TY - JOUR
AU - Richardson, Rebecca
AB - Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) is a novel uniquely interested in representing the history of human civilization and the relation between human populations and the environment. The frame story describes how the unnamed author discovers the narrative, in fragments, in the Sybil’s Cave in the nineteenth century, while the bulk, comprised of the (creatively) reconstructed fragments, is narrated by Lionel Verney, the only man to survive a catastrophic plague at the end of the twenty-first century. This plague spreads via the atmosphere rather than through direct contagion between humans, and it spreads all the more quickly and effectively when the climate changes, with England experiencing warmer weather, storms, and floods—a scenario likely inspired by the actual climate changes of 1816 resulting from Mount Tambora’s eruption.1 With the human population rapidly dwindling, Lionel imagines how the earth will go on without humans (quite swimmingly, it turns out) and what the ruins of human civilization might look like to future intelligent beings. Given such overt attention to the relation between humans and the environment, Shelley’s novel has inspired many ecocritical readings.2 This critical interest has as much to do with the novel itself as with our context as readers in the twenty-first century. Heidi Scott has described Shelley’s work as “prescient” (36) and “eerily apt” (43), while Kate Rigby has observed that the plot of disease and disordered climate unfolds “uncannily for today’s readers” (52). In the time that has passed since these critical assessments, Shelley’s novel has only grown more uncanny in its similarities and telling differences. In the aftermath of the Brexit vote and Trump’s election in 2016, Shelley’s portrayal of a world in crisis seems overly optimistic: her England welcomes refugees fleeing the plague in their home nations (even if some citizens resort to ill-fated attempts at isolationism, barricading themselves within private estates). Likewise, although Shelley’s atmosphere-borne plague is modeled on miasma theory, it can feel disturbingly apt rather than outdated in the wake of climate-change enabled diseases, from the recent outbreaks of the Zika virus to the increasing range of Lyme disease. And Shelley’s portrayal of floods and rising ocean levels seems all too realistic now, in an age when we have become accustomed to record-breaking temperatures, levels of carbon-dioxide, and glacier melt. The writing and publishing of this essay, for example, spanned 2016 and 2017, the hottest years on record since 1880, and 2018, which NASA has just declared the fourth warmest. In this time the atmospheric carbon dioxide has surpassed four hundred parts per million. More attention has been paid to the feedback loops hastening the melting of arctic ice, from the breaking off of the Antarctic Larsen C ice shelf in July 2017, to the publication of Nicholas R. Golledge et al.'s work on ice-sheet melt in Nature in February 2019. In short, Shelley’s novel offers uncanny parallels with our own environmental crises. As this essay will argue, this ecological or environmental uncanny is both a diegetic effect (experienced and described by the novel’s characters) as well as an extradiegetic effect (created by the narrative discourse). Moreover, I propose that contemporary readers, encountering this novel in an age of anthropogenic climate change, experience an extra layering of these effects—into what we might term an eco-historical uncanny. With these terms and this distinction between effects within the text and beyond it, my intention is to think through the way that ecocritical approaches bridge historical distance. Shelley’s The Last Man is a useful case study here because critical work on this novel, including Scott’s and Rigby’s, has combined historical and ecocritical attention, as if picking up the gauntlet of calls to historicize ecological scholarship. As Gillen D’Arcy Wood has described this need, “While abundant in ‘green’ readings of literary and philosophical texts and rightly consumed by the politics of the current global ecological crisis, ecocriticism has suffered from a deficiency in historical consciousness” (2–3). As a result, Hannes Bergthaller argues, ecocriticism “has remained much more attached to an ahistorical conception of nature that can be understood as providing a stable normative scaffolding for environmental politics” (22).3 Much recent ecocriticism has illuminated how concepts of nature are constructed in particular times and texts. Yet, after situating a text in its ecological moment—in the case of The Last Man, revealing how the novel responds to actual volcano-induced climate change, or understandings of disease transmission, or theories about fossils and extinction—there is something about such texts that exceed that moment. As Timothy Clark puts it, sometimes a text “jumps out, lingers and may have unexpected consequences.” And jumps out, specifically, at us. This is why, as Clark warns, mere historicism is not enough: “a text is not completely ‘understood’ by being resituated solely in the cultural context of its time of production.” To account for these unexpected consequences, ecocriticism must be attentive, Clark argues, to the “emergent effects” of texts, the writing of which “exceeds that of the situation in which it occurred, or, more strictly speaking, that situation is being reconceptualized as a context that must now also include the present and an uncertain future” (64–65). This question of how we can or should read our own concerns in texts that could not have anticipated them finds a parallel in recent ecocritical work in history and human geography, with researchers combing the past for the catalysts behind the fossil-fuel-powered global system we find ourselves in. Such work includes the pursuit of a “golden spike” to mark the start of the Anthropocene, as well as Andreas Malm’s recent investigation into the rise of steam power in Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016). As Malm writes, climate change forces us into a different relationship with the past: it is “a sun mercilessly projecting a new light onto history,” making visible what couldn’t be seen before. Only now can we see “what it really meant to burn coal and send forth smoke from a stack in Manchester in 1842.” Such events are, in Malm’s argument, “retroactively suffused with a new significance, calling for a return to history, eyes wide open” (4–5). Reading for such retroactive significance, or reading anachronistically, can exceed a strictly forensic inquiry. As J. Hillis Miller