Sublimating an Apocalypse: An Exploration of Anxiety, Authorship, and Feminist Theory in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

• Author: Olivia Zolciak
• Date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12254
• Published date: 01 November 2018

Sublimating an Apocalypse: An Exploration

of Anxiety, Authorship, and Feminist

Theory in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

By Olivia ZOlciak*

abstract. Mary Shelley was an early feminist writer, but she has not been

recognized as such because of profound misinterpretation of her final

novel, The Last Man. Set in the years 2090–2100, the novel is about a

plague that obliterates humanity aside from the protagonist, Lionel

Verney. As his family and friends perish, Verney journeys alone, and

begins to experience psychological and literary anxiety. The novel failed

within the conventions of female romance novels of the early 19th century,

a category in which it is still often pigeon-holed. But as the first modern

work of apocalyptic fiction, which created a genre now dominated by

Stephen King, it was a huge success, for which Mary Shelley is seldom

credited. By critically analyzing the novel’s treatment of anxiety of illness

and authorship in terms of psychoanalytic theory and juxtaposing these

concepts with a long-standing feminist approach, this article suggests that

Mary Shelley’s literary innovations will remain influential in the

continuously growing genre of post-apocalyptic literature in the 20th and

21st centuries. Thematically, the novel also presents a new feminist vision

of history, a millennial conflict that requires us to look forward and

backward simultaneously. It is also about new ways of recognizing the

authority of the female voice in that history, which is normally displaced

by the insistence on male authority that comes from historical lineage.

The Last Man contests that lineage by showing how apocalyptic narratives

can reframe our sense of time and authority.

Introduct ion

Mary Shelley’s final novel, The Last Man (1826), has had a lasting influ-

ence on modern fiction, but her contribution has largely gone unno-

ticed. More importantly, her novel raised important questions about

American Jour nal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 5 (Novembe r, 2018).

DOI: 10 .1111/ajes.1225 4

© 2018 American Journ al of Economics and Sociology, Inc

*Correspondence spec ialist and teacher of fi rst-year composition at Bowling Green

State University (BGSU). MA in L iterary and Textual Studies from BGSU i n 2017. Email:

obiggin@yahoo.com

1244 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

how authors transform personal tragedy into art and how a patriarchal

history has been used to silence women’s voices. Categorized as a

failed Romantic tale, these critical questions have been lost in literary

theory. By retrieving The Last Man from the wasteland to which it has

been consigned by critics and recognizing it as the first modern apoc-

alyptic fiction, it can be read as an innovative piece of literature that

has yet to receive the recognition it deserves.

Before we can examine the important insights Mary Shelley offered

in her final novel, we need first to understand how those insights have

been buried under the weight of literary criticism. For an answer, we

turn to an ongoing discussion about authorship and the anxieties

that relate to it. This has been an important issue in feminist literary

criticism because of the way female authors have been understood to

respond to anxiety. That interpretation of female authorship has, in

turn, been used to relegate The Last Man to a position of obscurity.

Harold Bloom’s (1973) landmark book The Anxiety of Influence

provides a useful starting point in understanding this controversy.

Bloom’s theory provides an insightful study of the relationship be-

tween tradition and the individual artist. Specifically, he explores the

tendency of 19th-century Romantic writers to reproduce the work of

strong poets of the past. His diagnosis includes the solution that for

writers’ voices to be heard, they must exercise a successful misread-

ing of their precursors. In Bloom’s view, awareness of this process

may allow readers to explore the precursor in terms of the later poet,

rather than merely compare the present to a conception of a revo-

lutionary past. He emphasizes that the anxiety of influence cannot

be avoided; however, he suggests that “strong poets” may be able to

overcome their anxiety. Ultimately, there is a constant battle to sepa-

rate tradition from the individual artist, and this is particularly relevant

to critics of 19th-century literature, who sometimes fail to see beyond

the precursor’s pen.

Criticizing the dominant patriarchal slant in Bloom’s The Anxiety

of Influence, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979) theorize in their

revolutionary book The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer

and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, that female authors

have to overcome a unique form of anxiety. Because Bloom’s theory

emphasized masculine precursors, Gilbert and Gubar (1979: 93) point

1245Sublimating an Apocalypse

out that a female author experiences “a radical fear that she cannot

create, that because she can never become a ‘precursor’ the act of writ-

ing will isolate or destroy her.” Though Gilbert and Gubar’s persuasive

theory made history in feminist literary theory, female authorial anx-

iety of influence is undeniably under-scrutinized. Unfortunately, the

anxiety of influence continues to serve as one of our only tools in ana-

lyzing the works of many female authors, proving that feminist theory

is desperately underdeveloped. Despite being outdated, the primary

weakness of Gilbert and Gubar’s approach is that it encourages us to

pity influential female writers rather than respect their achievements.

The texts of Bloom and of Gilbert and Gubar are relevant in con-

junction with exploring anxiety, psychoanalysis, and authorship in

Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, which work manifests far more strength

than anxiety. As the first novel published after the death of her hus-

band, The Last Man has been criticized by scholars, primarily by

feminist literary scholars, since the 1960s. Harping on Shelley’s anx-

ieties, scholarly readings of the novel tend to marginalize Shelley as

an innovative, influential author. The Last Man attempts to comment

on a biographical sketch of her late husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley,

a conflicted lineage and Romantic inheritance, a millennial conflict

about the need to look forward and backward simultaneously, and

a single author’s desire to locate her writing in a long classical his-

tory. Shelley’s text is a categorical failure of the gothic genre, yet it is

emblematic of post-apocalyptic, or dystopian, literature. Deriving from

the Old Testament of the Bible, apocalyptic literature uses destruction

and death as a symbol of how societal problems can be resolved,

but it also emphasizes the personal anxieties that are projected and

transcribed through an intensified, exaggerated reality. Scholars often

criticize Shelley’s book through the lens of feminist theory and based

on historical—both political and personal—contexts. This leads most

scholarship to take an underdeveloped feminist approach to Shelley’s

writing, which is rooted in the overly “sympathetic” and insufficiently

respectful approach of Gilbert and Gubar.

Contemporary horror fiction is best characterized by one of its lead-

ing writers, Stephen King. With a vast imagination to create monstrous

plots and an exceptional understanding of his readership, Stephen

King is highly regarded as one of the best (and certainly most popular)