John Martin (1789-1854), The last Man (1849), a later painting illustrating Shelley’s novel, he was a friend
Friends,
This past November I blogged (at length) about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which I had just finished reading with a class of people at the Oscher Institute of Lifelong Learning at American University (on 19th century women of letters); last week I finished reading with a group of people on-line here The Last Man and thought I’d say a few words about it. I thought of Frankenstein as ever present because it seems as relevant and alive today (no museum-piece, not a classic which although set in contemporary times in its era reads like a historical novel) as when it was first written in 1818. I can’t say this third novel of Mary’s (she had also written Matilda, a novel in the tradition of her mother’s Maria; or the Wrongs of Women) is as alive: The Last Man is often a weak book: prolix inert style for too many stretches, the characters faery tale unbelievable except when we can recognize in them Mary’s memories of Byron, Shelley, Clair Clarmont and others as well as herself, or when seen as caught up in nightmares and idyllic sequences. Its strength is its memorable dystopian vision which is elaborated over hundreds of pages. Dystopias right now are what everyone is reading or watching — as in The Handmaid’s Tale. I watched the fifth episode tonight (whence this blog).
Max Minghella as Nick and Elizabeth Moss as Offred at the close of Episode 5: she and Mrs Waterford have decided the way to impregnate her is use Nick’s genitals — but cold sex is not working, so Offred visits Nick; not unimportant detail is that around his hips he wears much hardware as if to link his penis with guns, nails, iron, whips …
In genre or type like The Handmaid’s Tale, The Last Man is not science fiction — if we require that newly invented or fantastical technology play a key role. To my mind Shelley’s book is very like the Northanger Abbey novels cited in Austen’s famous satire. Shelley’s opening reminded me of Eleanor Sleath’s The Orphan of the Rhine, with its Paul et Virginie (or Daphnis and Chloe) love affair between central characters, Perdita and Lionel when they are adolesents. (Full disclosure: I wrote the introduction for the Valancourt edition of the novel.) I’d call The Last Man also gothic and very much coming out of the mode of Radcliffe, except no happy ending: it’s a dark vision in which all but one character die. The central characters are seen through the peculiar idiom of high idealistic sentimental romance, the tone intensely melancholy. It’s Shelley’s grief-work as she enacts and re-enacts the events of her life with these romantic poets in Italy. Mary Shelley’s deep trauma in reaction to PBS’s behavior (endless affairs and children with other women, her babies dying) is processed over and over. Lionel the narrator (a faux male like we find in George Sand’s novels) is mostly Mary herself; Adrian, this idealistic powerful leader is Shelley; Lord Raymond (a libertine) is Lord Byron. Idris is Clair Clarmont at times. There’s an Evadne, straight out of a Beaumont-and-Fletcher Jacobean tragedy. The politics is deeply conservative although what’s professed is deep humanity towards everyone. It’s Anglo-centric (everything occurs in places clearly versions of England or Scotland when we are not in a dream or nightmare version of Italy). War seems to be the only way to obtain peace (when all are dead); Mary resorts to emperors, kings, dukes, Protectors. The women all take traditional roles of wife, mother, daughter, or mistress.
I can refer the reader to a few essays offering interpretations of this novel (it has attracted a lot of scholarly attention in recent years), much of it predictable (alas), e.g., this is a realistic plague-story a la Defoe (Journal of the Plague Year) or visionary Camus (La peste), a horror piece in the mode of Charles Brockden Brown, apocalyptic in its spectacles; haunted by the nightmares of history Mary has read and the ghosts of people she cannot get herself to analyse accurately (and without false idealism). One problem with the scholarly essays is where is her book is situated, contextualized by male dystopias. Another is the autobiographical is ignored or denied as not interesting.
A third is left out is anger Mary cannot get herself to admit it. That’s the strain that unites it to The Handmaid’s Tale (or Charlotte Perkins’s Herland – she also wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”. I was alerted to this by Rebecca Mead’s essay in the New Yorker after interviewing Margaret Atwood. Atwood remarked that in a number of her dystopias she kills nearly everyone off. Or she was asked about this and replied yes. She then said that she usually saves a few people, a remnant to start again. We need hope. Well is this not Shelley? then I thought to myself, is this typical say of women’s dystopias? In Perkins’s Herland the whole community as as community is destroyed.
