The Last Man and the Language of the Heart

In an essay on the roles of authors in their books, Mary Shelley mused that those who allow their own personalities to appear in their works 'turn to the human heart as the undiscovered country'. Shelley's own novel The Last Man offers a sustained meditation on the motif of 'the country of the human heart'. Its first sentence is, 'I am the native of a sea-surrounded nook, a cloud-enshadowed land, which, when the surface of the globe, with its shoreless ocean and trackless continents, presents itself to my mind, appears only as an inconsiderable speck in the immense whole; and yet, when balanced in the scale of mental power, far outweighed countries of larger extent and more numerous population'. The narrator is the eponymous hero Lionel Verney, whose situation as the sole and, in his own eyes, the least interesting survivor of a group of brilliant and heroic friends exactly paralleled Mary Shelley's own; moreover, as the narrative unfolds, it becomes apparent that Adrian, the delicate, democratic intellectual, is modelled directly on Percy Shelley, and that the fickle, fiery, ambitious, and much-travelled Raymond is a portrait of Byron. To that extent, it obviously is the territory of Shelley's own heart which is being mapped. However, the language of this opening self-introduction does more than establish the beginnings of an identity for a particular character: it also sketches a more general cognitive process which involves experiencing the exterior world in terms of an interior mental map whose contours may often differ significantly from those of the 'real'. Richard S. Albright suggests that Certainly we are made privy to the interaction of two scales and modes of being here: the narrator's native land is small and insignificant in comparison with what he knows as the totality of external reality, but bulks large not only in his own mental landscape but, he seems to imply, in the mental realm in general. In part, this generalising effect may be attributed to the fact that at the time when he writes Verney is, to the best of his knowledge, the sole survivor of humanity; consequently, what Verney thinks is indeed, in this specialised sense, what the whole of humanity thinks. However, the implication also seems to be that Britain looms large in the mental sphere because its inhabitants are—or were—distinguished by their collective attainments and predominance in that sphere. This is in line with the emerging ideologies of colonialism and empire which find clear reflection elsewhere in the text, but it also introduces us to an equally insistent feature of the novel, a stress on the power of the mind and on the subjectivity of perception. This idea is further developed in the lines which immediately follow. Verney goes on to gloss his own remark with the assurance that There are a number of things of interest here. The initial aphorism bears distinct signs of indebtedness to Hamlet's proposition that 'There's nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so'; its presence offers us a strong indication of the temper and mood of what is to follow. There are also some low-key but suggestively delineated gender relations sketched in this passage. Short as it is, it contains four separate vignettes of female subordination to the male. Nature, capitalised though she may be, is only man's minister; England (whose feminine gender is confirmed by the subsequent use of the pronoun 'she') is like a 'well-manned ship'—a passive, feminised vehicle for an expression of male power; the earth (again subsequently confirmed as feminine by the use of a pronoun) is 'subdued to fertility' by the labours …