SOURCE: Franklin, Caroline. “‘Quiet Cruising o'er the Ocean Woman’: Byron's Don Juan. and the Woman Question.” In Byron, edited by Jane Stabler, pp. 79-93. Edinburgh Gate, Eng.: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998.

[In the following essay, originally published in Studies in Romanticism in winter 1990, Franklin chronicles the methods by which Byron challenged traditional ideas about marriage, chastity, fidelity, and female power.]

The importance of the debate on the woman question, and of [Christoph] Meiners and [Joseph Alexandre Pierre] Ségur particularly, in framing a context in which to view Byron's ‘sexual Jacobinism’ is plain. In his comic epic, Byron employs the same procedure as the Enlightenment histories of progressing from primitive to civilized countries; the same relativistic sociological stance towards sexual morality; the same assumption of the influence of climate on Northern and Southern mores.¹ Most importantly, he too focuses on female morality as the perspective through which to view the ancien régime and finally the Revolution itself. Ségur and Meiners portrayed the ancien régime as an effeminate civilization where the corruption of authority is measured by the ability of women to wield illicit power. This is the controlling perspective of the poem, too. For all the adult women of the poem are in positions of power or authority over Juan as his mother (Inez); elder (Julia); rescuer (Haidée); purchaser (Gulbeyaz); guide to harem life (Dudu); employer (Catherine); hostess (Adeline) and practical joker (Duchess). The poet begins by lamenting ‘I want a hero’ (I.i). He portrays a Europe lacking in male public-spiritedness. England is a ‘gynocrasy’ (XII.66; XVI.52), whose aristocracy is maintained by dynastic marriages arranged by female coteries (IV.109; XIII.82). All the male characters of the poem have lost the ‘masculine’ capacity to serve the state or to wield power disinterestedly, for universal justice. Lambro, the Greek poet, the Sultan, Johnson, Lord Henry: all have given way to dynastic or mercenary self-interest. The poet denigrates Britain's modern political and military leaders, Castlereagh and Wellington, in the same terms: the first as a moral eunuch and both as self-seeking hirelings.

However, when we look more closely, there are some fundamental differences. The female domination in Don Juan is always of a purely sexual nature rather than self-seeking or materialistic. The format of a progression from primitive Greek isle to Turkish despotism, to Catherine's attempt to graft enlightened monarchy on to Russian feudalism, and finally to British constitutionalism leads the reader to expect a similar correlation between the standards of sexual morality and the portrayal of ever more civilized societies, as that Meiners and Ségur had sought to establish. But by using this framework as the background for repetitive stories of Don Juanism, a tension is set up between the expectation of progress dictated by the format, and the portrayal of actual human sexuality, unvarying, unchanged and untamed, despite the differing mores. Byron undermines the concept of reforming society through endowing women with the role of guardian of morals, by suggesting that the unalterable dynamics of human sexuality have appertained throughout time and place, and that woman is by nature as much a creature—or more—of sexual appetite as is man. The poet's satiric strategy in Don Juan is that employed in The Vision of Judgement: he replicates the formula of an existing text in order to subvert it. Byron presents the same thesis as Ségur and Meiners that the development of a modern constitutional state necessitates ever-increasing control by women of their libido. However, with devastating comic irony he indicates in the English cantos the resulting choice between naive idealism (Aurora), self-repression (Adeline) and outright hypocrisy (the Duchess), which represent three stages in an Englishwoman's life. Byron does not apotheosize the chaste wife of Northern European protestant society, but romanticizes a libertarian ideal on a primitive Greek isle. Control of the libido by the rational will, on the other hand, is linked with the psychology of dynastic aggrandizement and political repression.

Just as British women are as adulterous as their primitive sisters, so the increasingly sophisticated governments of the various countries are not presented as illustrating a smooth progression in the freedom of the subject either. Even in ‘The land of the free’, as long as poverty continues to make prostitutes and criminals of the people, the advanced form of the institutions of government does not benefit them. Juan is as enthusiastic about Britain as Ségur and Meiners. He declares: ‘Here are chaste wives, pure lives … Here laws are all inviolate’, but he is interrupted by a holdup (XI.10). His hotel is an image of the British class-system: an oasis of luxury, surrounded by a ‘tide’ of servants, the mob of common people and ‘several score’ of prostitutes, all hoping to sell their services (XI.30). The material facts of life, whether sexual or economic, are presented by Byron as part of the life force, as uncontrollable by institutions as the ocean. The whole concept of law, whether despotic, constitutional or moral is presented negatively, as benefiting the ruling class but either irrelevant or inimical to the freedom of the individual.

