Robert O’Kell. “The Autobiographical Nature of
Disraeli’s Early Fiction.” Nineteenth-Century
Fiction 31 (1976): 260-66.
- . . . It is clear now that Disraeli found in the issue of
Catholic Emancipation not just a topical setting to exploit,
but a disguise for his own ambiguous feelings about his
Jewish heritage. He had, in fact, abandoned the manuscript
of The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833) in order to
write The Young Duke in 1829, and this is strong
circumstantial evidence that his Jewish heritage was at
least at that time a preoccupation directly linked in his
thinking to the Catholic question. It is, however, a
comparison between Alroy (which Disraeli completed
after his defeat in the second Wycombe election, marked by
overt anti-Semitism) and Contarini Fleming that
confirms the importance of religious allegiance to the
problem of personal identity in the life and in the fiction.
Both novels, for example, reflect an initial isolation of
the hero, a sense of expectancy with which his maturity is
anticipated, and a sense of guilt which his actions create.
But in Alroy it is not very helpful to attempt to
make the distinction between explicit and implicit themes
that illuminates Contarini Fleming, for it is clear
throughout that the central theme is the ambiguity and
conflict in the hero’s character. In that regard
Alroy is the product of a greater degree of
conscious awareness of himself on the part of the author.
While in its fantasy structure the novel confirms the
pattern of early conflict and tension in the author’s
personality, it also proves that Disraeli was undertaking a
reassessment of his behavior which led him to renewed
attempts, in his fiction and in his political life, to
establish his sincerity.1
- In the person of the emotionally autobiographical David
Alroy, Disraeli creates a hero who is an ideal, noble, and
divinely chosen savior of his people and who essentially
represents a personal defiance of reality parallel to the
public postures his creator had recently adopted on the
hustings. But, just as there is a deep insecurity underneath
the bravado of Disraeli’s early political campaigns,
there is a fear of failure within the imaginative projection
of the ideal. Even before he is fully possessed of the
supernatural power of the messiah to free the Jewish people,
Alroy is twice tempted to abandon that pure identity. The
first entirely materialistic suggestion, that he be
disguised and pass as Lord Honain’s son and so acquire
great social success and power in the Moslem world, he
rejects to pursue the “eternal glory” of his
religious quest. But when, at the emotional climax of the
novel, disguised as a deaf-mute eunuch he meets the daughter
of the Caliph, the Princess Schirene, whose mother was a
Christian, Alroy’s feverish and agitated response
reveals the complexity of his character. Suddenly, seizing
the rosary given to him by the Princess and pressing it to
his lips, he soliloquizes:
The Spirit of
my dreams, she comes at last; the form for which I have
sighed and wept; the form which rose upon my radiant
vision when I shut my eyes against the jarring shadows
of this gloomy world.
Schirene! Schirene! here
in this solitude I pour to thee the passion long stored
up: the passion of my life, no common life, a life full
of deep feeling and creative thought. 0 beautiful! 0
more than beautiful! for thou to me art as a dream
unbroken: why art thou not mine? why lose a moment in
our glorious lives, and balk our destiny of half its
bliss?
Fool, fool,
hast thou forgotten? The rapture of a prisoner in his
cell, whose wild fancy for a moment belies his fetters!
The daughter of the Caliph and a Jew!
Give me my fathers’
sceptre.
A plague on
talismans! Oh! I need no inspiration but her memory, no
magic but her name. By heavens! I will enter this
glorious city a conqueror, or die.
Why, what is Life? for
meditation mingles ever with my passion: why, what is
Life? Throw accidents to the dogs, and tear off the
painted mask of false society! Here am I a hero; with a
mind that can devise all things, and a heart of
superhuman daring, with youth, with vigour, with a
glorious lineage, with a form that has made full many a
lovely maiden of our tribe droop her fair head . . . and
I am, nothing.
Out on
Society! ’twas not made for me. I’ll form my
own, and be the deity I sometimes feel.
(Pt5Ch6) This passage is the true climax of
the novel not simply because it reflects most intensely the
violent ambivalence in the hero’s mind about himself
and his situation, although it certainly does that. The
opening confession of a long felt need for erotic
fulfillment quickly gives way to an expression of social
alienation and failure which is then immediately followed by
a declaration of his talent and uniqueness. But this too is
an unstable mood quickly dissipated by the remembrance of
the racial stigma under which he lives with a sense of
degrading captivity. The frustration engendered by this
thought creates the impulse toward action: “Give me my
father’s sceptre.” But the romantic confidence
is subverted by the fear of failure implicit in the
alternative of dying rather than conquering, and the initial
defiance turns to despair at being “nothing.”
This conviction reflects the social impotence of the Jew so
aptly expressed in the metaphor of the captive and the
disguise of the eunuch. Thus the disparity between the
knowledge of innate superiority and the lack of recognition
breeds the final defiance of sublime egotism.
