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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. 65 “ICannotRuleMyself” 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.
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