''Vaulted Over hy the Present": Melancholy and Sovereignty in Mary Shelley's The Last Man

JONATHAN ELMER In 1826, Mary Shelley published The Last Man and James Eenimore Cooper published The Last of the Mohicans. Both authors were hardly blazing new ground, and indeed the sniping directed against Shelley indicates that the theme of the "last" had become hackneyed. Both novels are gloomy affairs, but Cooper puts the project of mourning the "last" to nation-building purposes, while Shelley's vision of the last is so radical that mourning is rendered moot. Who is there to mourn for Lionel Verney? Nobody. He is the "last man"end of storyand not merely the "last Mohican," who is a symbol of man, to be sure, but one that is to be absorbed via his extinction into the Natty Bumppos of the world and all those he harbinges. There is an archaic verb "to harbinger," meaning to presage, but I prefer my misuse because it reminds me of Jean-Jacques Dessalines's great neologism when he declared Haitian independence in 1804 by observing how "le nom Franais lugubre nos contres""the Erench name lugubres our country" (Dubois 298). Ideologically speaking. Cooper's novel harbinges, while Shelley's lugubres. Cooper's novel uses the themes of mourning and extinction as an engine of sequence, a way of imagining the unfolding in space-time that twenty years later would be labeled Manifest Destiny. Shelley's novel, much more forthrightly political than Cooper's, is not about sequence and unfolding but about withdrawal and implosion. By adopting a different approach to the problems of empire, race, and historical melancholy than Cooper does, Shelley is forced, as it were, into greater formal innovation than the American, and she also reveals something important about the volatile isomorphism of imperium and individual in the romantic politics we still inhabit. In May 1824 Shelley wrote in her Journal: "The Last man! Yes, I may well describe that solitary being's feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me" (Shelley xiv). When she uses the term race here, Shelley means her immediate family. She had returned to England the previous year with her sole remaining child after Percy's death by drowning. In the eight years of her marriage to Percy, she had weathered two suicides, a miscarriage, and the deaths of three of her children and her husband. But in the novel that elaborates this refiection of private grief, the meaning of race is very expansive, embracing first the sense of race as aristocratic, indeed royal lineage, then race as nation or ethnos, ultimately expanding to mean species, that human race that is annihilated by plague in her novel. How does Shelley get from her private sorrow to global catastrophe? What warrants this self-aggrandizement? Erom its initial publication, critics have wondered how exactly to assess the weight of the autobiographical in The Last Man. Although the novel purports to be an incomplete transcription of ancient Sibylline leaves
Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42:2 DOI 10.1215/00295132-2009-027 2009 by Novel, Inc.

356

NOVEL I SUMMER 2009

concerning events of the late twenty-first century, the final effect of this thematization of time and prophecy is to render the force of the immediate and the contemporaryPercy's drowning, Byron's death in the Greek wars (which still mysteriously rage in the time of the novel)all the more overwhelming because unfixed in anything resembling a legible historical sequence. This is not a novel of mourning, then, but of melancholia, with Shelley sealing off her terrible losses by rendering them commensurate with global history itself. The novel is less a critique of romanticism's commitment to the sovereign self than an attempt to follow the logic of that commitment to its conclusion: one has the sense of a woman gritting her teeth and seeing things through to the end. In this sense, Shelley's novel offers a strong counterexample to Ian Baucom's "melancholy politics": rather than some kind of resistance to the exfoliating, appropriating, globalizing tendencies of modernitywhat Baucom sees as the political project of the "counterdiscourse of modernity" (233) he locates in romanticismShelley's melancholia reveals an inherent drift and errancy to those tendencies. To draw out this idea, let me return to the question of race in the novel. Barbara Johnson, Alan Richardson, and others have noticed that Shelley makes the plague "raise its serpent-head on the shores of the Nile" (137) and stages a major point of contact at the Greek siege of Constantinople, that "monument to antique barbarism" (137). Here we get taste of what Richardson calls Shelley's jingoistic Anglo-centrism. But if, as Richardson says, "the last man, for Shelley, must be an Englishman" (2), it may be for somewhat different reasons than mere racial disgust. What the steady march of the plague across Europe, and indeed across the Atlantic, emphasizes is the ideological fiction that it is England's isolation that simultaneously allows her to radiate power through her maritime networks and exempt herself from those same networks. Does Shelley look on the advancing plague in horror, as a Dracula-like invasion of the unclean, racial other? Perhaps so. But Dracula is defeated, and the plague is not. Does Shelley look on the advancing plague as the empire striking back? In one episode, marauders from North America cross the Atlantic and, picking up embittered Irish and Scottish dispossessed along the way, slouch toward London, pillaging as they go. But this confiict really amounts to nothing. Adrian (the Percy figure) stares them down by invoking what probably should have been obvious by then, namely their common humanity, and what looks like the revenge of the colonized fizzles out. Shelley seems intent on seeing the plague less as an allegory for racial or colonial others, or indeed any world-historical actor, than as that which dfites the meaning of all such confrontations. In the Greek wars against Muslim barbarism, for example, Shelley undercuts the moral force of the crusade by pointing out the equal savagery of the Greeks and the Turks. Lord Raymond (the Byron figure) is allowed the triumph of "seizing" Constantinople, but only after plague has hit it and the city has been abandoned as not worth protecting. Raymond's decision to march alone into the city comes across as almost petulant, an act at once hubristic and futile. His body is eventually found, having been "thrown from his horse by some falling ruin, which had crushed his head, and defaced his whole person" (162), a gruesome "defacement" through which Shelley enforces her denial of Raymond's quest for personal distinction.