puts it, some texts seem to present us with a “proleptic foretelling” of our present environmental crisis, allowing us to haunt the past for the unheeded writing on the wall. I am interested in how ecocritical approaches position us in relation to history, and where, beyond seeking causes and effects, we also seek uncanny resonances, a sort of communion across time. With this in mind, I take The Last Man as my case study because it responds to Romantic-era ideas about the environment, climate, and human versus natural agency, while also quite explicitly setting out to imagine something beyond this reality by incorporating the supernatural. Further, with its setting in the twenty-first century, The Last Man reaches beyond its immediate context, anticipating its own “uncertain future.” Although Shelley’s novel deliberately ventures beyond the bounds of realism, both in the setting and in its use of Gothic conventions, the text largely commits to tracing “natural” causes. The “last man” narrative had become a recognizable fad in the Romantic era by the time Shelley entered the field with her version, and earlier variations on this theme—from Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s The Last Man, or Omegarus and Syderia (1806) to Thomas Campbell’s “The Last Man” (1823)—had frequently explained the destruction of humans in religious terms.4 By instead emphasizing natural over divine causes, Shelley’s novel can be read as an early science fiction narrative. But Shelley also includes elements that defy natural explanation, like the vision of multiple suns. This mix of qualities has made The Last Man a unique object for ecocritical work.5 By portraying something beyond what could be explained by the natural science of her day—and likewise resisting a divine or religious gloss—Shelley seems to invite a critical approach that attends to these prescient and emergent effects of the text. In short, The Last Man uniquely invites future readers to “reconceptualize” its situation in and against chronology and scientific understanding. The context of our reading amplifies Shelley’s already uncanny narrative, as if this text were hailing us—although, unlike Frances Ferguson’s work on hailing, this is not between a character and reader, or between an object and ourselves, but between a setting and a reader, creating an environmental affinity.6 But the differences can become as important as the similarities, providing a distorted mirror by which to see Shelley’s text and our own experience of it. First, as the climate changes in The Last Man, the characters reconsider the relationship between humans and environment. But they do this without a sense of responsibility or guilt: their climate change is not manmade, and it certainly is not driven by carbon emissions from fossil fuels—in Shelley’s imagined twenty-first century world, people are still travelling by horse-drawn carriages, and the only explicit technological change is in hot-air balloon travel, which has become safe and reliable. Second, it depicts the end of the world, but only for humans—the rest of the natural world seems to thrive. Third, the timeline of the novel’s climate change, plague, and depopulation is incredibly fast, whereas our own environmental crisis proves difficult to represent, as critics such as Rob Nixon in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011) have pointed out, because of its slow, diffusive, and often invisible effects. And, strangely, despite the fact that Shelley was familiar with both her father and Thomas Malthus’s work on population dynamics, the novel offers no hint that, in the more than Two hundred intervening years, the global population has increased. Although, then and now, Malthusians and environmentalists pointed to overpopulation (and, we must add today, overconsumption, particularly in the north) as a problem, the novel never mentions more than “tens of thousands” of humans—and the population quickly shrinks to very countable and representable numbers. Reading for what strikes us as “eerily apt” helps us locate the structural and affective elements that contribute to the uncanny effects within and without the text. The first section of this essay examines how Shelley’s narrative evokes the uncanny, specifically around her characters’ ways of reading and interacting with their environment. The second section turns to the question of what this text seems to repress in its portrayal of a small remnant of humanity—specifically, the contemporary debates, in the wake of Malthus and Godwin, about the relationship between a growing human population and the environment. Today’s discourse around climate change similarly avoids confronting the question of how population dynamics as well as consumption patterns affect the environment. And, similarly, our own era is fascinated by apocalyptic narratives that imagine not an overcrowded earth, but a depopulated one. My goal, across both these sections, is to consider how an environmental uncanny is created within a text, and how an additional, eco-historical uncanny arises across texts and contexts. Uncanny Environments in The Last Man In his article “The American Uncanny,” Bill Brown draws our attention to the “unhuman object-world,” which Ernst Jentsch is attentive to in his definition of the uncanny, but which drops out of Freud’s definition, and, as a result, of much of contemporary criticism. As Brown notes, “psychoanalysis compulsively translates [the unhuman object-world] into the human” (198)—a definition that might double for our understanding of the Anthropocene.7 The resulting challenge is to take the unhuman object-world on its own terms. While Brown theorizes the relation between human and thing in his reading of American slavery and law, it is also important to look beyond both the human and even the object-world to the environment of landscapes, plants, and animals. And in fact, Jentsch and Freud both provide a foundation for such a specifically environmental or ecological uncanny. As much as Freud disavows Jentsch’s work on the uncanny, they agree on many aspects, such as the overlap of the familiar and the unfamiliar, and the resulting sense of uncertainty. For Jentsch, disorientation and intellectual irresolvability are important elements, while Freud downplays these in favor of repression: “an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed” (249). He also adds to the range of manifestations, highlighting the potential uncanniness of doubles, involuntary or compulsive repetition, and thoughts that seem to come true. But it is in Jentsch’s and Freud’s anecdotal examples, even more than in their definitions, that