While Meiners and Ségur demonstrate that the development of monogamous marriage for love is the sine qua non of the liberties of the property-owning classes, Byron counters this by showing that all forms of marriage (monogamous, polygamous and polyandrous) are equally destructive of the freedom of the individual for both sexes. All marriages depicted in the poem are unsatisfactory. Don José and Donna Inez are ‘wishing each other, not divorced, but dead’ (I.26); the Fitz-Fulkes have ‘that best of unions past all doubt, / Which never meets and therefore can't fall out’ (XIV.45). Marital unhappiness is also experienced by Julia and Alfonso, Gulbeyaz and the Sultan, Catherine and the Czar, Johnson in his second and third marriages, and the Amundevilles. In Canto III. 5-8, the poet overtly denies the bourgeois identification of romantic love with marriage:

Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine—
          A sad, sour, sober beverage—by time
Is sharpen'd from its high celestial flavour
Down to a very homely household savour.

Byron's poem deconstructs Ségur's and Meiners's reasoning. The rhetoric of the social importance of the feminine domestic virtues actually masks the repression of the individual's sexual freedom. His original epigraph for the poem was ‘Domestica facta … Horace’. Horace was referring to domestic governmental policy. Byron's pun indicates that his subject-matter is sexual politics: the political significance of the reactionary new emphasis on domestic morality.

Ségur's notion of complementary equality in difference between the roles of the sexes is also exposed as a sham, for even the highest social class cannot override a woman's inferiority by sex.

The gilding wears so soon from off her fetter,
          That—but ask any woman if she'd choose
(Take her at thirty, that is) to have been
Female or male? a school-boy or a queen?

(XIV.25. Compare II.201)

The creation of a cult of feminine morality, yet its simultaneous relegation of women to the tasks enjoined by the material aspects of existence is a waste: ‘Their love, their virtue, beauty, education, / But form good housekeepers, to breed a nation’ (XIV.24).

Those of the generation who had experienced the French Revolution, like Coleridge, Ségur and Meiners, were seeking to reestablish the authority of male over female, and imbue the female familial role with moral sanctity, as a bulwark against rampant individualism; a protest against aristocratic promiscuity; and an affirmation of the importance of the hereditary transmission of property. Because he was of the second generation of liberals, an aristocrat and libertine himself and an individualist above all, Byron was in a unique position to challenge the new puritanism. He based his sexual satire on the indivisibility of the individual and the common physicality of all humanity, rejecting the split between reason and passion for both sexes alike.

We may compare Don Juan with [Mary] Wollstonecraft's Vindication. Both seek to challenge [Jean Jacques] Rousseau's insistence in Émile on the necessity of dividing the public life of the citizen from the private life of the family through sharply differentiated sexual roles (which is the basis of Meiners's and Ségur's thesis, but applied to the lessons of the Revolution). Wollstonecraft rejects Rousseau's identification of the feminine with irrational sentiment, and wants both the ‘masculine’ public and the ‘feminine’ private spheres to be judged by the universal standard of Enlightenment rationalism. However, Byron's romantic sexual satire challenges the very basis of the reason / sentiment, culture / nature dichotomy itself. Ursula Vogel has contrasted rationalism and romanticism as two divergent strategies for women's liberation in this period. She comments on the romantic position:

Not ‘rational fellowship’ among citizens, but romantic love freed from the confines of conventional sexual roles points towards the utopia of a regenerated world. … While the rationalist associates the oppression of women, and the defects of present society in general with the all-pervasive effects of social and political inequality, the romantic critic focuses on the hypocrisy and pettiness of bourgeois philistine morality in which he sees the most telling signs of the profound corruption of modern culture.²

Romantic thinkers repudiated the constraint on individuality of character imposed by sexual stereotyping. Both Meiners and Ségur had deplored the sexual equality of the ancient Spartan republic, as destructive of femininity. But in Theorie der Weiblichkeit, Friedrich Schlegel admired both the strength and independence of Spartan women and the gentleness of the men, compared to the exaggerated sexual differences of modern times:

Both the impatient will to dominate in man and the self-denying submissiveness in woman are exaggerated and ugly. Only self-reliant womanhood and gentle manhood deserve to be called good and beautiful.