ELMER I MARY SHELLEY'S THE MST My4N

357

Shelley is, then, quite sensitive to England's imperial reach, and we can call the plotting of the book, as the plague creeps from the periphery to the mtropole, quite literally "Anglo-centric," in the sense that Nevil Shute's On the Beach is Australocentric. But the plague is not a figure for race, not an "other" that can be understood as some world-historical antagonist: the only way the plague participates in world history is to end it. What comes from without in The Last Man is finally immanent rather than transcendent. As Barbara Johnson puts it: "[T]he universal empire of the Plague wouldn't be ... what is excluded from Western humanism; it would also be its inverted image" (263). Shelley's vision of radical melancholia reveals an otherness internal to the West, to England, to the sovereign self, and ultimately to the human. Questions of race and empire are not so much excluded by this vision as swallowed up, revealed to be inverted projections of an unstable core. This is not to say that Shelley has set out to perform such an ideological or political "anatomy," as Lee Sterrenburg called it some years ago. As I have already hinted, the novel reads like a record of a woman testing a range of received values, determined to know the worst, rather than as an allegory or expos of values already found to be corrupt. Shelley spends much of the first volume discussing the political maneuvering in post-monarchic England at the end of the twenty-first century, eventually giving us portraits of three very different "Lord Protectors": the power-hungry and aristocratic Raymond, the republican arriviste Ryland, and the saintly Adrian, rightful heir (if such can be said) of the throne his father abdicated before the novel begins. On balance, Shelley favors the aristocratic values of Raymond and Adrian to the every-man-for-himself egalitarianism of the canine Ryland. The plague that destroys humanity makes irreversible inroads in England under Ryland's watch, and his pusillanimous response outrages both Adrian, who promptly relieves him of the protectorship, and Shelley, who consigns him to an ignominious death: having deserted both nation and family, he is found "halfdevoured by insects . . . with piles of food laid up in useless superfiuity" (252). Shelley is rather more ambivalent about Raymond. Like his model Lord Byron, Raymond is an "adventurer in the Greek wars" (31) of liberation against the Turks, a figure of Romantic heroism as projective power. As I have mentioned, however, Shelley dfites Raymond's heroism by having him reach the gates of Constantinople, that bastion of "slavery and barbarism" (138), only to discover that the plague has stolen his thunder. Raymond is the romantic individual as despot: he "looked on the structure of society as but a part of the machinery which supported the web on which his life was traced" (35). But Raymond has no sei/-government: although he "seemed to govern the whole earth in his grasping imagination, [he] quailed when he attempted to rule himself" (45). Shelley's analysis is clear: projective power, the quest for control, the desire to impress oneself on the world, is a form of despotism, whether in the service of Greek liberation or not. She avails herself here of an established political psychology according to which it is a leader's inability to govern the self, his susceptibility to "arbitrary" whims and passions, that sends him down the path to tyranny. To this vision of sovereign selfhood Shelley will counterpoise an ideal of power as in retreat, self-isolating, and pastoral. "No two persons could be more opposite than Adrian and [Raymond]," we are assured. Where Raymond's psychic and