I find a foundation for theorizing an environmental or ecological uncanny. Jentsch observes that one of the most regularly uncanny experiences is the uncertainty over “whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate.” Although Jentsch’s work is frequently cited in theories of automata, waxworks, and other such human-like and human-made objects, the first example he cites in this passage involves a person alone in the woods: “One can read now and then in old accounts of journeys that someone sat down in an ancient forest on a tree trunk and that, to the horror of the traveler, this trunk suddenly began to move and showed itself to be a giant snake” (221). Freud’s examples similarly tap into these questions about correctly observing and navigating one’s environment. Relating his own uncanny experience, Freud remembers wandering around an Italian town and realizing he had entered a red-light district: “I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another détour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny…” (237). Freud then imagines other examples, where “radically” different situations recall “the same feeling of helplessness and of uncanniness”: “So, for instance, when, caught in a mist perhaps, one has lost one’s way in a mountain forest, every attempt to find the marked or familiar path may bring one back again and again to one and the same spot, which one can identify by some particular landmark” (237). Such examples revolve around interactions between individuals and their environments, and particularly interactions that confuse identity and agency. As Nicholas Royle has observed, the uncanny involves a “crisis of the natural, touching upon everything that one might have thought was ‘part of nature’” (2). The log is actually a snake with its own agenda, while the streets and forest paths seem to assert a will of their own, leading Freud back over and over to the same spot. We can see this uncanny “crisis of the natural” throughout Shelley’s The Last Man. Like Freud’s example of returning to the same spot as much as he tries to escape it, the characters in The Last Man repeatedly try to escape the plague only to find it again, or leave a place only to be compelled to return to it. Populations migrate and shift north as the plague takes hold, seeking cooler climates less conducive to its spread. But the plague reaches even England, where the survivors come to fear the return of warm summer weather, recognizing that “Plague is the companion of spring, of sunshine, and plenty” (250). After living through these cycles, Lionel and Adrian counterintuitively lead the remnant of survivors south—the group having decided that, although the northern winters provide some protection from the plague, life is too bleak and toilsome (“The labor of hundreds of thousands alone could make this inclement nook fit habitation for one man” [256]). Nearly as soon as they have left, however, Lionel’s group has to turn around. An “accident” occurs when they reach Rochester—but before we learn what it is, Lionel breaks the chronology of his narrative to explain events that happened before the plague (273). This interlude is needed to explain why, when Lionel’s wife Idris receives a letter from Lucy, she insists that she and Lionel go back to Datchet to retrieve her. As a result, this return seems compelled not only by circumstances, but by the hand of the author pulling them back, without having laid the narrative groundwork to make it seem a natural effect of known causes. It is on this trip that Idris dies, and that Lionel experiences a strangely uncanny moment upon seeing the old road under these changed circumstances: Well known indeed it was. Each cottage stood on its accustomed site, each tree wore its familiar appearance. Habit had graven uneraseably on my memory, every turn and change of object on the road. At a short distance beyond the Little Park, was an elm half blown down by a storm, some ten years ago; and still, with leafless snow-laden branches, it stretched across the pathway, which wound through a meadow, beside a shallow brook, whose brawling was silenced by frost—that stile, that white gate, that hollow oak tree, which doubtless once belonged to the forest, and which now shewed in the moonlight its gaping rent; to whose fanciful appearance, tricked out by the dusk into a resemblance of the human form, the children had given the name of Falstaff;—all these objects were as well known to me as the cold hearth of my deserted home, and every moss-grown wall and plot of orchard ground, alike as twin lambs are to each other in a stranger’s eye, yet to my accustomed gaze bore differences, distinction, and a name. England remained, though England was dead—it was the ghost of merry England that I beheld, under those greenwood shade passing generations had sported in security and ease. To this painful recognition of familiar places, was added a feeling experienced by all, understood by none—a feeling as if in some state, less visionary than a dream, in some past real existence, I had seen all I saw, with precisely the same feelings as I now beheld them—as if all my sensations were a duplex mirror of a former revelation. (284–85) I quote this passage at length because it foreshadows many of Freud’s and Jentsch’s examples—the tree that resembles a human form, the doubling of old England and “ghost” England, and Lionel’s sense of déjà vu, which is closely related to the uncanny.8 Throughout this passage, Lionel draws our attention to similarities and distinctions, finally noting that, where he sees differences, a stranger would think the plots and walls are as alike as “twin lambs.” Lionel’s déjà vu and the theorizing it inspires importantly take shape through this attention to the environment—the meadow, brook, trees, etc. that “were as well known to me as the cold hearth of my deserted home.” This comparison of the landscape to the “deserted home” not only echoes the unheimlich, but also develops the broader question posed throughout Lionel’s narration: to what extent is the environment in fact a home to humans? As if repeatedly trying to answer this question, the characters pay increasing attention to the weather and its fittingness for human thriving—as the plague continues to spread, as the climate grows erratic and crops fail, and as “half England [is] under water” and “whole villages [are] carried away” in Europe (210–11). As much as England hopes for winter’s frosts to take away the plague, it is “not until February that the desired signs of winter [appear].” But this lasts for only three days; on the fourth, “the sun came out, and mocking the usual laws