Race, Vitalism, and the Contingency of Contagion in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

Abstract:Plague is a central, albeit strangely indeterminate feature of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. I argue that this indeterminacy is a crucial insight into the etiological and ethical questions at the novel’s core. Drawing from debates in early nineteenth-century medicine, Shelley’s representation of pandemic indexes the living body’s contingency—its indefinite yet continuous exposure to other potentially infectious bodies and environments. Shelley’s approach to contingent embodiment intervenes in the Romantic-era reception of vitalism, particularly Baruch Spinoza’s vitalist ontology of interconnection. Pandemic in The Last Man troubles the Romantic ethical idealization of interconnection, illustrating the potential for life’s contingencies to hurt connected bodies, and especially bodies of color, which are unrecognized by that ethical ideal and disproportionately exposed to sickness and pain.