eye of the Supreme."
Notes
1. Audrey A. Fisch, "Plaguing Politics: AIDS, Deconstruction, and The
Last Man," The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond
Frankenstein, ed. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor and Esther H. Schor
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) pp.
279-80. (back)
2. Mary Shelley, The Last Man, 1826, ed. Hugh J. Luke, Jr. (Lincoln,
Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1965) pp.
3-4. All subsequent references are to this edition and will be given
in the text. (back)
3. Giovanna Franci, "A Mirror of the Future: Vision and Apocalypse in
Mary's Shelley's The Last Man," Mary Shelley:
Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers,
1985) p. 186. (back)
4. Gregory O'Dea, "Prophetic History and Textuality in Mary Shelley's
The Last Man," Papers on Language and
Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature
28.3 (1992) 290-93. (back)
5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: J.M. Dent, 1997) p. 175; bk. 13. (back)
6. They also represent what Peter Brooks, in his discussion of repetition
as remembering, calls "a way of reorganizing a story
whose connective links have been obscured and lost". [Reading for the
Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992) p. 139]
(back)
7. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, 1972,
trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1983) pp. 109-10. (back)
8. Genette, Narrative Discourse, pp. 38ff. Consider the temporal complexity
(number of shifts in narrative time, and number
of temporal positions) in this chapter (volume 1, chapter 9) in comparison
to two other key chapters in the novel:
Vol./ Description
# Time # Temporal
Shifts per
Chap. of Events
Shifts Positions
# Pages Page
1.9 Marital Troubles
140
49
13.25 10.57
2.6 Alfred's Birthday/Plague
58
24
12.75 4.55
in London
3.10 Final chapter of novel
72
30
14.50 4.97
(back)
9. Hugh J. Luke Jr., "The Last Man: Mary Shelley's Myth of the Solitary," Prairie Schooner 39 (1965-66) 318-20. (back)
10. Anne K. Mellor, "Love, Guilt and Reparation: The Last Man," Mary
Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters
(New York: Methuen, Inc., 1988) pp. 146-64. (back)
11. Franci, "A Mirror of the Future: Vision and Apocalypse in Mary's Shelley's The Last Man," p. 185. (back)
12. Brian Nellist, "Imagining the Future: Predictive Fiction in the
Nineteenth Century," Anticipations: Essays on Early Science
Fiction and its Precursors, ed. David Seed (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1995) p. 116. (back)
13. William A. Walling, Mary Shelley (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1972) p. 88. (back)
14. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad. (London: Methuen & Co, Ltd., 1965) 4:629-56. (back)
15. Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley: 1814-1844, ed. Paula
R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) pp. 447-48. (back)
16. William Lomax has also noted the resemblance between Moses and Adrian.
Lomax, however, calls Adrian "a Moses
leading an exodus across the channel to a Promised Land". ["Epic Reversals
in Mary Shelley's The Last Man: Romantic Irony
and the Roots of Science Fiction," Contours of the Fantastic; Selected
Essays from the Eighth International Conference
on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. Michele K. Langford (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1990) pp. 9-10] My own view is that
such a movement would not constitute a true reversal, and that the
remnant is led from England, formerly privileged in the novel,
back toward the kind of slavery implied by the plague, particularly
as they perversely seek warmer climes despite the repeated
associations between warm weather and the plague (see pp. 230, 233,
279, for example). Such associations are consistent
with Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, which Shelley read
on 26-27 May 1817 (Shelley Journals 171), and it is
worth noting that Shelley lost two of her children, Clara Everina and
William, in Italy during the hot summer months in 1818 and
1819. Nevertheless, her Journals contain many references to her preference
for the Italian climate. (See for example her
entries for 18 January 1824 [Journals 470-71] and an undated entry
apparently from the summer of 1825 [489]). (back)
17. Lomax, "Epic Reversals in Mary Shelley's The Last Man," p. 11. (back)
18. There is a clear parallel with Adrian, who loses his reason and
nearly dies in consequence of his unrequited love for Evadne
early in the novel, long before the advent of the plague. At this point,
Adrian is ill while everyone else is healthy. Later, he is
wounded by Greek soldiers in the sack of a Turkish city, and believes
his wound will shorten his life. Yet, his health prospers as
Lord Protector--he was "never in better health" (171) despite considerable
contact with plague victims. (back)
19. The theme of reanimation apparently fascinated Mary Shelley. Victor's
creature in Frankenstein is comprised of parts of
the dead, assembled and reanimated. Her short story, "Roger Dodsworth,
The Reanimated Englishman," written in 1826 but
not published until 1863, is a humorous account of a hoax reported
in several newspapers, which described an Englishman
frozen in an avalanche in Italy in 1654 and reawakened some 150 years
later. And "Valerius: The Reanimated Roman," written
in 1819, describes a Roman from the time of Cicero reawakening in Shelley's
era. (back)
20. I am indebted to Dr. Beverly Schneller of Millersville University for this observation. (back)
21. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 139. (back)
22. Shelley, Journals, p. 70. (back)
23. O'Dea, "Prophetic History and Textuality in Mary Shelley's The Last
Man," p. 284. An example of this is Shelley's use of
the novel's future setting to examine the competing political philosophies
of William Godwin and Edmund Burke and demolish
both, as Lee Sterrenburg has noted; see Lee Sterrenburg, "The Last
Man: Anatomy of Failed Revolutions," Nineteenth
Century Fiction 33 (1978) 324 47. (back)
24. Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 27. (back)
25. Shelley, Journals, p. 435. (back)
26. Shelley, Journals, p. 479. (back)
27. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 23. (back)
28. Mary Shelley, rev. of The Loves of the Poets, by Anna Brownell Jameson,
The Novels and Selected Works of Mary
Shelley, ed. Pamela Clemit, vol. 2 (London: William Pickering 1996)
p. 196. (back)
29. As Joyce Zonana has noted, "Safie's narrative, enclosed within the
monster's tale to Frankenstein, is located at the physical,
textual center of Mary Shelley's novel" ["'They Will Prove the Truth
of My Tale': Safie's Letters as the Feminist Core of Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein," Journal of Narrative Technique 21.2 (1991)
171] (back)
30. Emily W. Sunstein is one of several biographers who have noted Godwin's
apparent lack of physical expressions of
affection; see Mary Shelley; Romance and Reality (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1989) p. 33. (back)
Richard S. Albright
Lehigh University
Copyright (c) The Editor Romanticism On the Net 1999 - All rights reserved
Read Nora Crook's comment on this article sent The Forum