of nature, seemed even at this early season to burn with solsticial force.” In March, already, fruit trees are in blossom and corn is growing, the spring being “forced by the unseasonable heat” (211). The weather raises fears specifically around the question of whether the earth is home or tomb: “We feared the balmy air—we feared the cloudless sky, the flower-covered earth, and delightful woods, for we looked on the fabric of the universe no longer as our dwelling, but our tomb” (210–11). Humans seem, suddenly, out of sync with the rest of the flourishing earth, because, as Lionel observes, “death fell on man alone” (216). The result is a strange disconnect between the pleasant aspects of the weather (the balmy air, cloudless sky, flowers, etc.) and the fear it inspires because of its association with the plague—a disconnect that will be familiar to many living in the United States who enjoy the warmer weather and cloudless skies associated with climate change and drought.9 The environmental changes only become more inexplicable as the novel proceeds. As the fleeing group approaches Dover, they find that the city has flooded, with the tide reaching higher and higher. It is in Dover that the group witnesses the strangest phenomenon yet, with meteors and mountainous waves seeming to meet the sun, leading to a sense of being unmoored from earth’s usual laws: “it appeared as if suddenly the motion of earth was revealed to us—as if no longer we were ruled by ancient laws, but were turned adrift in an unknown region of space” (290). When the group reaches the Continent, the natural environment continues to veer away from its “ancient laws,” with owls and bats flying under a “noon-day sun,” unseasonable storms, and blight (308). Although many of these environmental phenomena are presented as empirically documentable—even if inexplicable and difficult to describe, in the case of the Dover sun vision—others, the narrator makes clear, are purely imagined. The group of survivors grows increasingly prone to “nervous terrors and fearful visions” as they go on: “Every evening brought its fresh creation of spectres; a ghost was depicted by every blighted tree; and appalling shapes were manufactured from each shaggy bush […] Once it was confidently asserted, that the sun rose an hour later than its seasonable time; again it was discovered that he grew paler and paler; that shadows took an uncommon appearance” (320). Shelley thus presents a spectrum of visions—from the real to the imagined, from the explicable to the inexplicable—producing, within and without the story, precisely the experience of intellectual uncertainty that has long been associated with the uncanny. This is also, of course, a characteristic frequently associated with the Gothic, and at times Shelley seems to play with these conventions, troubling the line between natural and supernatural causes. While we never get a clear explanation for, say, the floods or the sun vision, at other points, the novel ruthlessly undercuts the apparently supernatural. For example, as the group nervously traverses the Continent, we have the strange “throwaway scenes” of the Black Spectre and the dancer. The Black Spectre is initially described as an “apparition” “haunting” the group; the dancer appears first as a white figure “of more than human stature, flourishing about the road, now throwing up its arms, now leaping to an astonishing height in the air, then turning round several times successively, then raising itself to its full height and gesticulating violently” (320–21). But in Radcliffian style, the “Black Spectre” is just a lonely nobleman drawn to Lionel’s group yet afraid of contact in case the disease is contagious, while the other is an opera dancer in a feverish frenzy. As a result, the reader might expect there to be similarly clear and natural causes for everything, even if our narrator cannot always supply them. But by leaving the most impressive of these phenomena unclear, Shelley invokes intellectual uncertainty within the story and in the discourse around the environment specifically. The climate change that enables the plague is left frustratingly unmotivated, while the plague begins to seem overdetermined. When Raymond enters the plague-infested city of Constantinople, for example, we can track a literal path for the plague’s transmission, a metaphorical one that reflects the violence of the war against the Turks, or a supernatural and interpersonal one with Evadne’s curse on her former lover. As a result, as Robert Lance Snyder has concluded, “there is no logically adequate way of construing the plague. As a fictional device, it is presented not, as in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), as a naturalistic calamity nor, as in John Wilson’s The City of the Plague (1816), as a framework for melodrama with religious overtones […] It is, in short, an irreducible phenomenon that both challenges and defines the limits of rational understanding” (436-37). This uncertainty has provoked many critics, who have sought recourse in either historical or metaphorical explanations. Alan Bewell argues that Shelley’s novel is one of the “first major works in the historical ecology of disease,” realistically imagining the ecological changes being wrought by colonialism (298).10 But as Lauren Cameron has pointed out, the novel apparently breaks its own rules about how the plague is transmitted, which might suggest that the epidemic is in fact comprised of multiple diseases (193). Others have read the plague in more purely metaphorical or symbolic terms. For example, Kevin Hutchings sees the plague functioning emblematically in the historical context of British imperialism and the slave trade. He points to the importance of the plague’s origin point in Africa, and concludes that, “because of its leveling effect, [Shelley’s] plague becomes, to a certain extent, an emblem of social justice carried out on a global scale” (238). Paul A. Cantor similarly sees the plague metaphorically, suggesting that it stands in for a web of international trade. These readings are all illuminating in their own right, but they also respond to how Shelley’s text confuses the human and natural, and their agencies. We see this blurring across the narrative, even before the plague strikes, in the ways that characters compare themselves to the natural world. They do this frequently, to the point of being “farcically Romantic,” as Scott puts it (36). Lionel describes Perdita, for example, as being “like a fruitful soil that imbibed the airs and dews of heaven, and gave them forth again to light in loveliest forms of fruits and flowers; but then she