(Quoted in Vogel, 1986: 37)

Like Byron, Schlegel claimed that the sensual passion of Southern women was more natural than the ‘northern frostiness’ held up as a feminine norm in Europe. Unlike rationalists like Wollstonecraft, the romantics included the liberation of woman's sexuality in their idea of female independence.³ In fact they saw romantic love as a means of personal liberation: the creation of a private enclave of freedom. Byron's most idealized heroine, Haidée, provides a paradisal haven for Juan on her Greek isle. She acts spontaneously, not constrained by Christian morality or social considerations. Her frank sexuality is therefore presented as more ‘natural’ to woman than chastity (II.190). The libertarian ideal of the Haidée episode, and The Island (1824), like Diderot's Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1772), privileges the relaxed sexuality of primitive Southern society, over European rigid Christian morality which seeks to suppress the laws of nature.

Rather than positing reform on the basis of the separation of public and private, by the reinstituting of sexual difference, Byron's poem diagnoses the lack of true male heroism as actually the result of such reductive dualism—based as it is on a false dichotomy between nature and culture. The lack of true male public-spiritedness is not attributed to the female attempt to wield ‘petticoat influence’ (as in Meiners and Ségur), but to the splitting-off of public from private spheres, and the consequent overvaluing of policy over sentiment. This theme is also explored in the political Venetian plays, where male rulers like Faliero and Foscari are expected to repress natural feeling in the interests of an oligarchic State, while women like Angiolina and Marina are guardians of conscience yet powerless to act.

Thus although Byron's critical view of the effeminization of modern society is comparable in many ways with Ségur's and Meiners's, he is nevertheless not prepared to hymn sexual differentiation by endowing the domestic sphere with a neo-spiritual sanctity in his poetry like Coleridge and Wordsworth or make the nuclear family the central plank of his liberalism. The poem begins in Canto I, with a savage denunciation of the bourgeois hagiography of the family, which for Ségur and Meiners was the basis of political stability. Byron attacks it for personal, literary and political reasons: his anger at his own failed marriage; contempt for the bourgeois protestant ethos which characterized contemporary English poetry; his perception that the new emphasis on sexual morality signalled the extension of the concerns of power into all aspects of life. The poem's stylistic features—irony, cosmopolitanism and refusal of closure—are all designed to expose the small-mindedness and insularity of the cant of personal morality, by reference to a cosmopolitan, aristocratic perspective.

Thus the portrait of Donna Inez, the moralizing mother, is not just a personal attack on Annabella and Mrs. Byron, but has a wider satiric purpose. The poet parodies the effusions on the ideal mother that we have found in Ségur. Inez is ‘perfect past all parallel’ (I.17); ‘a prodigy’ (I.12), ‘with virtues equall'd by her wit alone’ (I.10); she makes ‘the good with inward envy groan’ and ‘her noblest virtue was her magnanimity’ (I.12). As well as demonstrating the insipidity of the ideal (I.18), the poet shows Inez to have internalized the feminine ideal of morality and obedience to such an extent that whereas primitive women had to be physically oppressed to ensure their chastity, the modern woman is ‘an all-in-all-sufficient self-director’ (I.15). The moralizing mother then becomes the tool of institutional authority in policing others. She is compared to Romilly, ‘the Law's expounder and the State's corrector’, and is shown to be in league with the legal establishment and the Church to conquer and bring about the death of Don José (I.34). The ideal of the moralizing mother is portrayed as not ‘natural’ to woman as Meiners and Ségur assert, but a deliberately cultivated, artificial aura of perfection (I.18), an ideology of femininity propounded by texts and manuals:

In short, she was a walking calculation,
          Miss Edgeworth's novels stepping from their
                    covers,
Or Mrs. Trimmer's books on education,
          Or ‘Coeleb's Wife’ set out in search of lovers,
Morality's prim personification.

(I.16)

Maria Edgeworth, Sarah Trimmer and Hannah More and cited here as the female proponents of woman's role as guardian of morality.

