The Pitfalls of Sensibility in Mary Shelley's the Last

JIDRJournalofInterdisciplinaryResearch

“I Cannot Rule Myself” The Pitfalls of Sensibility in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

DIANE A. SAGER

In the exhaustive body of reconfigured Victorian novel of scholarship relating to Mary Shelley’s education. She denotes a new category, first and signature novel, Frankenstein, the end-of-sensibility novel, in which an emerging tradition suggests that a characters of sensibility who express helpful way of placing the work within a such feeling through sympathy are context of genre and culture is to thwarted by modernity and reality.3 For consider its commentary on sensibility Bour, Frankenstein in particular presents and sympathy. Betty T. Bennett suggests a bleak picture, in which “sensibility is that the parallel characters of Elizabeth repeatedly, inevitably defeated.”4 In all Raby and Elizabeth Lavenza (in Falkner of the central characters, sensibility and Frankenstein respectively), proves flawed or ineffectual, and unlike representing marked sensibility, in Waverley, the end offers no particular consistently develop an ethic of reform hope of redemption through that many critics assumed Shelley had compromise. Bour suggests that the abandoned as age and loss punctured her “disintegration of the paradigm of radicalism.1 Anne K. Mellor notes the sensibility” represented in these three masculine failure of sensibility in Victor novels is “a significant stage in the Frankenstein, who callously creates a development of the novel” in that it doomed being in arrogant imitation of forces a shift to an emphasis on nature, then abandons it to a cruel psychology of characters and world.2 Isabelle Bour argues that, like preliminarily begins to group the Walter Scott’s Waverley and William categories of youth and modernity Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Frankenstein against the counter-categories of age and represents a transitional genre between tradition.5 the Romantic novel of sensibility and the The focus on sensibility in

3 Isabelle Bour, “Sensibility as Epistemology in Caleb 1 Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, ed., Mary Shelley in Williams, Waverley, and Frankenstein,” SEL 45 (2005): Her Times (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 814 – 27. 2000): 17. 4 Bour, 821. 2 Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Methuen, 1998): 42. 5 Bour, 823 – 4.

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Frankenstein, and Bour’s argument in however, scholars have attempted to particular, can be usefully extended to reconcile the apparent inconsistencies in Shelley’s lesser-known third novel, The tone and theme by using sensibility as a Last Man (1826). Much recent lens through which to examine the novel. scholarship on The Last Man has tended Mark Canuel in particular defends the to downplay its literary value and The Last Man’s unrelievedly grim examine it within the context of descriptions of plague in the second and Shelley’s biography (Mellor, Spark, third volumes as a dramatic device to Brewer, Hill-Miller), as an expression of make a consistent ethical argument: that her politics and ethics (Bennett, sensibility alone cannot save a doggedly Bunnell), or as a flawed example of hierarchical society from destruction, genre (Smith).6 The novel’s apparently and that natural disaster is one drastic but uneven structure, transitioning from sure way of leveling a playing field.8 marriage/intellectual novel to Gothic Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor reinterprets the horror and apocalypse, has baffled grim plot through its theatrical frame modern critics as much as it did narrative (story-within-a-story) format, Shelley’s contemporaries, many of suggesting that the overwhelmingly whom treated it as a flawed continuation pessimistic title and outcome (the death of the theme better explored in of the world and the prospect of Frankenstein.7 In the last decade, unceasing loneliness for the protagonist) are mediated by the little-observed fact 6 Muriel Spark, Mary Shelley (New York: E.P. Dutton, that Lionel Verney, the last man, 1987); William D. Brewer, The Mental Anatomies of William Godwin and Mary Shelley (Cranbury, NJ: miraculously does find an audience. For Associated University Presses, 2001); Katherine C. Hill- her, the novel’s nested narrative Miller, “My Hideous Progeny”: Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and the Father-Daughter Relationship (Cranbury, “functions to re-present the narrator’s NJ: Associated University Presses, 1995); Charlene E. mediated version of the story, insisting Bunnell, “All the World’s a Stage”: Dramatic Sensibility in Mary Shelley’s Novels (New York: Routledge, 2002); that this tale of a dead-end history be Johanna M. Smith, Mary Shelley (New York: Twayne opened back up to reader responsiveness, Publishers, 1996). back to that most important of human 9 7 “The present work has all the beauties and defects of her feelings, sympathy.” In other words, the former production [Frankenstein]” (Ladies’ Monthly discovery of Verney’s narrative by Museum 23 (1826): 169); “After the first volume, it is a sickening repetition of horrors” (Literary Gazette and nineteenth-century tourists in a Sibyl’s Journal of Belles Lettres 473 (1826): 102 – 3); “the cave was not accidental, but intended by offspring of a diseased imagination and of a most polluted taste” (Monthly Review 1 (1826): 333 – 5), The 20th century critics who rediscovered the book were hardly more forgiving: “The story is, unfortunately, an offshoot of the idea of “lastness” (in The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Gothic novel, and the style is turgid…Mrs. Shelley remains Frankenstein, Audrey A. Fisch et al., ed., New York: the author of a single book, and that book, of course, is Oxford University Press, 1993, 107 – 23). Frankenstein” (Charles W. Mann, Library Journal 91 (1966): 163); “Such an apocalyptic vision requires a style 8 Mark Canuel, “Acts, Rules, and The Last Man,” beyond the author’s reach” (Walter Guzzardi, Jr., Nineteenth-Century Literature 53 (1998): 147 – 70. “Romantic Vision of Destruction,” Saturday Review of Literature 49 (1966): 86). In “The Last Man: Apocalypse 9 Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, “Performing History, without Millennium,” Morton D. Paley explains this Performing Humanity in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” derision on the part of Shelley’s contemporary critics as Studies in English Literature 1500 – 1900 42 (2002): 753 – fallout from a cultural malaise concerning the overused 80; 768. JIDRJournalofInterdisciplinaryResearch

