Sibiu Alma Mater University Journals – Series C. Social Sciences – Volume 7, no. 1 / 2014
Humans Overwhelmed by Nature in Byron’s Don Juan
Roxana Diana CRUCEANU
Alma Mater University of Sibiu, 57 Somesului St., 550003 Sibiu, Romania
Phone/Fax: +40 269 250008
Abstract
The aim of the present analysis is to examine Byron’s Don Juan from the point of view of the impact produced by
the relation between humans and the two natures that control people’s lives: the external one and the internal one.
Our preoccupation is to discuss what happens when individuals imitate nature and the laws of the beasts, be they
surrounded by wilderness and dominated by instincts or placed in the middle of civilization and hiding under the
mask of refined social habits.
Keywords: nature, cannibalism, war, wilderness, instincts, refinement, civilization.
Rezumat
Scopul prezentei analize este să examineze Don Juan-ul lui Byron din punct de vedere al impactului produs de
relaţia dintre oameni şi cele două naturi care le controlează viaţa: cea exterioară şi cea interioară. Preocuparea
noastră este să discutăm ce se întâmplă atunci când individul imită natura şi legile fiarelor, fie el înconjurat de
sălbăticie şi dominat de instincte ori plasat în mijlocul civilizaţiei şi ascunzându-se sub masca obiceiurilor sociale
rafinate.
Cuvinte cheie: natură, canibalism, război, sălbăticie, instincte, rafinament, civilizaţie.
1. Introduction
In the numerous moments of confusion in
Don Juan, when the personages are alone
with nature, be it external, uncontrollable or
internal, instinctual and equally savage,
nature will prevail over man, at least over that
type of persons who are seen as contemptible
or not strong enough so as to win the
perpetual battle. And, it happens not only
when they are in a natural setting, outside
conventions, but also when they are on the
social scene, trying to be civil, elegant, yet
incapable of such virtues because of their
inner primitivism, which is made to come out
eventually, taking off that mask of wisdom,
self-possession and good taste – all virtues
that cannot be placed under the sign of
refinement since they are not authentic.
But, since it is now that such things as
horrendous diseases occur, horrible slaughters
happen and men eat men, the poet can be
suspected of blaming a little the nature
without for the beast within.
If we watch the shipwreck events or the
carnage of Ismail, we learn that Byron is very
close to transmit what Baudelaire (1964: 32)
declared much later, in an overt
demystification of the crude world: “Nature
can counsel nothing but crime. It is this
infallible Mother Nature who has created
patricide and cannibalism, and a thousand
other abominations […]. I ask you to review
and scrutinize whatever is natural – all the
actions and desires of the purely natural man;
you will find nothing but frightfulness”. And
Byron designes the episodes with his
castaways or with the warriors at Ismail, as if
led by Baudelaire’s request to review and
scrutinize the impact of nature over man.
Of course, when people are surrounded by
wildlife and extreme conditions, it is simpler
to disclose their gross material condition, so
much despised by a fashionable. In such
instances, nature is Byron’s accomplice for
misanthropy, for his dandy intension of
showing the true face of common mortals.
2. Men at the Mercy of the Sea
The satire of the shipwreck episode starts
with Juan – presented now “as the victim of
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Roxana Diana CRUCEANU - Humans Overwhelmed by Nature in Byron’s Don Juan
‘guilty’ for the mess in his intestines, whereas
civilization is reduced to the crew and
passengers of the ship, functioning as a mini
organization at the mercy of the sea. Hence,
the reigning nature outside awakens the
nature inside, both contributing to the
devaluation of the hero’s ‘noble’ ardour.