Inez's function in life is to devote herself to the personal superintendence of her child's education, the role outlined by Rousseau and Edgeworth. Like Émile, he is supervised for all his waking hours (I.49). But Inez's favourite Evangelical women educationalists have put more emphasis on religion, and puritanically suppress all mention of the physical aspects of existence. This results in the philistinism of her ensuring Juan's studies do not include natural history (I.39), a large part of the classics (40-5) or even the Confessions of Saint Augustine (47-48). When he leaves Spain she applies her educational philosophy to the children of the poor:

In the mean time, to pass her hours away,
          Brave Inez 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 whipt, or set upon a stool:
Their manners mending, and their morals curing,
She taught them to suppress their vice and urine.

(II.10. The final couplet was censored in the proofs.)

Byron plainly portrays the appeal of the role of moralizing mother to women as a sublimated power strategy. Inez's material ambition is made clear in her letter to Juan commending Catherine's ‘maternal’ friendship for her son, and advising him to conceal his religion so as not to impair his advancement (X.31-34). The poet's technique of accretion enables him to later reveal Inez as a hypocrite anyway: although she acts the part of the wronged wife, she herself has had an affair with Alfonso (I.146), and schemed to break up his marriage in order to marry him herself (I.101).

Julia and Adeline are more subtle analyses of the new woman. Julia is a parody of the sentimental heroine of Rousseau's Julia, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), in her comical attempts to cherish only platonic feelings for her lover, remaining faithful to the elderly husband of an arranged marriage (I.75-85). Adeline loves her cold husband only with an effort (XIV.86), her natural spirit ‘frozen into a very vinous ice’ (XIII.37). Julia and Adeline try to live the feminine ideal, and spiritualize or rationalize their feelings about Juan, unable to admit their sexual origin. This is a source of comedy, but Byron also empathizes with and dramatizes the tragic frustration of these women. The notion of writers like Ségur and Meiners of extolling woman as ‘made for love’, dooms them to a role in life related only to the sexual, yet also constrained from self-expression by a concept of femininity based entirely on passivity and self-restraint. The contradiction on which this ideology of femininity is based is exposed by Julia's letter:

‘Man's love is of his life a thing apart,
          'Tis woman's whole existence; man may range
The court, camp, church, the vessel, and the mart,
          Sword, gown, gain, glory, offer in exchange
Pride, fame, ambition, to fill up his heart,
          And few there are whom these can not estrange;
Man has all these resources, we but one,
To love again, and be again undone.’

(I.194)

However, the context of the letter renders ironic Julia's envy of the masculine prerogative to separate love from life, and derive satisfaction from both the private and public spheres. For as an anti-epic the poem as a whole calls into question the masculine ethos of love as ‘a thing apart’ and in inevitable conflict with duty. The masculine honor of the court, camp, church, vessel and mart will each be shown in the poem to have degenerated into pragmatism and selfish materialism, as a result of relegating subjectivity to the inferior sphere of the private life. Military glory, fame and ambition are contemptuously portrayed by Byron as motivating the men of an age of bronze, in Don Juan, instead of true patriotism and love of liberty. A further irony is that Juan does not fill up his heart with public affairs like most men anyway, but by adopting the female role of a life devoted only to love, manages to keep his innocence and natural goodness. The expression of the sentiments through even promiscuous sexuality is thus shown to be less morally harmful to the individual than the separation of his private from his public life to facilitate the concerns of policy.

On what foundation does Byron base his attack on the notion of woman as reforming wife and mother? He relies on two points of view, which are the systole and diastole of the poem: the eighteenth-century aristocratic libertine tradition, and the antinomianism of extreme romantic individualism. The resulting shifts in tone towards woman, between cynicism and idealism, have led critics to assume the poet had no controlling purpose behind his sexual satire. In fact the libertine and romantic impulses are polarized around the two personae of middle-aged narrator and Juan as young natural man/man of sentiment, with the underlying suggestion that they are age-related aspects of the same man (the poet). The libertine pose does give the humor an antifeminist edge occasionally, in routine jokes about the bluestockings for example, and in portrayals of women as loquacious (VI.57); capable of extreme rage (XII.50); revengeful (I.124); and obtaining sway by the use of tears (V.118), lies (XI.36) and through matchmaking (XV.31). The tone is patronizingly teasing, but has none of the contempt of Pope's antifeminist satire, or the repulsion towards women we find in Swift, though there are jibes at women as creatures of insatiable appetite (see the treatment of Catherine II, and the stanzas joking about geriatric rape).