was often dark and rugged as that soil, raked up, and new sown with unseen seed” (13). As a young man, jealous of the not-yet-befriended Adrian, Lionel looks “on the sterile rocks about me, [exclaiming]—‘They do not cry, long live the Earl!’” (17). Such passages point us to how characters engage with the natural world by imagining themselves as like or unlike their natural surroundings. But as the climate alters and the plague strikes, the characters become more attentive to the differences. In contrast to the sickening human population, the earth, as Lionel repeatedly and exhaustively describes it, is superabundant in its flourishing fertility: “Where was pain and evil? Not in the calm air or weltering ocean; not in the woods or fertile fields, nor among the birds that made the woods resonant with song, nor the animals that in the midst of plenty basked in the sunshine” (249). Caught between the opposed “natural” and “manmade” worlds are the domesticated spaces and animals of the novel. Animals frequently come up in this text, with the word “horse” or “horses” appearing Seventy times (not counting further examples such as “horsemen,” “horse-power,” and “horse-whipping”). Sheep also make a frequent appearance, given that Lionel starts life as a shepherd. From the landed gentry’s parks to the peasants’ chickens to the flocks Lionel attends to as a young man, these domesticated elements of the natural world require regular attention and upkeep. But as England begins to take in refugees, her attention shifts to absolute necessities, leaving the rest to default to their natural state. We learn that the horses, given this “long holiday,” have become “almost wild” (296), while other animals take over the empty towns and buildings, exerting their “new found liberty.” In one scene, for example, Lionel describes how “The dove-colored oxen turned their full eyes on us, and paced slowly by; a startling throng of silly sheep, with pattering feet, would start up in some chamber, formerly dedicated to the repose of beauty, and rush, huddling past us, down the marble staircase into the street, and again in at the first open door, taking unrebuked possession of hallowed sanctuary, or kingly council-chamber” (336). Such scenes contribute to our sense of how “unhomelike” humans’ homes have become. Animals begin to seem like uncanny and ghostly doubles, with the eerie scenes of sheep “pattering” down marble staircases, or cows “stalled in the hall of pleasure” (336). Such images emphasize how quickly the formerly domesticated spaces and animals of the novel revert to a “natural” state, and are suggestive of an unsettling power reversal, with the oxen seeming to stare down the last humans, and the sheep taking “unrebuked possession” of human-made spaces. These effects—of returning to the same places and situations of the plague; of uncertainty over natural, human, and supernatural agency; of substituting animals for humans—add up to a specifically environmental uncanny. This section has demonstrated how the novel invokes these effects within the story and narrative discourse, even as these effects are amplified—into a sort of eco-historical uncanny—by the experience of reading this novel in the twenty-first century. Following Freud’s theory of the uncanny, it is tempting to find a common, repressed idea to bridge Shelley’s vision of the Anthropocene and our own apocalyptic narratives. In the next section, I argue that what is strangely elided by Shelley’s novel—or raised only through its opposite—is the Malthusian nightmare of overpopulation. In the “depopulation narrative” we can find a through-line from the Romantic-era “last man” genre to our own contemporary moment’s intense interest in apocalyptic narratives about a scrappy band of survivors. These narratives are all the more important for how they elide the perceived if not always actual environmental crisis of both the nineteenth and twenty-first century: a burgeoning human population. Fantasies of Depopulation in the Anthropocene Five years before the publication of The Last Man, Mary Shelley read her father’s, William Godwin’s, Of Population (1820) and Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Where Malthus perceived an inevitable conflict between the limitations of the environment (the land and improvements that could be made to produce food) and the fertility of the human population that relied on it, Godwin argued that humans could continually improve through education and better governance. But regardless of whether humans were incrementally progressing toward a perfect state, or going direct the other way (via a cycle of population booms and busts), the nineteenth century witnessed a profound demographic shift. As Nicholas Daly has observed in The Demographic Imagination (2015), both Europe and North America experienced a “demographic transition” in the nineteenth century, from high fertility and mortality to low fertility and mortality. In the midst of this transition, the birth rate was still high even as mortality fell, resulting in what Daly describes as a “population explosion” (1–2). In short, Britain’s population roughly quadrupled across the nineteenth century. Not only were there simply more people, but there was also a shift from rural to urban spaces, meaning that cities, in particular, felt overcrowded. And yet, as if reversing the reality of these population dynamics, Shelley and other writers participating in the “last man” genre imagined a completely depopulated earth. Such a genre would seem to parody the population principle. Critics such as Lauren Cameron have in fact read Shelley’s novel as a rejoinder to Malthus, suggesting that, while Shelley agreed with many of his premises, she disagreed over the form population “checks” would take (pointing to disease rather than famine). Indeed, even before disease decimates the population, Shelley is intent on imagining humans as a collective. For example, Lionel explains that while “A multitude of men are feeble and inert, without a voice, a leader,” when they find a leader, “they regain the strength belonging to their numbers” (152). Later, facing the threat of the plague, Lionel reflects on the comfort previously derived from the knowledge that, “though the individual is destroyed, man continues for ever”—“we glory in the continuity of our species” (182). Such passages make an interesting distinction between the individual and the species, while trying to imagine the human at different scales (much like Shelley’s philosopher-scientist Merrival).11 But at the same time that Shelley raises such questions about individuals and populations, she avoids the question of