- All of this pattern suggests that the fascinating
correlation with events in Disraeli’s social and
political career is justified and that Alroy is
indeed part of the secret history of his feelings.2 The most important point
in the analysis of this particular passage, however,
concerns Alroy’s and, by implication, Disraeli’s
motivations. Significantly, the soliloquy occurs after Alroy
has found in the beauty of Schirene and the magnificence of
the Caliph’s palace concrete temptations more
persuasive than Honain’s abstractions. The tale at
this point embodies both literally and metaphorically the
impotence of the hero. Admittedly in the former case it is a
matter of disguise, but that fact in itself has thematic
significance. Disguise of the hero enters the novel in three
places. In the first, on the journey to Bagdad, it is a
matter of denying the fact that he is a Jew, which
ironically is a fact that would seem to endanger his life,
but actually saves him in two separate encounters. The
second incident is the visit to Schirene, the significance
of which has already been shown. The third action in
disguise is also a visit to the Princess, after Alroy has
conquered the “glorious city,” in which she
discovers that Honain’s slave is in fact a noble and
powerful prince. The act of disguise is thus associated with
the racial stigma and the impotence of Alroy’s
position at the moment of temptation, and the fantasy
structure works toward the revelation of his ideal, truly
heroic identity, as formulated in the penultimate paragraph
of this passage. The defiant resolutions thus show that this
“true” identity is for him no longer that of the
altruistic mystical messiah and that his deepest wish
fulfillment would be a worldly recognition of his personal power.
- The remainder of Alroy is a dramatization of the
conflict within the hero’s character as to which
identity is the stronger: the Prince of the Captivity on a
messianic mission to free his people, or the worldly prince
of “superhuman daring” in search of an empire
and its tribute and willing, if necessary, to adopt the
Romantic hubris of making himself a deity. The symbiotic
relationship between these identities is, however, the most
interesting aspect of that dramatization. When Alroy at the
height of his messianic power has completely conquered the
Moslem world Lord Honain comes to deliver formally the city
of Bagdad into his hands:
we must bow to your
decree with the humility that recognises superior force.
Yet we are not without hope. We cannot forget that it is
our good fortune not to be addressing a barbarous
chieftain, unable to sympathise with the claims of
civilisation, the creations of art, and the finer
impulses of humanity. We acknowledge your irresistible
power, but we dare to hope everything from a prince
whose genius all acknowledge and admire, who has spared
some portion of his youth from the cares of government
and the pursuits of arms to the ennobling claims of
learning, whose morality has been moulded by a pure and
sublime faith, and who draws his lineage from a sacred
and celebrated race, the unrivalled antiquity of which
even the Prophet acknowledges. (Pt7Ch19)
This is obviously an exhilarating fantasy for Disraeli as he
lived through the frustrations of political defeat in the
summer of 1832, for it clearly represents a transformation
of the hero’s most humiliating captivity into a
seemingly limitless victory. Interestingly, it blends the
purity of the religious role with a worldly recognition. But
significantly, although Honain (representing the
city’s inhabitants) has been forced to recognize
Alroy’s position by an overwhelming demonstration of
the latter’s superiority, his words of submission
stress the qualities of innate genius which bring forth the
admiration for the King’s nobility, manifested in
learning, morality, and the appreciation of the arts of
civilization. The sensitive reader can see, however, that
the fantasy is not the complete victory it might seem. The
concluding references to Alroy’s “pure and
sublime faith” and “sacred and celebrated
race” only serve to show how completely those
attributes have come to subserve the glorification of the
hero’s genius. That Disraeli clearly perceives his
hero’s sin of pride is, of course, borne out by the
remaining plot.
- The marriage of the King and the daughter of the Caliph
represents the dramatic climax of the novel. Although his
fall from grace has already been prefigured astrologically,
Alroy is now at the height of his fortunes, and, as the
lovers retire to consummate the marriage, the author
intrudes to point the moral: “Now what a glorious man
was David Alroy, lord of the mightiest empire in the world,
and wedded to the most beautiful princess, surrounded by a
prosperous and obedient people, guarded by invincible
armies, one on whom Earth showered all its fortune, and
Heaven all its favour; and all by the power of his own
genius!” (231). The abandonment of any pretense at
performing Hebrew rituals, the rumor of Alroy’s
attendance at a mosque, his alliance with his former
enemies, and, finally, his assumption of the title,
“Caliph,” and his public display of effete
decadence eventually provoke the faithful into a conspiracy
against the life of “this haughty stripling”
(237); Alroy’s empire is quickly consumed by rebellion
and he becomes the captive of his rival. In narrating these
events Disraeli’s chief concern is the portrayal of
the hero’s consciousness of what he has done. Indeed,
the conflict between Alroy’s two symbiotic selves and
their respective commitments to his sister, Miriam, and to
the Princess Schirene (and all they represent: altruism,
innocence, religious and sexual purity versus expediency,
hypocrisy, religious betrayal, and self-glorification) is
the subject of his thoughts as, alternately despairing and
defiant, he awaits his fate in his dungeon cell.
Significantly, it is the question of Alroy’s Jewish
faith and race that leads to his ultimate act of defiance.
