...an explosion of "last man" texts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the answer to this question is left deliberately vague. (1) Shelley's narrator, Lionel Verney, shows no signs of understanding his inexplicable recovery from a plague that decimates the rest of humanity in the twilight of the twenty-first century. Having produced our culture's most famous freak of science in Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818), Shelley envisions for her third published novel a bona fide freak of nature, a man whose immunology is monstrously disproportionate to all those around him. Robert Lance Snyder has argued that "there is no logically adequate way of construing the plague" in The Last Man; it represents "an irreducible phenomenon that both challenges and defines the limits of rational understanding." (2) I maintain that the same can be said of Lionel's singular capacity to withstand that plague: aside from being a structural necessity of the novel, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to the last man's enduring fortitude.

This unresolved detail of the novel has only piqued the curiosity of Shelley's critics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, prompting speculation about both the source and the meaning of Lionel's resilience. In a recent book chapter, for instance, Jan Plug suggests that if the plague's devastation represents a complex critique of Romantic ideology, politics, and gender (as Snyder, Lee Sterrenburg, and Jane Aaron have argued), then Lionel's survival story "offers itself as the narrative of what it might mean to pass beyond ... that ideology." (3) When Plug attributes Lionel's unique significance in this regard to the simple fact that Lionel "is the only character to contract the plague and survive it," he repeats an idea that has become a commonplace in Shelley criticism: Lionel's acquired immunity has something to do with the plague-devastated black man, "a negro half clad," whom Lionel encounters in an early episode of the novel's third volume. (4) Lionel "survives this literalized black death," writes Plug, "after having a black man, in his dying moments, breath [sic] the plague on, or perhaps better, into him." Lionel's recovery from this encounter thus "takes place as a kind of immunoreaction in which he inhales and integrates the antibody that the plague has perhaps always been." (5)

Snyder is the first critic in recent memory to make this connection between Lionel's immunity and what he calls Shelley's "plague-stricken and dying black." (6) Although Snyder rarely is cited for making the connection, his gesture is rehearsed by many of the novel's most influential readers, including Anne K. Mellor, Alan Richardson, Alan Bewell, and, more recently, Kari E. Lokke and Kevin Hutchings. None of these readers makes anything but the most casual reference to an important paradox that Snyder's observation brings to light: in order to read Lionel's encounter with the black man as a miraculous moment of immunization, or "inoculation" as Bewell calls it, one must acknowledge Lionel's contraction of the disease as being distinctly inconsistent with the plague's epidemiology. (7) The novel's plague, as Lionel himself admits, is not communicable through human contact but "depend[s] upon the air" to spread across the globe (p. 182). It is an airborne infection that "was not what is commonly called contagious, like the scarlet fever, or extinct small-pox" (p. 182). Lionel's encounter with the black man is strange in many ways but not least because, purportedly, it yields "the sole instance of direct infection in the novel." (8) Read as a figure of immunization, the encounter produces a number of unresolved questions: Why is Lionel uniquely exposed to the plague in this manner? How could others not have been immunized similarly? And, perhaps more significantly, how are we to read Shelley's characterization of the alleged agent of Lionel's inoculation, a man whose racial profile aligns him dangerously close to "the Black Spectre" that indiscriminately devours mankind (p. 321)? (9) Revisiting the site of Lionel's encounter with the black man as well as the various interpretations of that scene, this essay contends that by privileging the encounter as the most likely source of Lionel's lastness critics read The Last Man as being itself consummately dis-eased, anxiously torn by wanting to have its plague both ways, as both contagious and noncontagious. There may be no logical way to construe the plague, as Snyder insists, but positing Lionel's encounter with the black man as an exceptional instance in which the plague alters its habitual mode of transmission renders the scene intelligible only in a contradiction. As Jacques Derrida points out, "coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire." (10) Unable to produce a coherent reason for Lionel's resilience, critics comprehend Shelley's novel as deliberately forcing the "negro half clad" on its narrator, who in turn gains immunity through his rejection of this man's body. The dual purpose of this essay is, first, to call this critical commonplace into question by pointing to evidence in the novel that challenges it and, second, to propose an alternate explanation for Lionel's resistance to the plague.

PRESCRIBING SOLUTIONS: LIONEL'S CASE HISTORY

By the time Lionel meets the "negro half clad," the plague has run its course through most of Europe and the Western world. Despite assurances from England's political leaders, who naively insist that the threat of plague is as foreign to London as a "lunar territory," pestilence permeates the city's borders, forcing many of its citizens either to flee to the country or to "die on the threshold of poverty" (pp. 173, 253). Inspired by a newfound "spirit of emigration," surviving Londoners agree "[t]o leave England for ever" and journey southward en masse toward more tropical climates in search of what Lionel's good friend, Adrian, calls "some natural Paradise, some garden of the earth" (pp. 256, 257, 244). Preparing for the coming exodus, Lionel returns to his London home during a terrible storm and finds an "assemblage of persons under the portico of [his] house"--gathered, as he soon learns, because of the rapid decline in health of his "eldest darling," Alfred (pp. 265, 264). Lionel recalls with some trepidation that day's events when he made his way through the crowd:

I snatched a light, and rushing up stairs, and hearing a groan, without reflection I threw open the door of the first room that presented itself. It was quite dark; but, as I stept within, a pernicious scent assailed my senses, producing sickening qualms, which made their way to my very heart, while I felt my leg clasped, and a groan repeated by the person that held me. I lowered my lamp, and saw a negro half clad, writhing under the agony of disease, while he held me with a convulsive grasp. With mixed horror and impatience I strove to disengage myself, and fell on the sufferer; he wound his naked festering arms round me, his face was close to mine, and his breath, death-laden, entered my vitals. For a moment I was overcome, my head was bowed by aching nausea; till, reflection returning, I sprung up, threw the wretch from me, and darting up the staircase, entered the chamber usually inhabited by my family. (p. 265)

Not long after this encounter, Lionel succumbs to a debilitating illness during which he hovers near death for three full days before making a complete and unprecedented recovery. It is primarily the close proximity between this encounter and Lionel's illness that has persuaded critics such as Snyder to diagnose Lionel's struggle with the black man as the "sole instance of direct infection" in the novel. Lionel, of course, will not make the connection himself. He records nothing beyond his immediate and physical revulsion at the black man's sickly state before proceeding to describe his visit to the deathbed of his beloved son. Snyder nevertheless insists that through this singular act of contagion Lionel achieves an archetypal rebirth that not only renders him immune to the plague but also endows him with "redoubled health and keener powers of perception." (11) From this black man harboring a plague of distinctly Eastern or "dark" origins, Lionel receives what Snyder calls "a new faculty of vision, a heightened spiritual awareness" through which he "alone is able...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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