358

NOVEL I SUMMER 2009

domestic volatility are translated onto the battlefield, Adrian wants nothing more than to retire to the domestic quietude of the royal domain at Windsor. The retiring heir of an abdicated throne, Adrian is an exemplar of power as the power to preserve, to let live. He takes "great delight in his park and preserves. He never sported, but spent hours in watching the tribes of lovely and almost tame animals with which it was stocked, and ordered that greater care should be taken of them than ever" (18). Only someone fundamentally committed to the passive exercise of powera power to protect and care for rather than impose and changewould see the invasion of a global pandemic as the career opportunity of a lifetime: "O, I shall be something now!" Adrian cries. "I cannot intrigue, or work a tortuous path through the labyrinth of men's vices and passions; but I can bring patience, and sympathy, and such aid as art affords, to the bed of disease; I can raise from earth the miserable orphan, and awaken to new hopes the shut heart of the mourner Congratulate me then that I have found fitting scope for my powers" (194-95). But of course Adrian's role as protector is as doomed as all the others. Adrian's power is archaic, in the sense that it involves a return to the private seats of power, the homes of the archons: in place of projection and extension, we have retreat and isolation; in place of government, we have pastoralism; in place of London, Windsor. And instead of empire and the globe, England itself. All the more ironic that it falls to Adrian to lead the surviving English citizens on their fruitless wanderings across Europe. In the fate of Adrian, then, we have an image of radical deterritorialization. What we must emphasize now, however, is what we concluded about race earlier, namely that it is not the plague that causes this deterritorialization but a tendency inherent in the very structures and values Adrian embodies. Perhaps the clearest way to see this is to look once again at the question of Shelley's Anglocentrism. Here are the novel's opening words:
/ 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. So true it is, that man's mind alone was the creator of all that was good or great to man, and that Nature herself was only his first minister. (7)

This is a dream of sovereign extension, where the isolation of the "sea-surrounded nook" amid the "shoreless ocean" is converted into a projective power greater than that of "countries of larger extent" and even Nature itself, now merely "first minister" to man's mind. If England exerts a sovereign sway, an actual geopolitical force emanating, via maritime prowess, from a "sea-surrounded nook," it is because its isolation and individuation are analogous to the source of sovereignty itself, "man's mind alone." When Verney exclaims later, "Thou, England, wert the triumph of man!" (256), what makes England and mankind look like synonyms is this model of sovereignty as isolation leading to extension, individuation become reduplication. But just as the characters' hope that England's isolation will protect

ELMER I MARY SHELLEY'S THE LAST M/IN

359

them from the plague is dashed, so the ideal of "man's mind alone" becomes, in the form of Lionel Verney adrift in his ship, once again an "inconsiderable speck" on a "shoreless ocean." The novel turns one after another to romantic ideals only to imagine their pathetic inadequacy: it is finally a core concept of the human itself, in its essential dignity as the irreducible, nonexchangeable locus of sovereign agency, of the basic right to be and to do and not to be done to, that is exposed as unfixed and unfixable, subject to drift and errancy. The political force of melancholy "encrypting" (Baucom) is altogether lost when the earth itself "become[s] a wide, wide, tomb" (Shelley 196) "vaulted over by the omnipotent present" (282). Let "vaulted" have both its temporal and architectural connotations here: when the present is omnipotent, it has vaulted over its place in the successions of time, and this temporal dislocation is also a kind of absolute immurement, as though all the world has become a "vaulted" tomb. The same dark terminus can be described inversely, too: the annihilation of time that comes with being the last man is accompanied by a spatial dislocation or errancy: "A solitary being is by instinct a wanderer" (365). At the close of the novel, Verney climbs into his boat, but he is going nowhere. His destiny is not manifest.

Works Cited Baucom, Ian. Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Dubois, Laurent. Avengers ofthe New World: The Story ofthe Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Johnson, Barbara. "The Last Man." The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein. Ed. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. 258-66. Richardson, Alan. "The Last Man and the Plague of Empire." <http://prometheus.cc.emory .edu/RC/mary/richardson.html>. Accessed 16 March 2009. Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Ed. Anne McWhir. Peterborough: Broadview, 1996. Sterrenburg, Lee. "The Last Man: Anatomy of Failed Revolutions." Nineteenth Century Fiction 33 (1978): 324-47