Shelley to rescue sensibility by giving after her death, was regarded either as Verney a hearing. the one-hit-wonder author of While Wagner-Lawlor’s Frankenstein or as the incidental implication of authorial intent on beneficiary of an intoxicating intellectual Shelley’s part is not backed up in her and personal climate can be reconfigured journals and letters, and Canuel’s thesis as a genre-bending writer of unique style of a cleansing and therefore essentially and increasing literary courage and productive plague requires some mental sophistication. acrobatics, both scholars importantly Appealing as this sympathetic further a discussion on sensibility and its redrawing of Shelley is, such a thesis role in The Last Man. Bour’s work on must be backed by textual evidence. I Frankenstein suggests another possible propose to argue that The Last Man can avenue for exploring sensibility, the be usefully read as an end-of-sensibility notion that The Last Man may also be an novel, and that the primary evidence for end-of-sensibility novel, albeit a later that is in the novel itself. Shelley’s prose and therefore more emphatic one. is rife with direct and implied references Reading The Last Man in this way to sensibility and its social expression, rescues Shelley from some fairly sympathy, and most of the first volume unflattering analyses. First, if The Last of the novel focuses in great detail on the Man is more definitively an end-of- various ways in which these ideals are sensibility novel than Frankenstein, then expressed through a handful of diverse it can no longer be discounted as a failed characters.10 As circumstance disrupts experiment with form that was better the best-laid plans of these protagonists accomplished in Shelley’s first novel. in Volume 2, they rely on their ethic of Also, the unevenness often noted in the sensibility to carry them through the novel’s structure can be regarded as a crisis, but it is ultimately inadequate, device of purpose and ingenuity; Volume despite offering a temporary promise of a I explicated the main characters’ varied better society. In Volume 3, the last man and powerful sensibilities and is left to deal with his own sympathies, Volume 2 showed how these overwhelming and terrifying mechanisms were inadequate to sensibilities, and can find no better outlet negotiate the crisis of plague, and for them than in the creation of literature Volume 3 (like the end of Scott’s – an outcome that, as Wagner-Lawlor Waverley) suggested a way of coping suggests, is vindicated by the fact that his with the failure of sensibility: through words are discovered. Throughout The social cooperation at first and literary Last Man, sensibility plays an catharsis at last. Finally, reading The

Last Man as a focused commentary on 10 Bour quotes Ann Jessie Van Sant’s Eighteenth Century the inadequacy of sensibility pulls Sensibility and the Novel (Cambridge, 1993) definition of Shelley out of the shadow of her famous sensibility: “acuteness of feeling, both physical and emotional”; and defines sympathy as “its social husband, friends, and parents. The lady manifestation” (815). This is a simple but useful definition, novelist who, for more than a century and the one I have chosen for this essay.

