Of Poets and Romancers--You're a Bore: Don Juan as a Satire of Morality

Byron's Don Juan can be seen as an extended critique against the generic idea of morality as a suppression of sexuality. In this vein of thought, while Don Juan betrays his loves and is betrayed by them, the greater betrayal is how the idea of "morality" offers a better way of life to its adherents, but it actually suppresses the enjoyment of life by minimizing the role of sex. The way morality betrays sexual inclinations is represented in the poem at a point of Juan's "heroism"--the sex scene with Julia--because the narrator engages in a lengthy diatribe on Platonic love, when he could focus on (the heroic?) love-making itself.

The narrator wants demands a hero, and the one he chooses is the folk figure of Don Juan--a mythological sexual conqueror (I., ll.1-7). In his choice of Juan, there's a conception that his style of epic heroism would be in a sexual conquest. However, at the moment of Juan's first passionate encounter (with Julia), the narrator betrays the reader by not going into the details of this event, but into a discussion of Platonic morality:

And then--God knows what next--I can't go on;
I'm almost sorry that I e'er begun

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Oh Plato! Plato! You have paved the way,
With your confounded fantasizes, to more
Immoral conduct by the fancied sway
Your systems feigns o'er the controlless core
Of Human hearts, than all the long array
Of poets and romancers--you're a bore,
A charlatan, a coxcomb, and have been
At best no better than a go-between. (Canto I, ll. 921-928)

While this is still a conversation against Platonic love, it is the equivalent of inserting a discussion on cowardice, right at the exact moment in the Illiad which Achilles slays Hector. The result of this discussion is the narrator effectively ravishes the reader from explicit knowledge about the acts of Juan's heroism. The insertion of narratorial voice also satirizes how moral discourse interferes with sexual expression because it seems pointless to talk about Plato at that particular instant and it is out-of-context. The result is it lends a sort of absurdity to the discourse of morality because it doesn't seem to appropriately address the topic of sex.

(While some may think Byron was forced to put this discussion against Plato in the poem, due to the context of his era's view about sex, he still has choice as to where to place that disclaimer: it could have been at the end of the event. This placement would have been more appropriate and, thereby, less satirical because it would have been more of a reflection or evaluation of the act.)

Dona Inez's encouragement against sex and love are a staple of her moral upbringing of Juan. However, Inez's teachings betray Juan because it inhibits his sexuality; in the end fails to provide Don Juan with much of an education:

In the meantime, to pass her hours away,
Brave Inez now set up a Sunday school
For naughty children, who would rather play
(Like truant rogues) the devil or the fool;
Infants of three years old were taught that day,
Dunces were whipped, or set upon a stool:
The great success of Juan's education
Spurred her to teach another generation. (Canto II, ll.72-80)

This passage comes at the moment Inez sends Juan away because of his sexual forays with Julia. In some sense, she betrays Juan because she builds up an education of morality in his youth, but this education "diverted his natures modesty" (II, ll.8); this expresses the idea that her attempts to improve his life via the ideas of morality as sexual inhibition do not actually help him because it is unnatural to suppress sexual inclinations.

The satirical element is her inability to recognize her failure because she begins the process of "breaking" nature out of other kids, through the Sunday school. The satire is she doing something with grave seriousness (beating children), but for a purpose that will be entirely undone by the natural inclinations of the heart. Therefore, just as the insertion of a Platonic dialogue onto Juan's sexual triumph, the insertion of Inez's morality into children creates a sense of absurdity of morality to do anything but thwart desires that in turn will, eventually,find expression (note Inez's own implied sexual relationship with Don Alfonso).

The purpose of satirizing anti-sexual rhetoric is to serves as a criticism of the discourse of morality because it shows the ways morality obfuscates natural inclinations. In the process of satirizing morality, the narrator makes it seem silly and unnatural. Ultimately, the most natural actions come between Haidee and Juan because their passion for each other is not expressed in language, but in gestures which impart emotion (II., ll.1289-1290: "And then she had recourse to nods and signs,/ And smiles, and sparkles of the speaking eye"). The larger implication of this is: the language natural to humanity is not the rough moralizing language of the "north," but potentially a language based in signs and symbols which impart passion (in some sense, this turns into the figurative language of poetry, its melodies and rhymes which emulate emotion).

Al Provinziano