The libertine tradition also gives the poem its unique language—aristocratic, masculine and colloquial. By using it, Byron is signalling his preference for the notoriously immoral Whig aristocratic ruling class of the past, over the present Tory administration which was influenced by the Evangelical mercantile classes. In fact, he identifies himself with the very salon society that Meiners and Ségur had accused of paving the way to Revolution through their freethinking and sexual laxity. Paulson rightly comments that Byron's sexual comedy looks back to the libertarian ethos of Sheridan and Rowlandson, which is that of the Foxite Whigs of the 1790s.⁴ In France too, sexual license had been a prominent feature of the first phase of the Revolution. The Liberty tree and Phrygian cap derived from Roman fertility rites, before becoming the emblems of Liberty, and were often portrayed as phallic symbols in cartoons of the period. Hostile English reviewers of Don Juan made the connection between the poem's free sexuality and those early days of revolutionary fervor in France: comparing Byron to Louvet and Laclos, who were revolutionaries as well as authors of sexually-explicit novels.⁵

However, when Robespierre came to power, erotic libertarianism had gone out of favor, and the Jacobins reverted to defining the state as a collection of male-headed families. The second phase of the revolution was sectarian and homophile in character. In the purges of the Terror, eccentric individualists like Anarchasis Cloots and female revolutionaries and feminists such as Olympe de Gouges were ritually guillotined. This would have been the period when Juan was destined for the block. As the victim of the re-emergence of puritanical moral law, the Don would thus become a comic martyr for sexual liberty. The poet thus neatly combines his hero's aristocracy with his potential for radical subversion of society.

For the aristocratic nature of the libertinism of Don Juan is complemented by a definitively romantic and antinomian view of human sexuality, which is based on the individual, and egalitarian in its implications. Byron's Juan is not the traditional libertine as sexual predator, but an ordinary individual released from the confines of social mores. His sexuality is the result of his acting spontaneously, in accord with his emotions like the man of feeling or the natural man of eighteenth-century novels of sentiment. The romantic antinomianism of the portrayal of his love affairs makes the moral rigor of the men and women of the ‘literary lower empire’ (XI.62) appear unnatural by comparison.

Far from enabling them to act disinterestedly for the public good, the repression of their natural sexuality is portrayed by Byron as leading to the self-inflated fuelling of diseased imaginations with delusions of grandeur. Thus Wordsworth is compared to Joanna Southcott, a mystic who, when she swelled up with dropsy imagined she had been impregnated by God (Prose preface), and to other messianic fanatics—Swedenborg, Brothers, Tozer, di Cagliostro and the Baroness de Krüdener. Sexual impotence is linked with linguistic incoherence in the comparison of Southey's empty bombast with sexual intercourse without emission (Dedication 3), and in the comparison of Wordsworth's introspection and Coleridge's metaphysics with the confused yearnings of Juan's puberty (I.90-93). Castlereagh, too, is simultaneously mocked for his inarticulacy, and for his homosexuality, he is an ‘it’, a time-serving eunuch, ‘emasculated to the marrow’ (Preface to Cantos VI-VIII), taking a perverted sadistic pleasure in subjugating Ireland (Dedication 12).⁶

The notion of repressed or perverted sexual energy causing physical symptoms of disease, mental disturbances and aggression is not merely a device for satirizing individuals, but the controlling principle of the poem. Byron analyses the cause of imperial aggrandizement—represented by the Siege of Ismail—in psychological terms. The monarchs of Turkey and Russia are described as having perverted their sexuality into an unnatural exercise of power over others, expressed in their amassing of both harems and armies. The energy created by this distortion of the libido can only find its outlet through genocide. The only other alternative would be a therapeutic imperial copulation:

          There was a way to end their strife …
She to dismiss her guards and he his harem
And for other matters, meet and share 'em.

