Offprinted from
MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW
VOLUME 110, PART 1
JANUARY 2015
© Modern Humanities Research Association
© Modern Humanities Research Association
Modern Language Review, (), –
DISRAELI AND THE ARCHI-TEXTUAL:
CONSTRUCTIONS OF AUTHORITY IN SYBIL
Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil () has oen been read in three overlapping
contexts: as a political novel, an engagement with the ‘Condition of England’
debate, and a novel concerned with symbols and signs.
Drawing on such
readings, I argue that Sybil uses architecture and language as the raw mater-
ial to construct a lost source of truth and authority, whose ‘restoration’ the
text seeks to bring about. is process, I suggest, produces two related prob-
lems: first, since no single building, name, or document is sufficient to serve
as basis for this lost origin they must be combined into mutually dependent
‘archi-textual’ structures, concealing the contingency of authority in the novel.
Second, the deployment of material objects as sites of authority undermines
Sybil’s attempts to establish a transcendent truth beyond materiality, placing
architecture and language in the position of Derrida’s ‘supplement’—an object
or concept that appears marginal to a structure, but on which that structure
in fact relies. For Derrida, one example of this is writing’s relationship with
language: although writing appears to be a secondary development within
language, it is in fact the place where the différance necessary to sustain
language is established.
Similarly, in Sybil, supposedly secondary signs of
power (houses, documents, names) establish and enforce the authority from
which they are presumed to derive. In developing this reading I draw upon
Heidegger, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari—thinkers whose work, like
Derrida’s, decentres and destabilizes authority.
e first way Sybil has typically been read is in relation to Disraeli’s po-
litics, especially as part of the ‘Young England’ trilogy of political novels,
between Coningsby () and Tancred (). Robert O’Kell’s recent major
study of Disraeli argues that his fiction and politics are inseparably inter-
twined, so that ‘both are shown to be enactments of the same urgencies and
purposes. e political career, like the fiction, is an invention.’
For O’Kell,
Sybil is ‘consistent with the ideals of Young England embodied in Coningsby’,
expressing this allegiance imaginatively through an ‘allegorical romance of
I would like to thank attendees of the Gladstone Library Colloquium in November for their re-
sponses to an early version of this article, and Jeremy Tambling for his invaluable advice throughout
the writing process.
e term ‘Condition of England’ was coined by omas Carlyle. See Chartism, nd edn
(London: [n. pub.], ). For an introduction to this topic see James Simmons, ‘Industrial and
“Condition of England” Novels’, in A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
), pp. –; and Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, –
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), pp. –.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ),
pp. –.
Robert O’Kell,
Disraeli: e Romance of Politics
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ),
p. .
Disraeli and the Archi-Textual
secular politics and spiritual devotion’.
According to Gary Handwerk, Sybil
employs the rhetoric of a practised politician, with Disraeli attempting to
build a consensus for the legitimacy of Young England’s goals. Matthew Bevis
has suggested that such rhetoric was later parodied by Dickens in Bleak House
(–) through the figure of Sir Leicester Dedlock.
Sheila Smith also
comments on Sybil in political terms:
Together with Coningsby, Sybil embodies the ideas of Young England, active from
to , a small group of Tory MPs including Lord John Manners and George Smythe,
led by Disraeli [. . .] Young England attacked the Utilitarians and looked back with
nostalgia to an idealized feudal system in which Church and aristocracy combined to
protect the rights of the people.
To read Sybil in this way is to see it as part of a political project that
seeks to escape an alienating present and return to what Daniel Schwarz
calls an ‘agreeable but imaginary past’.
According to Paul Smith, this is
part of a wider European debate, concerning whether ‘an organic and stable
community could be sustained or formed, when old bonds of locality, tradi-
tional authority and religion had been loosened’.
e name ‘Young England’
gestures towards this European backdrop—Walter Benjamin quotes Pierre
Martino’s observation that éophile Gautier and his friends were referring
to themselves as ‘Young France’ by .
Indeed, as O’Kell observes, it was
in Paris that ‘the parliamentary identity of the Young England movement
took shape’ in .
It is in this political context that Disraeli’s division of
England into ‘Two Nations’ must be considered: ‘I was told’, says Egremont,
that an impassable gulf divided the Rich from the Poor; I was told that the Privileged
and the People formed Two Nations, governed by different laws, influenced by differ-
ent manners, with no thoughts or sympathies in common; with an innate inability of
mutual comprehension.
Young England seeks to bridge this divide, not only in terms of a new future,
but as the return to a lost past. As a result, the novel’s politics are arranged as
O’Kell, pp. , . is chapter on Sybil first appeared in Victorian Studies, (),
–.
Gary Handwerk, ‘Behind Sybil’s Veil: Disraeli’s Mix of Ideological Messages’, Modern Lan-
guage Quarterly, (), – (p. ); Matthew Bevis, e Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens,
Tennyson, Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –.
Sheila Smith, e Other Nation: e Poor in English Novels of the s and s (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, ), p. .
Daniel Schwarz, Disraeli’s Fiction (Guildford: Macmillan, ), p. .
Paul Smith, Disraeli: A Brief Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .
Walter Benjamin, e Arcades Project, ed. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cam-
bridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ), p. .
O’Kell, p. .
