Don Juan
A Romantic Hero
Table of contents:
1. Lord Byron’s Don Juan and The Mythical
Figure of the Seducer
2. Lord Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ – a satiric poem
3. Plot’s Summary – major episodes
4. Critical Opinions
5. Lord Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ in Visual Arts
6. The Initiation of Don Juan
7. Bibliography
1. Lord Byron’s Don Juan and
The Mythical Figure of the Seducer
• The myth of Don Juan has been told for over three
centuries and there are many authors who wonder if it
is still justified to tell of the Seducer as a myth, or as
story.
• It is therefore pertinent first to identify the most
representative pieces among the countless works that
depict a Don Juan or Don Giovanni.
1. Lord Byron’s Don Juan and
The Mythical Figure of the Seducer
• According to some authors and critics, excess is the
driving force that moves the myth of Don Juan forward
through the centuries. Each author brings a different
type of excess forward in his or her interpretation.
• A consequence of this is the liberation of the seduced
woman (the victim) from her ‘duty’ and prison of
chastity, which leads to her self-awakening.
1. Lord Byron’s Don Juan and
The Mythical Figure of the Seducer
• The character of Don Juan was
contributed to world literature by
the Spanish writer Gabriel Tellez
(1584-1648), whose pen name was
Tirso de Molina, in his play
El Burlador de Sevilla (The Rogue
of Seville), which appeared in the
early 1630s.
• The character of the unscrupulous seducer became a
favorite with later writers, and of all literary characters
Don Juan is the one who is most used, in plays, in
pantomimes and in narrative verse.
1. Lord Byron’s Don Juan and
The Mythical Figure of the Seducer
• Mozart's Don Giovanni is an
example of the use of the Don
Juan character in opera.
• Few other literary characters
approach Don Juan in popularity.
Readers and lovers of the theater
seem to be fascinated by the
theme of the "lady-killer."
• The bibliography of the Don Juan
theme fills a whole volume.
1. Lord Byron’s Don Juan and
The Mythical Figure of the Seducer
• Another celebrated work gave
further impetus to the spread of
the Don Juan legend. Byron's Don
Juan is one of the greatest long
English poems of the Romantic
period; Goethe called it "a work
of infinite genius”.
• Whether Byron made a real contribution to the Don Juan story, however,
is quite another matter. Most critics would agree that he did not even try;
instead he turned the story inside-out and upside-down by making his
Juan a passive charmer who is seduced by a succession of women.
• Byron probably chose "Don Juan" as an ironic name for his hero, making
use of the already established term for a notorious womanizer — a
gesture in itself a tribute to the extent that Don Juan was already well
known as a myth.
2. Don Juan – satiric poem
• Don Juan is a satiric poem by Lord Byron,
based on the legend of Don Juan, which
Byron reverses, portraying Juan not as a
womaniser but as someone easily seduced
by women.
• It is a variation on the epic form. Byron
himself called it an "Epic Satire" (Don Juan, c.
xiv, st. 99). Byron completed 16 cantos,
leaving an unfinished 17th canto before his
death in 1824. Byron claimed he had no ideas
in his mind as to what would happen in
subsequent cantos as he wrote his work.
• When the first two cantos were published
anonymously in 1819, the poem was
criticised for its "immoral content", though it
was also immensely popular.
3. Plot’s Summary
Canto I Liaison with Donna Julia
• Don Juan, a sixteen-year-old native of Seville, has
received a prim education from his puritanical
mother, Donna Inez.
• His mother’s friend, Donna Julia, married to the
middle-aged Don Alfonso, seduces the handsome
lad.
• Upon discovery, Donna Julia is commited to a
nunnery, and Don Juan is shipped on a vessel bound
for Leghorn, Italy.
• Byron described the episode to an Italian
acquaintance, Parolini.
3. Plot’s Summary
Canto II (to Stanza 112) Storm and Shipwreck
• The Trinidada is wrecked in a fearful storm and survivors
are left clinging to an over-crowded and ill-provisioned
ship’s boat. Suffering and deprivation reduced the
castaways to cannibalism.
• Juan alone escapes, collapsing upon the shore of an
island in the Greek Cyclades.