Cheap as it may be, Juan’s poeticism –
“Sooner shall this blue ocean melt to air, /
Sooner shall earth resolve to sea / Than I
resign thine image, oh my fair” (Byron, 2004:
106) – is by no means beyond the sloppy
declarations made by any Don Juan to a
woman. It is not because of the words or the
theatrical pathos that he proves to be less
aristocratic, but because of his cramps and the
subsequent reactions.
the indignities of nature which relentlessly
intrude on ideal sentiments and visions”
(Marchand, 1965: 174) – and his seasick that
brutally interrupts the teenager’s chivalric
romanticism with promises of endless love
for Julia, the lady of his heart, who has
seemingly touched his sensibility so deeply
with her valediction letter. The monologue
uttered on the deck, filled with poetic words,
which are the product of education, is
practically destroyed by Juan’s violent
corporal manifestations, a sign that, beside
the risibility of the situation, induces the
legitimate doubt of whether the hero will ever
be able to ignore his viscerality in the manner
of a fashionable-seducer, who would certainly
not compromise himself by vomiting in the
middle of a pleading. The verses: “Beloved
Julia, hear me still beseeching! / (Here he
grew inarticulate with retching)” (Byron,
2004: 107) confirm what J.J. Dump (1968:
10) writes about “the subjection – at least in
some degree – of soul to body, mind to
matter, spirit to flesh” in Don Juan, which
leads to a naturalism that trivializes “by
stubborn material facts […] various kinds of
rarefied moralizing or sentimentalizing or
idealizing” (ibid.: 18): “But worst of all is
nausea or a pain/ About the lower region of
the bowels./ Love, who heroically breathes a
vein,/ Shrinks from the application of hot
towels,/ And purgatives are dangerous to his
reign,/ Seasickness death. His love was
perfect; how else/ Could Juan’s passion,
while the billows roar,/ Resist his stomach,
n’er at sea before?” (Byron, 2004: 107)
Interestingly enough, it is by this type of
factualistic closure of the Juan-Julia affair
that a double stroke is achieved. Juan,
overcome by his entrails, is reduced to the
primal reactions of any living creature, being
forbidden to promote the Don Juanesque fake
emotion thoroughly. Romanticism, on the
other hand, is soiled; any hope of endless love
is lost. Sentimentalism is scorned and passion
becomes disgusting the very moment Juan
regurgitates, holding Julia’s letter. ‘Nausea’,
‘bowels’, placed near ‘love’ and ‘passion’,
constitute the most naturalist but also the
dandiest association possible, showing the
author’s opinion upon the question. Juan’s
sickness is a thousand times more credible,
more sincere than his fallacious logos. It is
very clear now that being an elegant is not an
easy task, at least not for the foolish who
consider themselves stylized. Instead of
melancholic amour, the body, more precisely
its inferior part, becomes the event of the
entire scene, speaking loud and clear in the
name of the hero. The sea sardonically forces
the truth out and demonstrates indifference to
desire.
Indeed, Byron’s talent as a naturalist is
certainly remarkable, especially since Don
Juan abounds in such descriptions, of which
the one aforementioned is just the beginning.
Human debasement is accomplished without
fault and Byron’s naturalist method of doing
it was acknowledged more than once in
criticism. What we wish to examine
nonetheless, is what hides beneath the choice
of such an approach.
It is an indifference that will remain
immutable and even more visible during the
shipwreck. At this point, all Baudelaire’s
assertions about the nature producing
monsters are precisely shaped. It becomes
“neither benevolent nor beautiful [and] Byron
The motif of water dominates the whole
scene, even if in the wings. Juan is
surrounded by a hostile seascape, which is
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insists on her apparent cruelty and
malevolence” (Rutherford, 1962: 169) The
terrible destiny of the men crowded in boats
is announced by a hostile landscape: “the sea
yawned around her like a hell, / And down
she sucked with her the whirling wave, / Like
one who grapples with his enemy / And
strives to strangle him before he die” (Byron,
2004: 115).
Doubtless, the appetite for food characterizes
both men and beasts. What distinguishes the
two categories is people’s capacity to prepare
the meat and organize banquets, two aspects
that socialize eating, transforming it into a
civilized act of decent joy. Since mortals –
unlike gods – are unable to ignore the bodily
need for nourishment, there should be at least
some order and etiquette in it, under the form
of a repast shared within a ceremonial, where
cooking, the mediator between nature and
culture, makes the difference. Neither of the
two codes is respected by the castaways.