I know of another: Suzy McKee Charnas wrote a trilogy of dark dystopias in the 1980s, strongly feminist: Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines. I don’t usually read science fiction (or allegorical fantasies) and have only skim-read these. The series begins in a dystopic post-holocaust America where men keep women as slaves. The women rebel lead by one woman, Aldera. By the second volume Aldera has joined a culture of free women who live a nomadic life and reproduce without men. It ends in a violent war where the two sides nearly destroy one another. Sixteen years later she wrote The Furies (1994), in which the women take back the male-ruled Holdfast and turn men into slaves. The first two books won awards; the second was written during the backlash (Susan Faludi covers that) and was daring for staying with strong feminism. Charnas is a fine writer: her Vampire Tapestry I’ve taught twice and even love: she gets rid of all the Christianizng and substitutes geology and sympathizes to some extent with our vampire turned professor; her memoir of her father, My Father’s Ghost is deeply moving; he deserted her and her mother when she was small, but now she takes the broken man and his cat in, very truthful about her ambivalent feelings.
A very great one I’ve written about here is Marlen Haushofen’s The Wall, adapted by Julian Polser.
The Wall: the heroine makes it on her own with a group of animals
I am wondering how far a deep anger in women as a group underlies their dystopias/utopias. For countless centuries we have died in childbirth, until recently were subjected to endless childbirth. Made into servants who could not make any money, own any property, by law could be beaten. Raped we were blamed. It seems at the end of WW2 there was a free-for-all of rape in Germany by all men. I suggest that these dystopias come out of the reality that Marta Hiller’s Women in Berlin dramatizes and explores (still often attributed something to Anonyma).
Nina Hoss as the woman haunted by continual rape
There is a gender faultline in all the genres I’ve ever studied and it makes sense to me there would be gender faultline for women’s dystopias. I distrust the idea that a utopia is a dystopia in disguise (which I’ve come across over Thomas More’s Utopia, a veiled attack on its communism). That’s to confound terms, perhaps mystify. Maybe a male would see any utopia as a dystopia because he is to be controlled and as a group wouldn’t want that. In More’s Utopia if an older man separates himself from his wife and marries or goes to live with a younger one, he is put in jail and then enslaved. Thomas More says this predilection of many older males to do this and the willingness of unattached young females to agree makes this punitive law necessary. For older women whose partners have left them for younger women this this parable would not seen dystopic at all.
On Trollope19thCStudies Tyler Tichelaar had this explanatory analysis of yet another dystopian book, not by a woman but written by a man in drag, as a woman:
I’m not sure I can speak to women’s dystopias in general, but I mentioned that I had recently read Robert O’Brien’s Z is for Zachariah – although a novel by a male author, I would place it with women’s dystopias since the narrator is a woman. She is all alone in her valley after a catastrophe and thinks she may be the only person left until a man in a space suit to protect him from radiation enters the valley. She spies on him until he hurts himself and then she cares for him. When he is better, he tries to rape her, she runs and then they are at war until in the end she steals the space suit so she can leave the valley and leave him behind. The idea according to critics is that she refuses to start the whole Adam and Eve story again. I think Shelley may feel something similar and that may be the reason for the drawn out Perdita and Raymond plot. Men do not support the domestic circle but end up working against it, and in the end, the woman is just too tired and sick of dealing with men’s behavior to try to start that cycle all over again. The continuance of the human race is just not worth the pain and frustration it brings its members.
A man in drag (as a woman character at the center, its consciousness) can produce l’ecriture-femme. Arguably the structure of Richardson’s Clarissa and Grandison are just that. Z sounds like Charnas’s dystopias. Women have been as unwilling as men to repudiate the reproduction function and that has given the patriarchal structures an advantage. And we see this in Mary Shelley in The Last Man and Frankenstein: where the creature longs for a mother and has been repudiated by his father. But Haushofen, Hiller’s, Charnas finds nothing sexy or attractive about rape (see Diane Reynolds’s blog on the dysfunctional and impotent males in The Handmaid’s Tale:: subversive TV), neither do they think the ends of their being to make babies.
I came the conclusion Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is courageous grief-work; she is exhausted but refuses to fall silent about what she has experienced, sees around her (the wastelands she saw in Italy too), and prophesizes: she is herself a muted Cassandra (bound not to offend father-in-law, not to hurt her chances as a professional woman writer).