• This most realistic and gripping account of shipwreck in
English literature is based upon reading, for Byron was
not knowledgeable in semanship. Its chief sources are
Byron’s grandfather’s book, Dalzell’s Shipwrecks and
Disasters at Sea(1812), and William Falconer’s poem
The Shipwreck(1762).
3. Plot’s Summary
Canto II (Stanza 113) – IV (to Stanza 74) The Haidée Idyll
• Juan is nursed back to health by a beautiful Greek girl,
Haidée, in the absence of her pirate father, Lambro. The
two young people fall in love.
• Lambro returns, wounds Juan and sells him into slavery.
Haidée dies of a broken heart.
• Haidée (meaning "a caress" or "the caressed one") appears
in contemporary Greek songs, cruelly treated by her
relatives for loving a stranger. The lush Oriental love theme
is at least as old as Hellenistic Greek prose romances of
antiquity.
• The passage displays strong resemblances to Cristoph
Martin Wieland’s Oberon. Lambro was a historic character,
not associated with this love story.
3. Plot’s Summary
Canto IV (Stanza 75) – VI
The Harem Episode
• Juan is purchased in Istanbul by a veiled woman who proves
to be Gulbeyaz, the love-starved sultana. She disguises the
youth in female garb as Juana and conceals him in the
seraglio.
• Repulsed because Juan honours the memory of Haidée and
suspecting him of loving the harem girl Dudu, Gulbeyaz orders
Baba to slay Juan.
• Escaping, Juan makes his way to the Russian lines.
• The theme of the Moslem lady and the Christian slave has
been a familiar Mediterranean tale since mediaeval times. In
La Provencale, by Jean- Francois Regnard, the account is
declared a "true story". Byron also utilizes versions by
Cervantes, The Liberal Lover and Wieland, Oberon.
3. Plot’s Summary
Canto VII – VIII
Siege of Ismail
• Juan serves with the Russians under Suvoroff (later
famous in Napoleonic battles) against the Turkish
city of Ismail, a genuine historical event of 1790.
• Amidst frightful slaughter, Juan distinguishes himself
and saves the life of a little girl, Leila. Slightly
wounded, he is sent with despatches to
St. Peresburg.
• Chief source is Castelnau’s Essai sur l’Historie
ancienne et moderne de la Nouvelle Russie (1820).
3. Plot’s Summary
Canto IX – X (to Stanza 64) The Court of Catherine the Great
• Handsome Juan is made the latest favourite of the
Russian empress but becomes sick, for "in royalty’s
vast arms he sigh’d for beauty".
• Reluctantly Catherine agrees to send the youth,
accompanied by Leila, on a diplomatic errancy to the
milder climate of England.
• Source is the ottava rima mock Poema Tartaro
(1797), by Giambattista Casti.
3. Plot’s Summary
Canto X (Stanza 65) to breaking-off point England
• In the secure shoots, his handsome person makes him the
darling of London high society, even like his creator. He is a
guest at Norman Abbey (obviously Newstead Abbey), Gothic
mansion of the politician Lord Henry Amundeville. Here Byron
sketches many English aristocrats of his own circle.
• Juan attracts three females: Adeline, volatile wife of his host;
Aurora Raby, a young heiress; and the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke, a
female Cassanova.
• The sixteenth Canto offers a spectre who turns out to be the
Duchess disguised as the local ghost, the Black Friar; she is
also intent upon a liaison with the good-looking Juan.
• Here Byron drew largely upon his personal knowledge, though
such material was also widely available in articles, journals,
memoirs.
4. Critical Opinions
• Sir Walter Scott: "has embraced every
topic of human life, and sounded every
string of the divine harp, from its slightest
to its most powerful and heart-astounding
tones."
Sir Walter Scott
• Goethe: "a work of boundless genius."
Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe
4. Critical Opinions
• Percy Bysshe Shelley (Cantos III, IV, V):
"wonder and delight:" "This poem carries with
it at once the stamp of originality and defiance
of imitation. Nothing has ever been written like
it in English, nor, if I may venture to prophesy,
will there be, unless carrying upon it the mark
of a secondary and borrowed light... You are
building up a drama," he adds, "such as
England has not yet seen, and the task is
sufficiently noble and worthy of you."
