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The Problem of Immunity in The Last Man
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 47, Number 4, Autumn 2007
- pp. 825-846
- 10.1353/sel.2007.0042
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay challenges recent explanations of the uniquely robust immunology of Lionel Verney, narrator of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. Most readers point to Lionel’s encounter with a dying black man as the source of his immunity to the plague that decimates the rest of humanity in the twilight of the twenty-first century. Because this explanation is inconsistent with the plague’s epidemiology, this paper seeks alternate reasons for Lionel’s resilience and reads Lionel’s encounter with the black man as a moment in which the novel’s models of universal compassion collapse in the face of abject suffering and racial alterity.