(VI.95)

We could compare Swift's ‘A Digression concerning Madness’, in A Tale of a Tub. Both Byron and Swift use a materialist perspective derived from Lucretius's On the Nature of the Universe to explain the sexual basis of their satire of imperial warfare. Swift attributes the imperial aggrandizement of Henry IV of France to unfulfilled lust for the Princesse de Condé:

… the collected part of the Semen, raised and enflamed, became adust, converted to Choler, turned head upon the spinal Duct, and ascended to the Brain. The very same Principle that influences a Bully to break the Windows of a Whore, who has jilted him, naturally stirs up a Great Prince to raise mighty armies, and dream of nothing but Sieges, Battles, and Victories.

… Teterrima belli causa …⁷

Byron, too, quotes from Horace Sat. I.iii.107, and stresses the fact that he takes the unspoken word ‘cunnus’ as the cause of war, rather than—by synecdoche—woman. In other words, not woman but the womb itself—or human libido—generates hysteria on a world scale. Libido functions beneficially in furthering procreation under Venus, yet is converted into the death-dealing aggression of Mars if thwarted or perverted (IX.55-56). Sexual stereotyping is overturned by having Catherine make the martial decision to take the city at any cost, and likening Juan, in his military uniform to Cupid, the god of love. This emphasizes that the libido works both positively and negatively in both sexes alike. In fact the selection of the Siege of Ismail as an image of carnage, in which the warring nations are headed by both a male and a female monarch, emphasizes that the dynamics of sexuality and power operate in exactly the same way in men and women. This pan-sexual diagnosis of both personal and social aggression is biological, rather than cultural in emphasis. It therefore undermines the progressive historicism of Montesquieu's myth of the influence of climate and Meiners's view of racially-determined sexual mores. Byron's viewpoint is fundamentally psychological (anticipating the ideas of Freud and Wilhelm Reich).

Don Juan is emancipatory in that it also challenges belief in definitive feminine and masculine roles. The poem specifically attacks both the notion of woman's role as reformer of the nation's morals, and the masculine military ethos lauded by traditional epic. Central to this endeavor is Byron's use of the comedy of sexual role reversal. His version of the Don Juan story is innovative in that his Juan is a passive cipher; the women seduce him. This satirizes the notion of female sexuality as either non-existent or at least naturally modest and chaste. Frederick Beaty has suggested that Byron was probably inspired by the pantomime tradition, and may have read Hazlitt's review in The Examiner for 25th May 1817, of a new after-piece, based on The Libertine, in which Don Juan was for the first time portrayed as the victim of female circumstance ‘forced into acts of villainy against his will’.⁸ However, Byron's use of sexual role reversal differs from this pantomime as from Joseph Andrews, in that he makes Juan not a chaste and reluctant victim, but vulnerable to seduction through his capacity for emotion. The purpose of the sexual role reversal is thus extended: showing men as equally capable of ‘feminine’ sentiment, as well as women not above showing ‘masculine’ appetite.

Byron also draws on the transvestite tradition of pantomime, carnival and masquerade, particularly in the Turkish episode when Juan is dressed as a female slave, and the mock Gothic ghost story in Norman Abbey, when the Duchess impersonates a monk. In her excellent article on cross-dressing in Don Juan, Susan Wolfson comments: ‘In the heightened forms of cross-dressing, Byron foregrounds the artifice that sustains much of what we determine to be “masculine” and “feminine”.’⁹ The codes and laws of gender are continually challenged through transgression in these episodes, though the subversive energy of sexual role reversal is temporarily contained by the comic resolution of each story in a reassuring restatement both of Juan's male potency and his lovers' ‘feminine’ sentiment. The intention is not to substitute a new definition of masculine and feminine roles, but to celebrate the capacity of the individual to override all such categorization. The existing concepts of masculinity and femininity are not rejected in themselves, but individualism is privileged over gender identity.

The double standard of sexual morality, on which the thesis of Ségur and Meiners rests, is constantly attacked in the poem. In both the Turkish and the Russian episodes, Juan is dressed and/or treated as a concubine, and evaluated by his owner/employer in purely physiological terms. In Russia his sexual prowess is even tested by ‘l'eprouveuse’ before his services are engaged. The unusual view of a man used in this way brings home to the reader the humiliating sexual oppression of women accepted as normal in many societies. The satire simultaneously shows women in authority like Catherine and Gulbeyaz to be as capable as men of using sexuality in the context of a power relationship. Juan initially reacts with tears (V.118); and later complies through vanity and self-interest (IX.68: 72), as women conventionally do. The Russian courtiers behave in response to the role reversal: the women leer enviously at Juan, while the men are tearful with jealousy (IX.78). Clearly, the poem demonstrates ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ behavior as culturally rather than biologically determined.