"Every word has the stamp of immortality... It
fulfils, in a certain degree, what I have long
preached of producing—something wholly new
and relative to the age, and yet surpassingly
beautiful."
4. Critical Opinions
• Algernon Charles Swinburne: "Across the
stanzas ... we swim forward as over the
'broad backs of the sea;' they break and
glitter, hiss and laugh, murmur and move
like waves that sound or that subside. There
is in them a delicious resistance, an elastic
motion, which salt water has and fresh
water has not. There is about them a wide
wholesome air, full of vivid light and
constant wind, which is only felt at sea. Life
undulates and Death palpitates in the
splendid verse.... This gift of life and variety
is the supreme quality of Byron's chief
poem".
5. Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ in Visual Arts
Henry James Richter,
Illustration to Don Juan,
The Byron Gallery (1833)
They look upon each other, and their eyes
Gleam in the moonlight; and her white
arm clasps
Round Juan’s head, and his around hers
lies
Half buried in the tresses which it grasps;
She sits upon his knee, and drinks his
sighs,
He hers, until they end in broken gasps;
And thus they form a group that’s quite
antique,
Half naked, loving, natural, and Greek.
5. Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ in Visual Arts
Eugène Delacroix - The Shipwreck of Don Juan
oil on canvas (1840)
5. Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ in Visual Arts
Canto II
The boats, as stated, had got off before,
And in them crowded several of the crew;
And yet their present hope was hardly more
Than what it had been, for so strong it blew
There was slight chance of reaching any shore;
And then they were too many, though so few -Nine in the cutter, thirty in the boat,
Were counted in them when they got afloat.
All the rest perish'd; near two hundred souls
Had left their bodies; and what's worse, alas!
When over Catholics the ocean rolls,
They must wait several weeks before a mass
Takes off one peck of purgatorial coals,
Because, till people know what's come to pass,
They won't lay out their money on the dead -It costs three francs for every mass that's said.
5. Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ in Visual Arts
Ford Madox Brown - The Finding of Don Juan by Haidée
oil on canvas (1870 - 1873)
5. Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ in Visual Arts
Canto IV
XXVI
Juan and Haidée gazed upon each other
With swimming looks of speechless tenderness,
Which mix'd all feelings, friend, child, lover,
brother,
All that the best can mingle and express
When two pure hearts are pour'd in one another,
And love too much, and yet can not love less;
But almost sanctify the sweet excess
By the immortal wish and power to bless.
XXVII
Mix'd in each other's arms, and heart in heart,
Why did they not then die? -- they had lived too
long
Should an hour come to bid them breathe apart;
Years could but bring them cruel things or wrong;
The world was not for them, nor the world's art
For beings passionate as Sappho's song;
Love was born with them, in them, so intense,
It was their very spirit -- not a sense.
XXVIII
They should have lived together deep in
woods,
Unseen as sings the nightingale; they were
Unfit to mix in these thick solitudes
Call'd social, haunts of Hate, and Vice, and
Care:
How lonely every freeborn creature broods!
The sweetest song-birds nestle in a pair;
The eagle soars alone; the gull and crow
Flock o'er their carrion, just like men below.
XXIX
Now pillow'd cheek to cheek, in loving sleep,
Haidée and Juan their siesta took,
A gentle slumber, but it was not deep,
For ever and anon a something shook
Juan, and shuddering o'er his frame would
creep;
And Haidée's sweet lips murmur'd like a brook
A wordless music, and her face so fair
Stirr'd with her dream, as rose-leaves with the
air.
5. Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ in Visual Arts
Isaac Robert Cruikshank - Don Juan - Canto I (1821)
5. Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ in Visual Arts
John Austen:
Haidée and Juan
were not married, the fault was
theirs, not mine
(1926)
6. The Initiation of Don Juan
• Donna Inez and Donna Julia
They are of course the women, who have taken Juan's education in
hand after his father's death, and the posse of priests and Schoolmasters with which Donna Inez surrounds him. Beside Donna Inez
there is Donna Julia.
Juan and Julia fall inevitably in love, being the first step in his initiatic
trip.
Donna Julia, Don Juan’s first love, a woman of twenty-three married to
the fifty-year-old Don Alfonso. She is forced to enter a convent after
her irate husband discovers his wife and her young lover in her
bedchamber. In a long letter, written on the eve of Don Juan’s
departure from Spain, she professes her undying love for him.
