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[2]Three essays from this text deal explicitly with The Last Man. These are Morton Paley's "The Last Man: Apocalypse without Millennium" (107-123), Barbara Johnson's, "The Last Man" (258-266), and Audrey A. Fisch's, "Plaguing Politics: AIDS, Deconstruction, and The Last Man" (267-286).
[3]See Paley, Fisch, and Johnson, The Other Mary Shelley.
[4]In charting this part of Mary Shelley's biographical history, I am basing my references on Muriel Sparks's book Mary Shelley.
[5]Mellor elaborates on Mary Shelley's grief over the loss of her children in her chapter on this novel in Mary Shelley entitled "Love, Guilt, and Reparation: The Last Man." Mellor discusses how Shelley struggles in The Last Man between her idealization of Shelley and her feelings of anger and resentment for his failure to provide the family with adequate housing and health care. See pp. 141-148.
[6]Muriel Spark believes that Mary Shelley is projecting herself onto the figure of Lionel Verney, as Verney's idealization reflects Mary's own idealization of Percy. Anne Mellor finds that both the figure of Perdita, with her passion for her husband, and Idris, as the ideal mother, serving as representations of Mary Shelley in the text. Morton Paley views Shelley as both Perdita, in which Shelley realizes her fantasy of marrying Byron, and as Verney, as it is Verney whose voice narrates the novel.
[7]Anne Mellor, in Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, sees the plague as Shelley's parody of Edmund Burke's theory of the body politic as a natural organism. In The Last Man, the body politic is a body that decays, a diseased body, as Mellor states, "if society is an organism, then it is subject to disease" (163). Morton Paley describes the plague as the ultimate symbol of the ineffectualness of Romantic idealism and imagination. Both Barbara Johnson and Audrey Fisch view this epidemic as deconstructing masculine, hegemonic institutions, whether masculine Romantic imagination or patriarchal forms of government. Fisch's essay takes on a postcolonial view of the novel in that she sees the plague as a subversion of Western European attitudes which see the East (the place in the novel where the plague begins) and other "colonial" sites as Other. The plague dismantles the boundaries between Other and self, between the "we" and the "they", as everyone becomes equal in the face of the plague. The plague destroys all humanity, not just an "othered" minority.
[8] See Paley, 110.
[9]Mellor suggest that Shelley may be critiquing Percy Shelley's inherently self-centered pursuit of idealistic goals, goals whose pursuit left damaging effects on their domestic community. Mary Shelley, 149-50.