Byron uses the same cultural polarities as Ségur and Meiners—the North/South myth—but reverses the usual value judgement by portraying Southern passionate heroines positively and the European women as cold and calculating. There are only two exceptions—Gulbeyaz and Aurora, for Byron gave both Julia and Haidée Moorish blood to emphasize their Southerness. England, which to Meiners was ‘a paradise for women’, where they enjoyed ‘rational liberty’ is shown at length in Cantos XI-XII to possess the most highly-organized system of bartering women for money: the aristocratic marriage market (XI.48-49; XII.13-16; 58-61), which forms an ironic point of comparison with the Turkish slave market of Canto V (7; 10; 26-30). Marriage is here a matter of lawsuits not passion (XII.68), and money above all (XII.32-38). Adeline, as circumspect mistress of her country house and hostess to the local gentry, is not shown fulfilling a redemptive moral role in provincial society, but coldly performing an artificial and uncongenial exercise in political management and public relations.

Norman Abbey is an emblem of Northern marriage. The juxtaposition of its ruined church and opulent mansion indicates that the decline of the Church's influence in the state has contributed to the power of the landowning dynasties. Its carved religious symbols are gone: only the female icon of virgin mother and child is left to preside over an empty arch (XIII.61-64), just as the only vestige of Christianity in public life is the vapid sentimentalization of domesticity. The ghost of the Black Friar haunts the Amundevilles' marriagebed (XVI.340-41). Adeline's role as wife and mother is thus symbolically constrained by the life-denying morality of a largely defunct religion. She could cast it off by night as does the Duchess her cowl to play the game of adultery, but only at the risk of her social position.

Aurora presents a third choice: a genuine Christian heroine. Here Byron comes closest to the feminine ideal of Ségur and Meiners. ‘Infantine in figure’, she has none of the threatening sexuality of the mature woman; she is sad and silent (XV.47), beautiful (XV.48), pure (XV.55) and austerely religious (XV.46). She differs, though, in that as a Catholic she is automatically an outsider from the governing class; as an orphan she is lonely and not a member of a nuclear family (XV.44); she is also strong (XV.47), contemptuous of society (XV.53), self-possessed (XV.57), bookish (XV.85) and not given to ‘feminine’ wiles, blushes and smiles (XVI.93-94). Byron is here uniting the virtues of female chastity with individual choice and independence rather than with obedience and submission to the dictates of family or society.

This study of the context of Byron's ‘sexual Jacobinism’ shows it to be a point of view subversive not only of orthodox Christian morality, but of one of the fundamental tenets of liberal ideology: the notion of the state as a collection of male-headed families, whose ability to transmit hereditary property rests on the ideology of female submission and chastity. Just as the revolutionary concept of universal suffrage threatened the political authority of these property-owners, so sexual individualism would undermine male primogeniture and dissipate their economic power. Byron took from Coleridge the idea of a new treatment of Don Juan, ending his days in the Terror, in order to vent his scorn, not just on the Tories, but at the bourgeois and reactionary turn liberalism had taken after the French Revolution.

Had he completed the poem, Juan's death on the guillotine would have explicitly underlined the relationship of the political and sexual, which has been virtually ignored by the modern reader. The subverter of dynastic marriages all over Europe, the aristocratic Don Juan is a sexual Jacobin, and one who continues to pose a threat to the contemporary re-establishment of the ancien régime, since all known social and governmental systems are shown in the poem to be based on control of female sexuality to further dynastic alliances. Sexual libertarianism, such as the Don's, is an aspect of the Natural Law which, it had been thought, would replace the authority of Church and King, in the earliest days of the Revolution. But the guillotining of Juan by the Jacobins themselves—alongside such idealists as Anarchasis Cloots and Olympe de Gouges—would also show how incompatible are true individualism and political government of any color.

