Set in a plague-ravaged twenty-first-century world, Mary Shelley’s three-volume novel The Last Man (1826) narrates the tragic tale of the protagonist, Lionel Verney, and his network of friends and family as they battle a deadly pathogen that engulfs the planet. The novel’s shifting interactions between human beings and Mother Earth, in which the apparently powerless natural world eventually becomes the planet’s domineering force, will be analysed in depth in this ecocritical reading of Shelley’s text, with aid from the scholarly works of Barbara Johnson, Morton Paley, and Simon Estok. The idea that a pandemic can cause armageddon – a very palpable reality in this post-COVID-19 world – makes a novel like The Last Man quite prescient. Further, this article will explore how Shelley writes her life into the formulation of the plot of The Last Man through a biographical reading of the text. Finally, this study will employ the theories propounded by noted critics like Val Plumwood, Karren Warren, and Vandana Shiva to present an ecofeminist reading of the text, through close analysis of the diverse cast of male and female characters, particularly Lionel Verney and the earth mother herself, who emerges as an ecofeminist all-powerful creation in Mary Shelley’s nonpareil dystopian novel.
Dipyaman Bhowmick (Mon,) studied this question.