Abstract
Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man can be read as a satire of nineteenth-century British politics. Shelley uses her characters’ ambiguous animality to satirize a patriarchal political order from a feminist perspective and the discourse of species to illustrate a lack in the rights of man. In Shelley’s as in her mother Mary Wollstonecraft’s work, nonhuman animals highlight the invisible gaps produced within humanist rights discourse and call its model of sovereignty into crisis. Shelley’s novel, in its testing of Enlightenment theories of politics through the figure of the animal, develops a satirical deconstructive analysis of women’s experience, one that collapses the categories of sovereign, beast, woman, and criminal.
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Notes
- 1.
Shelley, The Last Man, 18. Further references to this edition will be given parenthetically, in-text.
- 2.
Ryan, Stalin, 50.
- 3.
Williams, Mary Shelley’s bestiary; Mussgnug, Naturalizing apocalypse; Haslanger, The last animal; and Washington, Romantic Revelations, 66–99.
- 4.
Knight, Literature of Satire, 47.
- 5.
Carman, Radical Ecology, 22.
- 6.
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 243–57.
- 7.
Foucault, Security, 125–30.
- 8.
Wadiwel, Biopolitics, 80.
- 9.
Chatterjee, Our bodies, 37.
- 10.
Haslanger, The Last animal, 667; Washington, Romantic Revelations, 77.
- 11.
Shelley, The Last Man, 242, 268.
- 12.
Washington, Romantic Revelations, 66–67.
- 13.
Ryan, Stalin, 50–51.
- 14.
Derrida, The Beast & The Sovereign, 17.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid., 65, 32.
- 18.
Still, Derrida and Other Animals, 306.
- 19.
Hunt, Of whom, 83.
- 20.
Klemann, How to think, 1.
- 21.
Adams, Sexual Politics, 129–31; Botting, Mary Shelley, 166–70.
- 22.
Singer, All animals, 51–52.
- 23.
Deutscher, Sexual immunities, 93.
- 24.
Carman, Radical Ecology, 158.
- 25.
Deutscher, Sexual immunities, 78.
- 26.
Derrida, The Beast & The Sovereign, 6.
- 27.
Wollstonecraft, Wrongs, 117.
- 28.
Quoted in Derrida, The Beast & The Sovereign, 11.
- 29.
Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, 9.
- 30.
Singer, It’s the end, 217.
- 31.
Singer, The Usual Suspects.
- 32.
Wollstonecraft, A Vindication, 76.
- 33.
Foucault, Security, 122–30.
- 34.
Wollstonecraft, A Vindication, 114.
- 35.
Hammer, The world, 39.
- 36.
Williams, Mary Shelley’s bestiary, 139.
- 37.
Schmitt, The Concept; Agamben, Homo Sacer, 15–67.
- 38.
Doody, Philosophy, 153–54.
- 39.
Matz, Satire, 139.
- 40.
Sigler, Fracture Feminism, 237.
- 41.
Williams, Mary Shelley’s bestiary, 143; Haslanger, The last animal, 668.
- 42.
See also Chatterjee, Our bodies.
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Sigler, D. (2023). The Lacking Satirical Animals of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. In: McKay, R., McHugh, S. (eds) Animal Satire. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_10
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