The political danger of sexual Jacobinism was clear at the time. The Poet Laureate thundered:

This evil is political as well as moral, for indeed moral evils are inseparably connected … there is no means whereby that corruption can be so surely and rapidly diffused as by poisoning the waters of literature.¹⁰

Southey was particularly worried by two sections of Byron's readership: women and the working class. The poem was being brought out in numerous pirated editions by Radical publishers like Benbow, Onwhyn and Sherwin in half-a-crown duodecimo volumes, which would enable the poorer classes to buy it.¹¹ Women formed a large part of Byron's readership. Women and the working class were both characterized as so susceptible to subjectivity and irrationality that they would be more easily corrupted by the dangerous individualism of the poem into subversive lawlessness. It is an historical irony that it was a libertine who was in a position to challenge the consensus on the necessity for female chastity, and an aristocrat who could discern the bourgeois nature of contemporary liberal thought.

In the nineteenth century the view of Ségur and Meiners prevailed of course. The notion of woman's role as biologically and culturally determined to be guardian of morals in the family was used as an argument to press for reforms in female education, and later even to demand the vote. Wollstonecraft's rejection of conventional ‘femininity’ and Byron's assertion of female sexuality were both anathema to the majority of women, who found that stressing their feminine sentiment and superior capacity for morality was more effective in gaining concessions from the male hegemony than attacking the ideology of sexual difference itself. The issue is still current in contemporary feminism.

In the postwar reconstruction of society after the anarchy of the Revolution, the personal had become the political. Writers like Meiners, Ségur and Coleridge saw female chastity as the measure of effective political authority. Byron's poem accepts the premise. He merely restates it in terms of individual freedom. Freedom over his/her sexuality is the measure of the individual's degree of autonomy.

Notes

1. On Byron's imagery of climate, see Gerald Wood, ‘The Metaphor of the Climates’, BJ, 6 (1978): 16-25.

2. Ursula Vogel, ‘Rationalism and Romanticism: Two Strategies for Women's Liberation’, in Feminism and Political Theory, ed. by Judith Evans et al. (London: Sage, 1986), pp. 17-46. On the comparison between the attitudes of the rationalists and the romantics to sexual difference and to romantic love, see also H. G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History (London: Constable, 1966; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 151-8.

3. Wollstonecraft minimizes the importance of passion and sexuality: ‘A master and a mistress of a family ought not to continue to love each other with passion. I mean to say that they ought not to indulge those emotions which disturb the order of society …’ Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), ed. by Miriam Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 114.

4. Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 279. On Don Juan and libertinism, see also Leonard W. Deen, ‘Liberty and Licence in Byron's Don Juan’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 8 (1960): 345-57; and Sheila J. McDonald, ‘The Impact of Libertinism on Byron's Don Juan’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 86.3 (1983-1985): 291-317.

5. The Romantics Reviewed, part B, ed. by Donald Reiman, 5 vols (New York: Garland, 1972), Vol. I, pp. 307, 207.

6. Frederick Garber has noted that this crude abuse of Castlereagh and others, for their impotence or chastity, can be compared to the origin of satire, as described by Robert C. Elliot's The Power of Satire, in fertility festivals. See his ‘Self and the Language of Satire in Don Juan’, Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor, 5 (1982): 40.

7. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. by Kathleen Williams (London: Dent, 1975), pp. 103-4.

8. Frederick L. Beaty, ‘Harlequin Don Juan’, JEGP, 67 (1968): 395-405.

9. See Susan J. Wolfson, ‘“Their She Condition”: Cross-dressing and the Polities of Gender in Don Juan’, ELH, 54 (1987): 585-617 [see below, Chapter 6]. See also Katherine Kernberger, ‘Power and Sex: The Implication of Role Reversal in Catherine's Russia’, BJ, 10 (1982): 42-9.

10. Robert Southey, Preface to A Vision of Judgement, The Poetical Works of Robert Southey (London: Longmans, 1838), Vol. X, p. 206.

11. See Hugh J. Luke Jr., ‘The Publishing of Byron's Don Juan’, PMLA, 80 (1965): 199-209. See also N. Stephen Bauer, ‘Romantic Poets and Radical Journalists’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 79 (1978): 266-75.

All quotations from Don Juan are taken from Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. by Jerome J. McGann, Vol. V (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). References are by canto and stanza.

List of Abbreviations

BJ	Byron Journal
ELH	Journal of English Literary History
JEGP	Journal of English and Germanic Philology
PMLA	Publications of the Modern Language Association of America