Suzanne Nalbantian has noted how a “remembering human subject” is recognisable throughout Western literary history. The connection between human memory and human identity was cemented in the long eighteenth century, with John Locke suggesting that “personal identity” depends on how far “any intelligent being can repeat the idea of any past action with the same consciousness it had of it at first.” The emphasis on “personal” memory highlights an increasing attention to the experience of the individual human subject. This “remembering human subject” is also frequently characterised by a forgetfulness of animal experience. In the case of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the ‘re-membering’ human subject is notably distinguished by his anthropocentric forgetfulness. While it is Victor Frankenstein who literally re-members the bodies of both human and non-human animals into not quite human form, it is the creature himself who remembers these animals through his own consciousness. A conflict between Victor’s forgetfulness and the creature’s remembering thus forms a central tension of the novel. Indeed, close scrutiny of Shelley’s corpus reveals an almost ever-present dialectic between forgotten and remembered animals. Throughout her writing, human society often appears to be premised on an apparently necessary and inevitable forgetting of animal experience. Unbidden memories of animals serve as crucial interruptive moments, briefly disrupting social frameworks and narrative trajectories. 

 

This dialectic between memory and forgetfulness reaches a critical juncture in Shelley’s future-oriented novel, The Last Man. Highlighting how recent cognitive research has noted a deep connection between thinking about the future and thinking about the past, Alan Richardson points out that a recognition of the “close alliance between memory and imagination” was a “key element” of eighteenth-century thought. The Last Man is a prophesy about the future narrated in the past tense. As the human population is destroyed by an unnamed plague, animal memories continuously interrupt the narrative, briefly surfacing only to be forgotten again shortly afterwards. This ensures a constant reassessment of different pathways, with the novel’s prophetic quality allowing for the possibility of alternative futures. By describing a future prophesy as if it has already happened, Shelley literalises the connection between memory and imagination, making the line between them difficult to decipher. Sarah Eron has noted how eighteenth-century novelists examine how memory can be used to both “change our stories of the past” and “change present circumstances.” In The Last Man, Shelley also uses memory to change the future. Using Frankenstein and The Last Man as case studies, this paper considers anxieties about the role of memory in the construction of human identity, exploring how animal memories can disrupt narratives in order to indicate alternative ways forward.