For when Honain reveals the conditions for Alroy’s
release, that he should plead guilty to the charge of having
had “intercourse with the infernal powers,” that
he should confess to having “won the Caliph’s
daughter by an irresistible spell” which at last is
broken, and that he should deny his “Divine
mission” in order “to settle the public
mind,” the captive raises no objections. But when
Honain adds the final condition of “form,” that
he will be expected to “publicly affect to renounce
our faith, and bow before their Prophet,” Alroy leaps
into indignation: “Get thee behind me, tempter! Never,
never, never! . . . I’ll not yield a jot. Were my doom
one everlasting torture, I’d spurn thy terms! Is this
thy high contempt of our poor kind, to outrage my God! to
prove myself the vilest of the vile, and baser than the
basest?” (303). The explicit irony, that he has
already done this in the service of his own exalted egotism,
only serves to prove the complete dichotomy of Alroy’s
sense of his own identity. In the strength of his reemergent
purity he can immediately again assert his own glory and
resolve to die a hero for Schirene’s sake (304). But
this momentary attempt to join the glorification of his God
and the glorification of himself into one destiny cannot
succeed; he falls into a trance and is saved from his final
temptation by the ghost of the faithful priest, Jabaster. In
the denouement Alroy finds consolation in the presence of
his pure and holy sister and defies his conqueror’s
threats of torture even as the sword flashes down to behead him.
- In some sense the ending of his life is a triumph for Alroy.
He dies forgiven by his God for his sin of pride, comforted
by his sister, and secure in the belief that he is
ultimately true to his real and primary identity. At the
same time, however, it is obviously a Pyrrhic victory in
that his divine mission to free his people has come to
nought, and in that he dies after having completely fallen
from the heights of glory. It is not necessary to doubt the
hero’s sincerity of his return to innocence to
recognize that it is an escape from the consequences of a
personal failure. But it is important to recognize the final
act of defiance as an attempt to turn defeat into victory
without ever having consciously to admit that defeat.
Consequently that defiance, even though supported with a
sense of righteous purity, leaves the central conflict
between Alroy’s two senses of his own identity unresolved.
- Looking at Alroy as an embodiment of a fantasy
structure created by Disraeli, it is reasonable to conclude
that the author felt within himself the need both to deny
and to affirm his Jewishness, and by implication, the
innocence and purity that characterize his hero. The many
striking parallels between the author and his
hero—between Disraeli’s desire to liberate the
Conservative Party and Alroy’s desire to liberate his
people, between Disraeli’s recognition that hypocrisy
is a necessary ingredient of worldly success and
Alroy’s betrayal of his faith, between
Disraeli’s confidential attachment to his sister,
Sarah, and Alroy’s reliance upon Miriam’s
recognition of his purest self, and finally between
Disraeli’s defiant response to political defeat and
Alroy’s defiant mockery of his conqueror—all
suggest that Disraeli did indeed feel in his own early
career similar tensions to those he attributes to his hero
and that his struggle for “purity” in the
context of personal distinction remained an unresolved issue
in 1832. Clearly, though, Disraeli’s fictions do not
simply serve as an escape through fantasy from the
unpleasant social and political realities of his early
career. Alroy, for example, is a medium for exploring
imaginatively the ambivalence Disraeli felt about both of
his senses of himself and an imaginative assessment of the
costs of choosing either of those identities. But,
nevertheless, it is a less than satisfactory fantasy because
in its attempt to accommodate the conflicting goals of
purity and success within the characterization of a less
than perfect hero, it cannot permit a complete wish
fulfillment and remain honest. The unsatisfactory conclusion
of the fantasy did, however, provide Disraeli with the
impetus to return in subsequent novels to the subject of his
ambivalence about his racial heritage in the disguised form
of his heroes’ concern with Catholicism.3
Notes
1 The extent to which charges of
inconsistency, insincerity, hypocrisy, and expediency affected
Disraeli can be gauged by reading his political pamphlets, "What
Is He?" (1833) and The Crisis Examined (1834), as well as
his satires, "Ixion in Heaven" and "The Infernal Marriage."
2 "In Vivian Grey I have
portrayed my active and real ambition. In Alroy, my ideal
ambition. The P.R. [Contarini Fleming] is a developt. of my
poetic character. This trilogy is the secret history of my
feelings. I shall write no more about myself." Mutilated
Diary, Disraeli Papers, Box 11/A/III/C/21-22.
3 I have also argued that this
ambivalence is manifested in Disraeli's shifting attitude toward
Catholicism amid the political events of the 1830's. "The
Psychological Romance" ["The Psychological Romance: Disraeli's
Early Fiction and Political Apprenticeship," Dissertation
Abstracts International 35, (1975): p. 7264A] provides a
detailed account of Disraeli's violent anti-Catholic prejudice
at the time of the Municipal Corporations Reform Bill (1835) and
assesses this prejudice in the context of Disraeli's involvement
with the Ultra-Tory faction of the Conservative party and his
campaign in the Taunton by-election.
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