Posthuman Ecology and Immersive Materiality in M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud

M.P. Shiel's novel The Purple Cloud (1901) spectacularly dramatizes the material processes of becoming. Its protagonist, Adam Jeffson, travels an earth ravaged by poisonous gas as a Last Man figure, setting fire to cities and reflecting on a physical world no longer oriented toward the species. Taking up contemporary discourses concerning ecology and extinction, the novel points to the regenerative potential of catastrophe. The ecological rather than the eschatological matters most; it is not a matter of being last but of becoming new.

Ecological imagery charges the novel's recurring posthuman fantasies. The dialogical give-and-take between object/subject, human/non-human, and body/world draws attention to the relatability between the unbounded individual self and the immense external world. This brand of posthumanism stems from the ecological, requiring deep observations of radical ontology within an expansive network of affinities and kinships. These visions depict the immediate experience of becoming from first-person accounts of the phenomenological body, thereby providing access to the inner phenomena of a subject who experiences the linked states of interconnected biota and matter.

However,The Purple Cloud also demonstrates the limits of posthumanism as evidenced by Jeffson's misogynist and xenophobic musings on a remodelled species. This failure to absolutely embrace the radical ontology of becoming establishes the persistence of humanist thinking in the period's evolutionary and ecological imaginaries, as well as the period's fraught relationship to the prospect of posthumanism due to competing anthropocentric and materialist frameworks.