ABSTRACT
Mary Shelley is tasked with osculation as the means of solidifying family bonds. Lionel Verney’s act of osculation honors his living friend and is far more hopeful and future-oriented. The faithful female friendship at the heart of Lodore is a continuation of the male friendship romanticized in The Last Man, and unsurprisingly, Shelley uses another form of osculation – tree-kissing – to materialize the queer ecology, or the interface between sex and nature, coursing through her fiction. The chapter explores main point to keep in mind is that earth-kissing is the culmination of feeling perverse, or feeling the wildness and the haptic ecology. Eros and environment are interdependent in Shelley’s fiction, which explains why the climactic moment is also a climatic one: at this point in The Last Man, unseasonably warm weather has brought pressure to bear on the last man’s status as a man.