67 “ICannotRuleMyself” undeniably important role, and although idyllic forest setting, but with Lord Shelley’s personal valuing of the ethics Raymond’s election to Lord Protector, of sympathy and cooperation is evident their close-knit association begins to in her heroic treatment of sensibility’s unravel. Eventually, Raymond is killed proponents, her discomfort with these in the Greek wars after an estrangement mechanisms as ways to deal with from Perdita, and Perdita drowns herself modernity is equally plain. in grief. Verney returns to England after First, because The Last Man has burying his sister and friend to hear news never been and is not now a popularly that an Asian plague has begun to make read novel, a brief plot summary is inroads into America and Europe. Over necessary for most audiences. The novel the next few years, Verney and Adrian begins with a pair of tourists in Italy who do their best to combat the plague’s find a well-hidden Sibyl’s cave, and disruptive effects and protect themselves within it, the scattered leaves of a and their family, but eventually they are remarkable tale. One of the tourists all overwhelmed by the disease or the dedicates his or her life to collecting and effects of its social disruption, and translating the tale, which comprises the Verney is left, as far as he knows, alone rest of the novel. It is the first-person in the world, the last man. story of Lionel Verney, an Englishman It takes no genius to recognize of the 21st century (presumably the future that these characters are drawn from from the perspective of the tourists) who Shelley’s own life, and many scholars transcends a respectable but have argued that The Last Man is impoverished background, with the help unsatisfying because it is essentially a of an idealistic nobleman named Adrian. cathartic release of grief following the Other characters soon enter the picture: deaths of Shelley’s husband, Percy, her Adrian’s beautiful and tender-hearted good friend Lord Byron, and one of her sister, Idris (very much an Elizabeth children with Percy.11 Shelley herself Lavenza type); Perdita, Verney’s seems to be conflated in the characters of beautiful, temperamental, and doomed Perdita and Lionel, the brother and sister sister; and Lord Raymond, the who are always on the outside observing impossibly handsome, charismatic, the main action – Perdita frustrated by impulsive hero of wars and politics. In her sex and Lionel by his social and the midst of a politically shifting intellectual inferiority to Adrian and England (the monarchy of Adrian’s Raymond. Adrian is clearly a Percy father was abolished and a republic Shelley type, passionately republican and established, with an elected Lord infused with all the charms and virtues a Protector), Verney falls in love with and grieving widow such as Shelley might marries Idris, Raymond sacrifices retroactively confer on her all-too-human monarchical ambitions to marry Perdita, 11 and Adrian is disappointed in love and Barbara Johnson, “The Last Man,” in The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, Audrey A. Fisch et al., ed. commits to a life of study. All are (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 258 – 67. deliriously happy for several years in an Johnson argues that Shelley’s life is a metaphorical parallel to the story of extinction in The Last Man. JIDRJournalofInterdisciplinaryResearch husband; even his drowning death is a she smiled her face was embellished by direct echo. Most evidently, Lord the softest sensibility, and her low, Raymond is a mirror-image of Lord modulated voice seemed tuned by Byron, from his scandalous and often love.”14 Here, sensibility is clearly selfish behavior to his undeniable genius equated with feminine virtues, among and energy to his untimely death fighting them love, which Shelley repeatedly for Greek independence (although insists is tortuous, but necessary. Raymond’s death is considerably more If Perdita’s sensibility is a virtue, glorious than Byron’s). The tendency to how is the theme of an end-of-sensibility focus on these biographical factors, novel supported? Shelley takes care of however, obfuscates the literary value of that by condemning Perdita to be a Shelley’s novel and invites dismissal. victim of her own excessively The Last Man is assuredly more than a heightened senses; she doesn’t even diary cloaked as fiction.12 A close make it long enough to let the plague kill reading of the novel through the her. When Perdita discovers Raymond’s framework of sensibility provides one infidelity, she is unable to either forgive avenue away from biography and toward him or let him go. As a result, he flees to a larger cultural context. Greece to fight in a dangerous war. Sensibility is referred to overtly When he is captured, Perdita and Verney by the narrator and by the characters in try to ransom him, but her excessive dialogue. When describing Perdita’s sensibility renders her less than useful. virtues, for instance, Verney drapes them Knowing that he suffers, she suffers as in sensibility; “Her active fancy wove a well. “She abstained from food; she lay thousand combinations . . . a sensation on the bare earth, and, by such mimickry with her became a sentiment, and she of his enforced torments, endeavoured to never spoke until she had mingled her hold communion with his distant pain,” a perceptions of outward objects with nearly textbook example of empathy.15 others which were the native growth of Such activity is neither healthy for her own mind.”13 This sensibility is the Perdita nor helpful for Raymond, and is a undeveloped, wild Perdita; when she presentiment of her inability to survive comes in contact with the civilizing without him. When he is killed in the influence of Adrian, Verney notes a fighting, she commits suicide. difference; “Perdita appeared . . . Raymond, on the other hand, different from and yet the same as the combines colossal selfishness with a wild mountain girl I had left . . . when kind of towering sensibility that often translates into sympathy, although not usefully; he is unable to control his 12 See Canuel, Audrey A. Fisch, Wagner-Lawlor etc. for non-biographical readings of The Last Man. (Fisch’s essay, impulses sufficiently to avoid hurting “Plaguing Politics: AIDS, Deconstruction, and The Last Man,” appears in The Other Mary Shelley, 1993.) 14 Ibid., 29. 13 Mary Shelley, The Last Man (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965): 11. 15 Ibid., 123.