exactly how many people exist in this novelistic world. Although we rarely get exact numbers, Lionel’s narration repeatedly draws our attention to the crowding, thronging populations of the novel—with forms of the word “population” appearing twenty-one times, “crowd” forty-nine, “multitude” twenty, and “throng” nineteen. Crowds of people are frequently compared to a liquid, flowing in unison. At the beginning of the novel, when Adrian and the royal family visits Cumberland, Lionel describes how “Every inhabitant of the most miserable cottage, went to swell the stream of population that poured forth to meet him” (17). Similarly, when Raymond’s early victories in Greece are described, we learn that “whole towns poured forth their population to meet him” (31); later, after Raymond’s second venture for Greece, the “whole city poured at the gate […] towards the harbor” to meet their dying champion (133). As the crowd rushes to the sea, the comparison between the two is made quite explicit: “we arrived at the harbour; it was agitated by the outward swell of the sea; the beach, as far could be discerned, was covered by a moving multitude, which, urged by those behind toward the sea, again rushed back as the heavy waves with sullen roar burst close to them” (134). And, like the sea, the collective force poses a danger: Lionel is worried that the “eager crowd” will “pressure” the ailing Raymond on his landing. But instead “a hollow murmur, akin to the roaring of the near waves, went through the multitude; they fell back as the carriage advanced […] The sound of the waves was left behind; that of the multitude continued at intervals, suppressed and hoarse…” (134–35). This imagery persists across the novel; near the end, Lionel laments the loss of a humanity that, “like a flood, had once spread over and possessed the whole earth,” starting as a “streamlet” from Ararat, to become a river sweeping towards the “absorbing ocean”—and that now had “dried up” at the source (322). Such passages and imagery ask us to see humanity as a biological mass, while also closely associating humans with the earthly and natural. Before the human “stream” dries up, however, it floods England. As those fleeing the plague relocate, they contribute to a temporary state of overpopulation in England: “The English, whether travellers or residents, came pouring in one great revulsive stream, back on their own country; and with them crowds of Italians and Spaniards. Our little island was filled even to bursting” (186). Thus, although Shelley might object to Malthus’s predictions in some ways, in others, she quite clearly draws on his ideas. Much like Malthus, Lionel notes the economic and spatial consequences of this “revulsive stream,” as the country loses the overflow space previously provided by the colonies: “there were no means of employing the idle, or of sending any overplus of population out of the country. Even the source of colonies was dried up, for in New Holland, Van Diemen’s Land, and the Cape of Good Hope, plague raged” (185). And while, later, the survivors will have more resources than they need, in the interim both disease and famine strike, echoing Malthus’s attention to “checks” on population: “…the disease gained virulence, while starvation did its accustomed work. Thousands died unlamented…” (185).12 Despite these passages that suggest Shelley found some common ground with Malthus, I agree with other critics, including Cameron and Scott, that Shelley ultimately objects to much of his argument. The most profound, if repressed, objection that Shelley makes—which seems strangely to have been left out of these critical discussions—is in her demographic estimations of the twenty-first century. In 1801, England counted a population of 8.9 million; by 1901, this number had grown to over 32 million (Daly 2). Given that Shelley was living through and experiencing this demographic transition, that in 1821 the population was nearly twelve million, and that she was familiar with Malthus’s argument, it becomes entirely puzzling why at no time The Last Man references humans en masse beyond “thousands”; the largest groups referenced are in the “tens of thousands” or “hundreds of thousands.” We never obtain a clearer sense of how many people exist until the depopulation narrative is quite far gone—when we learn that the band of survivors consists of 1400, and then 80, and, by the time they reach Jura, a mere 50 (321, 325). Shelley does, however, use the word “millions” twice in reference to time, e.g., “millions of generations of extinct men” and “millions of calculated years” (359, 238). The third and final use of the word comes when Lionel considers, in the concluding pages, how he is like and unlike Robinson Crusoe: he is in fact lonelier because he has no hope of finding other humans, even though the entire produce of man’s work is now at his disposal—“If I turned my steps from the near barren scene, and entered any of the earth’s million cities, I should find their wealth stored up for my accommodation” (349). With this passage the narrative finally if implicitly suggests the scale of human habitation in the late twenty-first century: a million cities would presumably mean many millions (or more) of inhabitants. The above passage also dramatically reverses Malthus’s calculus: now humans are wanted, while the wealth, goods, etc. of the earth are in superabundance. As Lionel reflects on humanity’s dwindling numbers, he claims that the individual rises in value as humanity is thinned—as if such calculations responded to supply and demand in a similarly straightforward way. He reflects that “man had become a creature of price; the life of one of them was of more worth than the so called treasures of kings” (205). Later, he returns to this thought: “Now each life was a gem, each human breathing form of far, O! far more worth than subtlest imagery of sculptured stone […] but man, in himself weak, yet more powerful in congregated numbers than wind or ocean; man, the queller of the elements, the lord of created nature, the peer of demi-gods, existed no longer” (253). As much as this passage asserts the value of the individual, however, it emphasizes and celebrates the much greater power of a large population. At the same time, and despite the fact that Shelley’s novel does not implicate humans in the climate change that enables the catastrophic plague, such passages suggest a certain fraught power dynamic between nature and the humans that act as its “queller” and “lord.” Indeed, in the novel’s depictions of how animal and plant life ostentatiously take over and flourish in formerly domesticated spaces, we might