I hope this blog gives my readers some new perspectives for thought as you watch The Handmaid’s Tale and if you should attempt Mary Shelley’s first and third novels.
This is another illustration by Martin (found on a site that discusses Shelley’s novel in context with other dystopias)
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Patricia Cove, Gothic Landscapes and Grotesque Cove’s in Mary Shelley’s Last Man, Gothic Studies, 15:3 (November 2013):19-36.
Timothy Ruppert, “Time and the Sybil in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Studies in the Novel, 41:2 (2009):141-56.
Clayton Carlyle Tarr, “Infectious fiction: Plague and the novelist in Arthur Mervyn and The Last Man,” 47.2 (Summer 2015): 141ff. From the Literature Resource Center, at GMason
I agree that there is a huge difference between the intense and focused prose of Frankenstein and the lifeless, verbose prose of The Last Man. The difference is so great that there must be two different authors: Percy Bysshe Shelley for Frankenstein and Mary Shelley for The Last Man. Also, shouldn’t it be “Clair Clairmont”?
Thank you for the correction. I’ll fix it — I write these blogs late at night.
For the first time, Mr Lauritsen, I see why you persist in the idea that PBS wrote Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s Matilda, which reflects her relationship with her father, has all the passion and intensity of Frankenstein. I just know diaries of her writing life are accurate insofar as she could make them. I’ve read a couple of her poems, and some of her journalism and travel writing from later in her life. Far less intense, bland even, quiet, but intelligent and perceptive so they do not preclude Frankenstein being hers mostly.
I am now inclining to the idea that PBS did have a lot of more influence on and “input” (horrible word) in Frankenstein than I had thought. It’s easy to recognize the parallels in Shelley’s poetry of Mont Blanc, the Henry Clerval story and so son.
But there is this: in Frankenstein we are continually (as James Kincaid point out in a mock-up of Frankenstein in his Annoying the Victorians) being told how this or that cannot be expressed, is inexpressible in words. I find The Last Man that Mary is trying to and succeeds sometimes in expressing her anguish and trauma in the haunted landscapes of the book, particularly in the last volume. Equally important The Last Man falls into the structures and patterns I find in other female dystopias. I suppose that suggests she is the sole author of LM, but LM connects back thematically to Frankenstein (questioning religion radically, the philosophical sections are two areas of close connection). Both LM and Frankenstein have male narrators and all the books from the 20th century I’ve cited have a female consciousness at the center; now that may be function of 19th century women of letters being unwilling to put themselves as women too obviously forward.
Thanks for sharing your blog post, Ellen. I’m keen to see this TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale; it’s getting rave reviews.
With reference to Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man, you’d be well rewarded by reading Atwood’s more recent dystopian fiction, the “MaddAddam” trilogy — in particular its first novel, Oryx and Crake, which is a “last man” story — it’s so close to the premise and plot of The Last Man that I’d say it’s arguably an adaptation. (Oryx and Crake also includes some specific references to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, too.)
All best,
Mark A. McCutcheon, PhD
Susan Wolfson: “Though John and I disagree about the ascription, I agree that there were are two different authors–the young woman with a husband and child (1816-1817), who could imagine science gone wrong and use Paradise Lost (her copy is at Princeton!) to underwrite the creation story, and the bereft widow, ten years on, who could compare herself to Robinson Crusoe).
By the way, this week’s production of Frankenstein:The Musical (based on R. B. Peake’s 1823 play at the Royal Opera House, which Mary Shelley saw on its 23 night of a 37-night run) went quite well, ably maneuvering between farce, romantic comedy, tragedy, pastoral, melodrama (a Frankenstein Creature of theatrical imagination, on Polonius’s blueprint), with a terrific musical score, originated and conducted by Evan Gedrich!”
“Frankenstein v. Last Man v. Percy Shelley’s prose. I’ve done a stylometric analysis. This is, admittedly, quick & dirty—a 10-minute diversion from grading using unedited e-texts. But even these results are convincing, I think. No doubt that Mary Shelley’s novels are stylistically distinct from each other, but—even accounting for Percy’s contributions to F—she wrote both of them. I suppose the more accurate thing to say here is that he wrote neither of them.”