Their sombre modality of filling their
stomachs in a hurry, in a most repulsive
process, speaks for itself. That is why
punishment for this relapse into bestiality will
not delay. Anthropophagy leads to suffering,
madness and ultimately to awful death –
“tearing and grinning, howling, screeching”
(Byron, 2004: 121) – for those who indulge in
it.
Disturbed by humans, the personified ocean
behaves like a criminal to protest against
being ‘contaminated’. But nature is not
mimetic; it is practically impossible for it to
‘copy’ a feeling like that of hatred or an
attitude like that of strangling. Imitation is a
trait reserved exclusively to the living
creatures endowed with a brain. If we accept
that, it is the mood of the sea that will induce
the mood of her visitors. Were we to reverse
the comparison and imagine the desperate
survivors playing the role of the ocean,
‘sucking’ or ‘strangling’ one of their fellows
– the wave – we will discover that men are
influenced by nature, not the other way
round. Thus, the castaways are already
expected to engulf their mates as the sea does
with her breakers.
Ironically, Juan does not join the others in
their cannibal initiative. We say ironically,
because his non-participation is not a proof of
cerebral self-restraint. It is out of luck that he
will not eat, as it is out of luck again that he
will be the unique survivor, whereas the few
others who have also refused to be governed
by the inner nature and become cannibals are
killed by the nature outside anyway. That he
is not above nature is clear when the boy,
“feeling all the vulture in his jaws” (Byron,
2004: 119), accepts to eat an uncooked paw
of the spaniel inherited from his late father
and sacrificed for supper before Pedrillo.
Providence, played by Byron, will spare him,
because his mission cannot end before
revealing a few more fundamental truths
about human nature, the lust of killing
included.
After a random selection made by the
universe, the survivors are punished to drift
hopelessly. Soon out of provision, they will
follow the example of the ocean swallowing
the wave and will proceed to cannibalism.
Hunger is stronger than manners and, though
we are told that there are well-read people
among the protagonists, they will give in to
barbarism, sacrificing Juan’s tutor, because
“’twas nature gnaw’d them to this resolution /
By which none were permitted to be neuter”
(Byron, 2004: 120). Byron could have been
neither more explicit nor more brilliant than
that in speaking his mind. It is a complex
message with a variety of significances. The
disaster follows. Human uncensored nature is
obliged to explode by the other nature which
gives no alternative. The sailors start the
‘feast’, where the only dish is the raw flash of
their voyage companion. It is a meal where
the social norms of alimentation are grossly
transgressed.
3. The Carnage of Ismail
This lust of killing is the second chapter of
human savagery in Don Juan, presented
bluntly in the sequences describing the
carnage. What occurs in the Ismail verses is
so ignoble that those involved are depicted as
almost having lost their human quality
because of an inner primitivism awaken by
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nature’s overwhelming power. It is known
that, apart from the campaigns fought in the
cause of freedom, Byron detested war,
probably driven by the dandy creed that the
battle field can offer nothing sublime to the
spirit and aware of “the essential inhumanity
of the whole business” (Rutherford, 1962:
167). Now, despise is directed especially
towards those who, by invoking noblesse of
intentions, are obsessed with satisfying their
dictatorial needs.
this setting, where the forest is the queen,
where “thy plagues, thy famines” (Byron,
2004: 320) are the immediate reality,
barbarisms become normality. We find out
that “a Russian officer in martial tread / Over
a heap of bodies felt his heel / Seized fast”
(Byron, 2004: 337) and bitten by a dying
enemy, at which the Russian “howled as
wolves do for a meal” (ibid.), while the
Moslem “made his teeth meet” (Byron, 2004:
338) in the officer’s foot. This moment of
hostile association between the two is but a
brief recapitulation of the cannibalistic motif
in Canto II. As in the shipwreck episode,
civilization is far away from the battlefield:
”There cannot be much conversation there”
(Byron, 2004: 331). Reduced to the
automatism of murdering in order to survive,
the warriors come to a perfect mimesis of the
uncensored life of the woods.