read an implicit zero-sum game between nature and humanity. This is also an idea implicit but often repressed in much of our contemporary environmental discourse. As Alan Mikhail has recently observed, when we track historical carbon levels next to population, we confront uncomfortable facts—like the significant carbon-low in 1610, which is due to the loss of 90% of the human population in the Americas. The implications of this argument, Mikhail writes, “which pits human population numbers against CO2 numbers, making clear that genocide is good for climate, are scary indeed and tap into long-vexed arguments over the earth’s carrying capacity” (222). Such calculations must of course take overconsumption into account as well as overpopulation. But as Dipesh Chakrabarty has succinctly put it, “Population is often the elephant in the room in discussions of climate change” (11). In fact, as Clark points out, since the turn of the century, emission reduction measures have been “outstripped” by economic and population growth. Yet, “addressing population growth is not part of any proposed mitigation strategy in the IPCC, even though other lifestyle and behavioral changes are discussed. It is not clear whether this is because it is seen as not amenable to policy intervention, or that the topic is simply too politically and culturally toxic to touch—it simply disappears from the report” (81). While we find uncanny parallels in the fears over populations and consumption patterns between the Romantic era and our own, we now have much more evidence for how, exactly, our numbers and living practices impact an environment that would not only get along quite well without us, but would absolutely thrive. Read in this way, the “last man” genre—and its echo in our own contemporary obsession with the many novels, films, and television series, from The Walking Dead to Interstellar, that fantasize about partly or entirely wiping out human civilization—seems interested in playing out a repressed competition between humans and the natural world. I see a number of major thematic strands connecting the Romantic-era version and our own, from an interest in returning to a sustainable, pastoral existence, to imagining a knowable human community where individuals profoundly matter. As the plague progresses in Shelley’s novel and the population dwindles from 1400 to a mere three, the scale of the novel’s conflicts contracts. In the first half of the narrative, the webs of trade and empire, of politics and international relations, are complex and abstract. But in the latter half, the scale of human concerns shrinks along with the population, resulting in very concrete (if sometimes unrealistic) visions of self-sufficiency, like Idris’s fantasy of how her family will live on as an isolated remnant: “the simple manners of our little tribe, and of the patriarchal brotherhood of love […] would survive the ruins of the populous nations which had lately existed” (272). In mythologizing such isolated self-sufficiency, these visions ignore the webs of dependencies that make up human society as well as the environment. The danger of these narratives today—even if they don’t inspire actual survivalists and “preppers”—is that they further repress the actual state of the relationship between human populations and the wider environment. Far from going extinct ourselves, we are directly and indirectly hastening the extinction of many other life forms through both our consumption patterns and our sheer numbers. As Jan Zalasiewicz has summed up, drawing on Vaclav Smil’s work, Considered simply as body mass […] we now bulk up to about a third of terrestrial vertebrate body mass on Earth. Most of the other two-thirds, by the same measure, comprise what we keep to eat: cows, pigs, sheep and such. Something under 5% and perhaps as little as 3%, is now made of the genuinely wild animals—the cheetahs, elephants, antelopes and the like. (24)13 Why, when faced with the staggering adaptive success of humans and our continually rising numbers, have we often repressed or suspended this knowledge in order to imagine instead a scenario where humans face rapid depopulation or even extinction? To be fair, politically and ecologically sound reasons for imagining the extinction or near extinction of humans exist alongside rampant population growth. And, as critics including Ursula Heise and Samantha Morgan have explored, twentieth-century literature and film have in fact confronted the question of overpopulation in straightforward ways. As Heise argues, literary portrayals of overpopulation were often quite on the nose in the 1960s and 70s—imagining, for example, apocalyptically overcrowded cities—while many later texts zoomed out to “consider population growth as one factor in a whole complex of environmental, social, and political problems such as pollution, climate change, social inequality, uneven access to power, and international competition and conflict” (12). But if we situate “last man” and depopulation narratives alongside and as part of this history of overpopulation narratives, we can see how both confront questions about the balance of human populations and the environment. Indeed, the entire genre of apocalyptic zombie narratives is as interested in visually gesturing to overpopulation as they are in narrating depopulation: zombies, particularly the slow-moving variety popularized by George Romero and now Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, are less dangerous singly than en masse—and productions with generous budgets delight in imagining “herds” or, in World War Z, piles, of zombified humanity. Some versions, like the Walking Dead spin-off Fear the Walking Dead, have made the zero-sum game between polluting human populations and the environment explicit: in Fear, characters reflect that the “perk of the apocalypse” is “No planes. No noise pollution. No smog. Just stars,” concluding that “we definitely stopped the climate crisis” (“We All Fall Down”). As ecocriticism continues to turn an eye to the past to better understand how we reached this critical point, what practices and mindsets initiated and maintained the status quo, and even, perhaps, lessons for dismantling it, we will continue to find such emergent and uncanny effects. Reading for the environmental uncanny (and what is repressed or elided) both recognizes and uses the urgency of our present moment. As Wood argues, It is because of the unprecedented threat of current global warming, for which no historical analogies are truly apt, that neither mere ‘awareness’ nor cautionary tales are adequate to the moment. For their part, eco-historians must develop