69 “ICannotRuleMyself” others. This is seen first in his decision to Adrian, however, is the moral marry Perdita despite the fact that center of the novel, the one character marrying Idris would guarantee him a who can generally be counted on to much-coveted throne. In an excess of temper principle with mercy without emotion that he compels Verney to violating integrity. Nonetheless, he, too, witness, Raymond proposes to Perdita is a victim of excessive sensibility, extravagantly: “Take me – mould me to although he typically manages to your will, possess my heart and soul to overcome it in his personal life. Adrian is all eternity.”16 Surrendering to raw a poet, if not in profession, then in spirit. emotion, Perdita and Raymond are He values imagination and love above briefly deliriously happy. But other considerations, and considers them Raymond’s attachment to his own divine; “What a noble boon, worthy the emotional responses brings about giver, is the imagination! It takes from infidelity and the necessity of lying to his reality its leaden hue . . . is not love a gift wife, destroying his own sense of of the divinity? Love, and her child, personal honor. “The mind of Raymond Hope . . .”19 In this instance, love and was not so rough cast, nor had been so imagination have helped rescue Adrian rudely handled, in the circumstance of from the consequences of his excessive life, as to make him proof to these sensibility; rejected in love by a woman considerations [of honor] – on the who falls in love with Raymond (his contrary, he was all nerve; his spirit was eventual mistress), Adrian goes mad. as a pure fire, which fades and shrinks Madness, Shelley suggests, is an from every contagion of foul expected response to excessive atmosphere.”17 Thus Raymond is trapped indulgence of sensibility. Perdita, between a lack of impulse control due to likewise, enters a period of decline excessive sensibility, and insufficient approaching madness when Raymond callousness to cope with the results due betrays her, and even Lionel feels a to excessive sympathy. “I cannot rule despair he identifies as madness when he myself,” Raymond glumly admits, thinks he cannot win Idris from stepping down as Lord Protector after Raymond; “Truly, I was mad that night – indulging in humiliating public love – which I have named a giant from debauchery. “My passions are my birth, wrestled with despair!”20 Adrian masters; my smallest impulse my overcomes his madness with the tyrant.”18 In the end, he sacrifices sympathy of his friend Lionel,21 but everything to the gratification of his own self-destructive desires, and like Perdita, 19 Ibid, 53 – 4. serves as a warning against sensibility 20 Ibid., 44. For more on how Shelley constructed madness, and her father William Godwin’s possible influence, see outside the context of the novel’s Katherine Hill-Miller, “My Hideous Progeny”: Mary destructive plague. Shelley, William Godwin, and the Father-Daughter Relationship (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1995). 16 Ibid., 48. 17 Ibid., 91. 21 Friendship rarely represents a dangerous excess of 18 Ibid., 109. sensibility in Shelley; her mother’s views on the virtues of JIDRJournalofInterdisciplinaryResearch continues to demonstrate crippling hints that he will be proved wrong sensibility throughout. His short regarding the power of man’s will by adventure in Greece with Raymond ends having Lionel describe Adrian’s when he discovers he sympathizes on a appearance on uttering these noble human level with a wounded or slain words: “His voice trembled, his eyes enemy. “The Turks are men,” he says, were cast up, his hands clasped, and his “each fibre, each limb is as feeling as our fragile person was bent, as it were, with own.”22 While Raymond’s selfish, excess of emotion. The spirit of life quintessentially masculine brand of seemed to linger in his form, as a dying sensibility is able to put the sufferings of flame on an altar flickers on the embers others aside when they conflict with his of an accepted sacrifice.”25 Sensibility, goal, Adrian’s altruistic tendency for Adrian, does not pay. prevents such distancing. Adrian, unlike Finally, sensibility is observed in Raymond, survives to fight another day, the character of Lionel himself. If Adrian and enthusiastically embarks on a is the moral center of the novel, Lionel is program of public service when the at the plot center, peripheral to but plague renders most men too scared or affected by the actions of more forceful sick to lead. Ultimately, however, he is characters. This essential passivity is defeated by the bodily weakness that an usually gendered feminine by critics (in excess of sensibility seems to imply, a opposition to Raymond’s masculinized, weakness exacerbated by his madness essentially aggressive and impulsive over love and a war wound sustained in emotionalism), and that reading is the defense of a beleaguered Greek girl supported in Shelley’s descriptions of accosted by soldiers.23 His inability to Verney’s sensibility.26 Shelley has swim to safety as Lionel does is Lionel always reacting; even his Shelley’s ultimate judgment against his madness about Idris echoes his sister’s, sensibility; he is simply too good for the and Adrian’s, feminized response. world. “For the will of man is Shelley genders Lionel overtly feminine omnipotent,” he optimistically suggests, “blunting the arrows of death, soothing 25 Ibid. 26 the bed of disease, and wiping away the Scholars are endlessly fascinated by the gendering of Lionel Verney, mostly because the narrator of The Last tears of agony . . . I dedicate all of Man is usually understood to be a literary version of intellect and strength that remains to me, Shelley herself, a sort of fictional autobiography. Brewer sees Verney as an expression of Shelley’s ideas on the plot to that one work . . . of bestowing device of feminine victim confession, drawing from her blessings on my fellow-men!”24 Adrian mother’s novels Mary and The Wrongs of Woman. Johanna M. Smith argues that Lionel and Adrian are both gendered makes this pledge immediately after feminine, as opposed to the overt and failed masculine recovering from madness, but Shelley sensibility of Raymond (Mary Shelley, 49). Most interestingly, Barbara Johnson views Lionel, like Frankenstein’s monster, as a representative of a third and friendship were well known (see Mary Wollstonecraft, A intermediate gender; “he resembles neither the men nor the Vindication of the Rights of Woman). women of the novel. He serves the function of witness, of 22 The Last Man, 116. survivor, and of scribe . . . the same role that Mary Shelley 23 Ibid. plays at the moment when she writes her novel” (in “The Last Man,” in The Other Mary Shelley, 262). 24 Ibid., 54.

