Plague and the Politics of Sisterhood: Traces of Antigone in Mary Shelley's The Last Man

This essay explores the ways that Mary Shelley's 1826 apocalyptic novel The Last Man links the affective and ritualistic regulation of grief to the politics of epidemic disease through reference to Antigone. To understand Shelley's plague as an alternative vision for politics, this essay examines the relationship between the ancient heroine as an emblematic sister and nineteenth-century constructions of revolutionary politics as a disease. Historically, the questions the play poses about women's place in political life reflect the contradictions of a society in which women continued to be relegated to the roles of wife and mother even as the calls of liberté, égalité, fraternité reshaped Europe. For the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, questions of gender equality haunt Shelley's depictions of political life founded on brotherhood. The name for this spectral feminine force is sister. At the same time, conservative anxieties about political change drew on medical theories to link the promise of equality between men, and even between men and women, to the transmission of disease. The contaminations of republicanism figured as “pestilence” also entailed fears about women moving from the domestic space into political life, becoming, as it were, the spectral sisters who were at once outside politics proper and, like Antigone, a threat to political authority. Shelley's appropriation of Antigone links this early nineteenth-century politics of sisterhood—the repressed corollary to fraternity—to representations of disease. By tracking allusions to Antigone in The Last Man, the essay traces the ways that Shelley imagines politics in terms of sisters and, by the end of the novel, rewrites the politics of sisterhood as a posthuman network of relationships. In this way, Shelley's novel reaches for an ethic that resonates with our own time: Grief in the face of mass death becomes the foundation for understanding the shared precarity of living.