In a way or another, they are doomed for their
demonstration of involution. Some are
condemned to be the slaves of their own
sexuality, like Catherine or the Sultan, for
instance; some are punished in other ways.
The most explicit damnation is perhaps that
of Prince Potemkim, who is an important
pillar in this game of ambitions and
despotism, playing besides his military role
that of Catherine’s favourite and counsellor.
Convinced that the prince has obtained his
greatness from his love of “homicide and
harlotry” (Byron, 2004: 304), the poet
introduces him in the scene in the following
way: “There was a man, / If that he was a
man, / Not that his manhood could be called
in question” (ibid.). Considering that his
manhood is not questionable, it must be his
human quality that triggers the doubt. In
everyday life, a man who is not really a man,
for reasons that do not honour him, is
generally associated with a beast, a
comparison that becomes very possible in
Potemkin’s case also, given the type of his
chief preoccupations that rotate around killing
and reproduction. For this, he is not permitted
to expire as a hero; instead, he will be
‘judged’ by his own viscera: “indigestion /
Made his last illness, when all worn and wan,
/ He died beneath a tree” (ibid.).
As Byron himself declares, the guilty parties
for the atrocities at Ismail are the sovereigns
because
they
turn
everything
into
mercantilism, without considering the
disasters occurring at the human level: “And
whom for this at last must we condemn? /
Their natures? Or their sovereigns who
employ / All arts to teach their subjects to
destroy?” (Byron, 2004: 340). Fiercely
condemned by the poet, this reality at the
macro level is doubled by a reality existing at
the micro level of the deflagration. It is this
latter reality, overlooked in criticism because
of the far more impressive former one, that
we will take into account.
Despite the blame thrown explicitly on the
flawed political systems, it seems that Byron
suggests very subtly that there is a choice
even for the pawns involved in this
deflagration, in the sense that they can keep
their dignity and intelligence, in spite of the
terrible conditions, if they have acquired
enough wisdom and good sense so as to
dominate their visceral nature. An example in
this direction is the old Tartar khan who,
having seen his loved ones gone, offers his
chest to the piercing bayonets of the
adversaries with a gesture of extreme
elegance, arising the admiration of “the
And there is another dimension depicted quite
carefully in the Ismail conflict: the battle
itself and the comportment of soldiers at war.
It is important for our purpose to remind that
the episode is set into an impressive natural
amphitheatre, “a fortress of the foremost
rank” (Byron, 2004: 297) that “measures
round of toises thousands three” (ibid.). In
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rough, tough soldiers, who / Spared neither
sex nor age in their career” (Byron, 2004:
346), but who now “honoured such
determined scorn of life” (ibid.). For, if rulers
are allowed to force their subjects into the
battle, they cannot control their souls. In this
light, actions that do not bring victory closer,
such as gratuitous rapes, slaughtered children
and women are perhaps not so much the fault
of tyrants, but of soldiers’ inner nature,
masked under the pretext of duty for a cause.
It is always easier for ordinary men
possessing a weapon, which they are fully
allowed to use, to give way to their instincts –
with the apology that such things happen at
war – than to raise above the examples
provided by nature or greedy rulers. Reading
the verses: “Two villainous Cossacks pursued
the child / With flashing eyes and weapons.
Matched with them / The rudest brute that
roams Siberia’s wild / Has feelings pure and
polished as a gem - / The bear is civilized, the
wolf is mild” (Byron, 2004: 340), it is evident
that the ones who fight the battle are not
absolved of either Byron’s attack or scorn. In
this sense, it is relevant that the reduction of
people to the realm of beasts appears quite
frequently along the poem. Men are sharks,
tigers (Byron, 2004: 118), vultures (Byron,
2004: 119), dogs (Byron, 2004: 296), wolves
(Byron, 2004: 119: 340), bears (Byron, 2004:
340), jackals (Byron, 2004: 359), spiders
(ibid.), human insects (ibid.). Never are these
parallels flattering, for the similitude with the
creatures of wilderness discloses the
instinctual sides, the basic urges uncensored
by reason.