6. The Initiation of Don Juan
• Juan – Haidée
Is the seond and only true love that Juan will discover, their love being
innocent and mutual. Is the step where he will suffer and learn what
guilt, loss and loneliness is.
• Turkish Characters: Gulbeyaz and Dudu
The sultana Gulbeyaz takes Juan in her harem as a woman, Juana,
demanding to share his affection towards her at all times.
Dudu is a slave in her harem for which Juan had a crush.
Here Juan will experience the loss of his identity.
6. The Initiation of Don Juan
• Catherine the Great
After the Turkish War in Cantos VII and VIII, Juan is despatched to 'the
Royal Harlot of Russia.' Catherine's desire for sex is insatiable. She
loved all the things "save her lord, who was gone to his place." What
she adored most was the "lamented Lanskoi. who was such/A lover as
had cost her many a tear/And yet but made a middling Greanadier.‘
This is a moment when Juan gets to redeem some of his freedom as an
individual.
• English Characters: Adeline, Aurora Raby, Duchess of Fitz-Fulke
The last experiences which Juan encounters on his initiation are in
England, London’s high society. Here, the reader and the hero expect
to encounter a ‘normal’ life, safe for Juan’s health but on the
contradictory we find a different approach upon love.
6. The Initiation of Don Juan
• How different is Byron's one woman character from the other is
well-defined by John Jump:
"Juan's five lovers are clearly distinguished from one another. Julia is
sentimental and self-deluding. Haidee simple and affectionate. Dudu
shy and accommodating. Catherine insatiable, and the Duchess
frolicsome. The unsuccessful lover.,Gulbeyz, is imperious before, and
vindictive after her frustration."
6. The Initiation of Don Juan
• Byron's Juan, compared with most of his predecessors, has only a
modest number of affairs. He is limited to the married women,
and forward, Dona Julia; the beautiful Haidée; the sultana
Gulbeyaz, whose amorous orders he refuses at the risk of his
death; and Catherine the Great, to whose sexual desires he
surrenders.
• In the case of Haidée, their love is innocent and mutual;
elsewhere the ladies are the aggressors. Byron's Don Juan is an
innocent: he is youthful throughout - sixteen years old when
initiated into sexual activity by Dona Julia, and still a "boy" to
Catherine - in contrast to the usual portrayal of Don Juan as an
experienced man (Kierkegaard estimated Mozart's Don Giovanni
to be thirty-three years old).
• As a result there is an unbridgeable gap, in experience and in
moral attitude, between Byron's very youthful, innocent, and
sympathetic hero, and the other portrayals of Don Juan.
6. The Initiation of Don Juan
• As a conclusion, Don Juan follows a initiatic trip throughout the
poem. He creates in his mind the perfect woman, choosing what
he liked most from evey affair he encounterd.
• Being the hero of a heroic-comical poem, he is a mediocre, not
innocent character who is taken by surprise by the adventures that
happen around and to him.
• Don Juan is neither a satanic figure, nor a wild seducer, nor even an
imaginative projection of Byron, although the poet plays with the
readers’ expectations. The surprised adventurer Don Juan is a lover
by chance and a hero by chance; caught up in the middle of events
he finds that simply, there’s nothing he can do about it, but go on
with it. Things happen to Don Juan, he is not the one who causes
things to happen. Don Juan is rather the seducer seduced
deconstructing the legend of the famous seducer.
6. The Initiation of Don Juan
• Don Juan is an anti-hero meant to
neutralize
the
extraordinary
actions of the Romantic Byronic
heroes. He holds a false
reputation and Byron ironically
reduces him to his right
proportions.
7. Bibliography
• Annotated English Literature, Romanticism, Bantaş A., Clonţea
D., Teodorescu A., Editura Vlasie, 1995.
• Romantic Textualities – Literature and Print Culture(1780-1840),
Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, Cardiff University,
2013
• The Cambridge History of English Poetry, Michael O’Neill,
Cambridge University Press, 2010
• The Complete Poetical Works, Byron, Lord, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1980-93
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan_%28Byron%29
Made by:
Balla Cristina
An II, R-E