Contagious Sympathies in The Last Man

In The Last Man, Mary Shelley relies on theories of Romantic medicine that give her an unconventional way to conceptualize and narrate time and space. For the Romantics, organs, bodies, and communities were all intimately connected through "sympathy." The Last Man carefully employs the connection between biological sympathy and contagious disease to consider how suffering inhabits space. Lionel's individual suffering intertwines with the global suffering from the fictional plague of the novel, which threatens the boundaries of both Europe and the white, European body much as its non-fictional counterpart, cholera, does. As time and history grind to a halt, space is disconcertingly reconfigured by shrinking geographical distances between Black and white bodies, which threatens the cohesion of white identity even as it reinforces its sovereignty.