71 “ICannotRuleMyself” when he crouches over the sleeping form Perdita, the problem is directly opposite; of his dying wife: “The solitude became rather than being too selfish, she is intolerable – I placed my hand on the selfless, and her extreme sensibility beating heart of Idris, I bent my head to renders her helpless to survive without catch the sound of her breath, to assure the object of her passion. Adrian’s myself that she still existed – for a sensitivity to all of society as well as his moment I doubted whether I should not own emotions incapacitates him at times, awake her; so effeminate an horror ran and finally makes him a victim of his through my frame.”27 Lionel’s nursing own unbridled optimism. Only Lionel’s posture and his physical, sensible reactive sensibility stands the tests of reaction are sometimes read as circumstance. expression of Shelley’s own feminized The Last Man can be rescued sensibility. He is certainly subject to from the dismissive characterization of a physical reactions; he cries along with sort of fictional diary for Shelley by his sister when Raymond is returned to viewing it as an expression of Shelley’s them after captivity. “My swelling heart views on sensibility and sympathy. As choked me; the natural current would not demonstrated by a close reading of the be checked; the big rebellious tears novel, these ethics are present in each of gathered in my eyes . . . they came fast the main characters in importantly and faster.”28 Lionel’s sensibility, varying ways. Lionel, Adrian, and however, is not as ultimately destructive Perdita all represent degrees of as Adrian’s, Raymond’s, and Perdita’s. feminized sensibility, whereas Raymond He is able to seek solace in physical demonstrates an impulsive sensibility reactions, but unlike Perdita, is not and reluctant sympathy no less pivotal to overwhelmed by them. He is the only plot and character development for being person in all the world to survive the masculine. Considerations of biography ravages of love, war, and plague, and authorial intent aside, Shelley’s use possibly because he has sufficient of sensibility suggests that sensibility sensibility to produce sympathy and was very much a relevant cultural cooperation, but not so much that he is framework in her day. That sensibility is destroyed by circumstance. ultimately helpless against primeval By using the extreme plot device forces of nature is not necessarily a of killing literally everyone in the world rejection of sensibility as a useful and save one, Shelley dramatically outlines necessary societal attribute; by varying the perils of excessive or unchecked the type and degree of sensibility in her sensibility. In Raymond, the failure to characters and giving them all different temper emotional impulses with calm fates, Shelley indicates instead that while consideration of consequences makes a sensibility does not solve all problems, it wreck of his life and those of others. For should not be rejected out of hand as a means of coping with modernity. Lionel 27 The Last Man, 192. Verney’s survival, and the projection of his biography into a distant past, 28 Ibid., 125. JIDRJournalofInterdisciplinaryResearch underscores the cautionary tale aspect of The Last Man. The nested frame narrative, as Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor suggests, can be interpreted as a final vindication of sympathy by paradoxically giving the last man an audience.29 It also hints that Shelley’s contemporary readers should view modernity with skepticism and should consider neither technology nor sensibility adequate protections against the caprices of nature, a theme first suggested in Frankenstein. As in Frankenstein, but more explicitly, Shelley uses the plot and characters of The Last Man to carve a middle ground for sensibility and its product, sympathy. She creates a world in which sensibility is necessary, but fraught with traps made increasingly hazardous by the distractions of modern society

29 Wagner-Lawlor, 768.

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Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Methuen, 1988. PR 5398.M4 1988 Nitchie, Elizabeth. Mary Shelley. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953. PR 5398.N5 Paley, Morton D. “The Last Man: Apocalypse without Millennium.” In The Other Mary Shelley, Fisch et al., ed., 107 – 23. PR 5398.087 1993 Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Signet, 2000. ISBN: 0451527712 ---. The Last Man. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. PR 5397.L3 1965 Smith, Johanna M. Mary Shelley. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. PR 5398.S55 1996 Spark, Muriel. Mary Shelley. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1987. PR 5398.S63 1987 Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A. "Performing History, Performing Humanity in Mary Shelley's The Last Man." Studies in English Literature 1500 - 1900 42 (2002): 753 - 80.