Benjamin Disraeli,
Sybil
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. . Further references
are given in the main text.
a conflict between the restoration of what has been ruined or concealed (such
as medieval forms of society) and two other forces: on the one hand, mere
surface, epitomized by the bored young dandies of Chapters and , and on
the other a politics which erases the past completely, epitomized by Wodgate
(see below) and the revolutionary ideas of Stephen Morley.
In pursuing this return to the past, politics in Sybil becomes intensely
historical. For Schwarz, the novel, like Coningsby and Tancred, centres on
its protagonist overcoming doubt to attain a ‘unique intellectual and moral
potential to shape history’.
is shaping of history involves a process of his-
torical return, an unearthing of the origins from which genuine social values
are supposed to emanate. It is a process that requires the protagonist to take
on the values he hopes to restore, something Schwarz points to in observing
that Disraeli’s trilogy ‘explores the possibilities of heroism’ in the Victorian
age.
If Disraeli’s protagonists are heroes, it is in omas Carlyle’s sense of
the word, as members of an ‘Aristocracy of Talent’ uniquely equipped to cor-
rect the errors of the English nation. In Past and Present ()—a text which
influenced Disraeli’s understanding of history—Carlyle describes the most
significant of these errors: ‘We took transient superficial Semblance for ever-
lasting Substance; we have departed far away from the Laws of this Universe,
and behold now lawless Chaos and inane Chimera is ready to devour us!’
Carlyle asserts that genuine and universal values exist, but that false appear-
ance and quackery have usurped their place in England, where people have
mistaken surface appearance for truth. For Disraeli, this is the problem his
heroes must overcome. Carlyle had previously explored the theme of heroism
in his lecture series () and book () on the topic, proposing that ‘the
history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History
of the Great Men who have worked here’.
Influenced by German idealist
philosophy, Carlyle suggests that the hero is able to penetrate the ‘divine
mystery’ of the world, of which ‘all Appearance, from the starry sky to the
grass of the field, but especially the Appearance of Man and his work, is but
the vesture’.
e hero sees the truth concealed by this external clothing and
imparts it to others, as prophet, poet, priest, or king. Part of the significance of
Schwarz, p.
Ibid., p. .
omas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, ), p. . According to
Gordon Fraser, Sybil helped spread Carlyle’s political views in America; ‘“To be indifferent and
to be young”: Disraeli, Sybil, and the Preservation of an American “Race,” –’, Victorian
Literature and Culture, (), –. See also Catherine Gallagher, e Industrial Reformation
of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form – (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, ), p. .
omas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History, ed. by Michael K.
Goldberg and others (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), p. .
Ibid., p. .
Disraeli and the Archi-Textual
Sybil lies in the way it combines this heroic search for ‘true’ Carlylean origins
with an interest in the ways authority can be socially constructed.
Critics have also commented on the novel’s engagement with the ‘Con-
dition of England’ question, typically alongside Mary Barton (), North
and South (), Hard Times (), and Alton Locke (). Raymond
Williams takes this approach, comparing Sybil’s ‘brilliant romantic genera-
lizations’ to Hard Times,
as does Catherine Gallagher, who argues that the
‘tensed structure’ of the novel in England was uncovered and altered for
good by Disraeli and his peers. For Gallagher, the concerns these novels raise
about industrialization are also questions about how the realist novel deploys
narrative representation. Sybil, for instance, is built around a ‘combination
of ironic and synecdochal symbolic representation’, with the political classes
offering incomplete and corrupted representation while Sybil Gerard stands
for the possibility of full or genuine representation. is structure, Gallagher
suggests, builds on Carlyle’s concern in Sartor Resartus () with the dual
nature of signs or symbols: their ability to both conceal and reveal. ough
Teufelsdröckh, the novel’s protagonist, appears to distinguish between ‘ex-
trinsic’ (opaque and conditional) and ‘intrinsic’ (transparent and essential)
symbols, it eventually becomes clear, says Gallagher, that both sorts of symbol
are ‘at least partially socially determined, arbitrary and potentially ironic’.
She extends this critique to Sybil, arguing that Sybil Gerard should be read
against the grain of Disraeli’s text, as an ultimately ‘extrinsic’ rather than
‘intrinsic’ symbol.
Other critics who have interpreted Sybil as a complex of more or less closed
and open symbols—the third main critical approach to the novel—include
O’Kell, whose politically inflected reading contends that Sybil sees Disraeli
‘attempting to write propaganda in the form of an allegorical romance’, and
Mary Poovey, who argues with reference to Coningsby that ‘Disraeli attempts
to arouse his readers’ interest in the political domain by figuring the initiation
into politics as falling in love’.
Both O’Kell and Poovey read romance in the
Young England novels as a political allegory, with Disraeli’s politics under-
lying a more conventional romantic structure. is structure both displays
Disraeli’s politics (by incorporating them into the plot) and conceals them
(by sublimating them into a different form). Similarly, for Louis Cazamian,
Disraeli ‘thought in symbols, and was acutely alive to the power of images
over human thought and conduct’.
Jennifer Sampson takes symbolism as
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: – (New York: Columbia University Press,
), p. .
Gallagher, pp. xii, , .
O’Kell, p. . Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation –
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), p. .
Louis Cazamian, e Social Novel in England –, trans. by Martin Fido (; repr.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), p. .