The Psychologization of Geological Catastrophe in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

In the late eighteenth century, the French geologist, Georges Cuvier, employed fossil studies to prove the extinction of certain species, attributing their annihilation to past, sudden changes on the surface of the globe. I argue that Mary Shelley’s third novel, The Last Man (1826), explores various contemporary geological ideas about what caused past species extinctions, ultimately privileging her theory of plague. To support this notion, Shelley adopts Cuvier’s hypothesis of an enervating earth, portraying anti-climatic natural disasters, while also radically shifting geological catastrophism into the psychological “world” of the individual.