4. Human
Civilization
Beasts
in
the
Bosom
cheese and cucumbers during his voyages,
must have felt genuine repulsion for those
submitted to their stomach. “Eating, with
another act or two / Makes us feel our
mortality in fact / Redoubled” (Byron, 2004:
227) preaches the dandy within Byron, in an
evident rejection of the reign of the flesh.
“When dinner has oppressed one, / I think it
is perhaps the gloomiest hour” (Byron, 2004:
226), he warns. His endless mentioning of the
alimentary motif is consequently a tool used
to demolish the spiritual pretences of the
human being, reducing him to the sum of his
animal functions, where eating, having sex,
manifesting bodily functions of waste are the
most relevant because they are the most
humiliating: “Love or lust makes man sick
and wine much sicker’ (Byron, 2004: 221). In
vain do the aristocrats try to give complicated
names to their dishes: fowls à la Condé
(Byron, 2004: 513), dindon à la Périgueux
(Byron, 2004: 512), soupe à la Beaveau
(ibid), etc. Their need of filling their bellies is
as disgusting as the artificial food which
transgresses the simple nobility of the
Homeric feast, and brings thus disease of the
body and of the mind: “And fruits and ice and
all that art refines/ From nature for the service
of the goût –/ Taste or the gout, pronounce as
it inclines/ Your stomach. Ere you dine, the
French will do,/ But after, there are
sometimes certain signs/ Which prove plain
English truer of the two” (Byron, 2004: 515).
For, if literal cannibalism kills, so will the
snobbery of some beasts trying to play the
bluebloods.
That they transgress elegance constantly is
more than evident. Their inner natures,
greedy and unrefined, are stronger than their
intended virtue and that is why the body with
its unheroic parts will not cease to betray
them in every way.
of
After Ismail, wilderness is taken out of the
equation; the reign of the viscera remains,
transferred now to the more sophisticated,
man-modified decorum of the English cantos,
where we meet the augmented animal-like
appetite, camouflaged under the form of fine
gourmandise. People in the English cantos
ingurgitate excessively, which a cerebral
person should avoid. Byron, who went on
drastic, extreme diets, often having only
5. Conclusions
It appears almost strange to speak almost
strange to speak about a dismission of the
natural with Byron, who, it is known, was
fascinated with nature and became a bard of
its wonders. With Don Juan, however, things
change to a certain extent. This time
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wilderness will not mirror the hero’s soul, as
it happens in Childe Harold or Manfred. Not
only does it mock at the smallness of man,
but it also contributes to the ingloriousness of
the mind and soul. For that, nature outside
was discussed as provocation that brings
about the worst in the human being, a
perspective that offers an alternative
interpretation to all those theories which view
nature in Byron’s poetry as “a perfect
companion” (Babbit, 1919: 279). Not denying
this type of vision, we demonstrated that the
opposite may be true as well with this final
Byronic masterpiece: as man is guilty for
destroying the beauty of wilderness, so is
nature for the cancellation of man’s good
breeding and tact. For, although Don Juan is
first and foremost a social satire, a continuous
proof of how etiquette and civilisation spoil
and corrupt people, it also makes clear that
their complete lack or flawed application is
more terrifying than hypocrisy and
dissimulation.
References
Babbit, I. 1919. Rousseau and Romanticism, The
Riverside Press, Cambridge.
Baudelaire, C. 1964. In Praise of Cosmetics in The
Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays,
Phaidon Press, London.
Byron, G. G. 2004. Don Juan, Penguin Books,
London.
Dump, J. J. 1968. Byron’s Don Juan: Poem or Holdall?, University of Swansea Press, Swansea.
Marchand, L. A. 1965. Byron’s Poetry: A Critical
Introduction, John Murray, London.
Rutherford, A. 1962. Byron. A Critical Study, Oliver&
Boyd, Edinburgh.
.
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