Noah Comet
Ellen, thank you for sharing the John Martin illustration – I had no idea there were illustrations for The Last Man. Were they published with the novel or separately displayed? Are there more than one? I agree wtih everything you said about The Last Man and will only add that in my book The Gothic Wanderer, I put the novel in the context of Frankenstein and the other nineteenth century Gothic novels if readers want to know more about it. Thank you also for quoting me on Z is for Zachariah.
Tyler Tichelaar
The truth is I don’t know for sure if there were more than one illustration. I found this on a site where there was a paper on The Last Man and other dystopias, and it was described as one of the illustrations. Peter Quennell in his Romantic England tells us Martin and Mary Shelley were friends; Martin illustrated moments from poems by (among others) Byron and Blake, and eschatological and German romantic texts. The illustration looked like it was illustrating Mary’s book: it’s far busier, far more cities built up than his usual wide rural and seascape and starlit landscapes. I remember your book; you also had a section on Godwin and connected his work back to other gothics. I reviewed it on my “Ellen and Jim have a blog, two” site:
https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/the-gothic-wanderer-teaching-the-gothic/
Hi Ellen, Ironically, in the intro to Grainville’s The Last Man they have John Martin’s painting of The Last Man (1849) and it’s a different painting. I don’t think the painting you used is his painting of The Last Man but of something else and The Last Man painting definitely was much later than the book. That said, he did many paintings of turmoil, destruction, and apocalyptic end of the world time scenarios.
I’m grateful for the correction and will amend the attribution. I found the correct one with the information you sent and will replace. The date suggests that Shelley’s book carried on being read well into the Victorian era. Ellen
Rick Albright: “This topic seems to come up every few years on the list, usually as a comparison of the two novels, but I’m not sure that the comparison is apt, as they are two very different novels. The Last Man was written in the context of a whole series of “last man” narratives, which is quite different from the situation that inspired Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s third novel is closer to several of the tales that she wrote for publication around this time, particularly “Valerius: the Reanimated Roman,” “Roger Dodsworth: the Reanimated Englishman,” and “The Mortal Immortal,” some of which may have been influenced by William Godwin’s St. Leon. These three tales and The Last Man are all characterized by Shelley’s experiments in temporality and narrative.
While The Last Man has been criticized, perhaps justifiably, for being tedious at times, Shelley’s use of temporal farming is actually quite intriguing. As I write in a chapter of my book, Writing the Past, Writing the Future: Time and Narrative in Gothic and Sensation Fiction, the novel “is an ancient prophecy of a future apocalypse written retrospectively by its lone survivor, who looks back upon the final decades of the human race’s existence from the year 2100,” and this elaborate and dizzying temporal framing sometimes seems to penetrate the narrator’s consciousness, as he imagines that all his “sensations were a duplex mirror of a former revelation.”
Adding to the complexity of her temporal experimentation, Shelley employs a narrative rhythm that uses interpolated narratives to draw the reader backward and forward, mirroring the larger structure of the novel.
When compared to Frankenstein, The Last Man is often dismissed, and while it is in many respects a less successful novel, it is vastly more ambitious, and clearly represents Shelley’s growth as a writer, as well as her willingness to take chances. “
[…] I’ve heard from friends and acquaintances how they are finding The Handmaid’s Tale too grim, too gruesome, too relentless. Life today in say Yemen, life for women in deeply misogynistic cultures, might be characterized similarly. I am not sure this series is not bad for my mental health. As I watch, I start to remember how hierarchical, controlled, unfree our society is, how dangerous, how women are trafficked, I recall pictures of executions recently. Myself I think the problem is Hulu is milking a not very long book for too many episodes. The first novel of Outlander produced 16 episodes but it’s a book 2/3s as long and all 16 ran for the first year, with no break. Atwood’s novel is meant to be allegorical, symbolic and often unrealistic; it’s prophetic (I regret to say) and the matter of two out of the these last episodes are back-stories, meant to fill us in, a traditional technique in realistic fiction for deepening a novel psychologically. Episode 7 brings us what happened to June-Offred’s husband, Luke, how he came to be a rare successful fugitive and offers hope that there is a world outside Gilead where decent human lives may be lived; Episode 8 is Nick’s backstory; both and Episode 9 show the characters who were so purely evil bullies showing signs of humanity, pity, much more complicated emotions than had been allowed these nightmare figures before. (For 1-3, out-harrowed; 4-6, parallels with our world; likeness to Mary Shelley’s Last Man) […]