a wholly new historiography: one in which the relative success or failure of human dwelling in the ecosystems of the world is not the setting of the stage, but the point of the story itself. (7) Such an approach demands a renewed attention to setting, and to human as well as natural agency. Reading for the environmental or eco-historical uncanny demands this sort of attention, while also acknowledging how our environmental context has inspired our reading in the first place. After arguing that The Last Man evokes just such an uncanny reading experience, I am tempted to conclude that these effects point us to ideas about human control that are all too familiar—such as Raymond’s confident anthropocentrism, seeing the “machinery” of society and the “earth […] spread out as an highway for him” (35). Or that we might find hope in reviving a worldview that has been buried, like Adrian’s, which “own[s] affinity not only with mankind, but all nature” (35). Instead, I want to conclude by drawing attention to a different sort of “apt” in ecocriticism: one that, rather than being true, realistic, or historically accurate, instead draws on our sense of uncertainty, misrecognition, and difference-in-familiarity. This finds a parallel in what we might experience as an environmental uncanny in our own moment, as we are structurally and financially compelled to continue burning fossil fuels, even as news of extreme weather, burning forests, and melting ice returns over and over to haunt our newsfeeds. The environmental uncanny asks us to pay attention to how we confront both overwhelming information about climate change and overwhelming uncertainty as to how much agency we have as individuals, as nations, and as a species—particularly in the face of widespread, politicized repression of the scientific fact of anthropomorphic climate change. Footnotes 1 Heidi Scott has made the case for the importance of the Year without a Summer for both Frankenstein and The Last Man in Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century (2014). 2 For example, Kate Rigby has argued that Shelley’s novel depicts a “scenario of socioculturally intensified vulnerability to a lethal pandemic” (52). Other recent examples include Lauren Cameron’s discussion of how The Last Man reflects on discoveries about extinction and the fossil record in “Questioning Agency: Dehumanizing Sustainability in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man” and Olivia Murphy’s “Apocalypse Not Quite: Romanticism and the Post-human World,” both in Romantic Sustainability: Endurance and the Natural World, 1780-1830 (2015). Melissa Bailes addresses the novel’s interest in psychological as well as natural catastrophe in “The Psychologization of Geological Catastrophe in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” 3 It is worth noting that, in making this argument, Bergthaller is careful to distinguish between ecocriticism and environmental history. 4 For more on the genre’s use of religious explanations, see Morton D. Paley’s “Mary Shelley's The Last Man: Apocalypse without Millennium.” The haunting quality that Shelley achieves by drawing on supernatural and religious allusions without fully committing to them contributes to the uncanny effect of this novel. As Nicholas Royle notes, it is “one of the unstated assumptions of Freud’s essay that the uncanny is to be theorized in non-religious terms” (20). 5 As Serpil Oppermann has observed, ecocritism has traditionally been a field of inquiry where “realist epistemology and realist texts are assigned high priority” (162). In making this point, Oppermann draws on Susie O’Brien’s “‘Back to the World’: Reading Ecocriticism in a Postcolonial Context.” 6 In theorizing the phenomenon of hailing, Ferguson explores how D. A. Miller’s “too close” reading—feeling “almost personally hailed” by the shot of Hitchcock in front of Miller’s Music Store in Carousel—involves “deleting that ‘almost’ and insisting on the importance of the ways in which a reader or a viewer is ‘personally hailed,’ hailed by elements of a description that could not have been put there with the aim of being meaningful to him because the novel or the film had no prior knowledge that he would exist […] Too close reading sees in criticism, in novels, in films the ways in which they were already speaking Miller’s language, were already predicting a history of the future, and of not just any future but of his” (538–39). Reading texts like The Last Man in the context of anthropogenic climate change, we experience a similar, but collective, sort of environmental hailing. 7 For another recent reading of how the human world—and specifically technology—creates an uncanny effect, see Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “Mind the Gap: Spiritualism and the Infrastructural Uncanny.” 8 Royle raises the interesting question of how Freud could leave déjà vu out of his essay, considering that déjà vu was a concept he had theorized earlier in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life as something “we must […] include in the category of the miraculous and the uncanny” (qtd in Royle, 178). 9 Recent research—published in Nature in 2016—by Patrick J. Egan and Megan Mullin has found that, as climate change unfolds, Americans are experiencing a temporary improvement in local weather conditions, complicating perceptions of and responses to this crisis. 10 For further work on the realistic representation of the plague in The Last Man, see Anne McWhir, who has explored Shelley’s use and critique of Romantic-era theories of disease in depth in “Mary Shelley’s Anti-Contagionism: The Last Man as ‘Fatal Narrative.’” Siobhan Carroll has written about the related idea of the atmosphere and its global nature in The Last Man in her essay “Mary Shelley’s Global Atmosphere.” 11 Charlotte Sussman is similarly attentive to such passages in her essay “‘Islanded in the World’: Cultural Memory and Human Mobility in The Last Man.” As she argues, in Shelley’s novel “‘[M]an, the individual’ is simply another animal; man ‘the lord of created nature’ can only exist in numbers larger than three” (289). 12 Malthus similarly describes the order in which calamities strike: “…sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. 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TI - The Environmental Uncanny: Imagining the Anthropocene in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isz019
DA - 2019-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-environmental-uncanny-imagining-the-anthropocene-in-mary-shelley-s-lVBmtsDesy
SP - 1062
EP - 1083
VL - 26
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -