At the Margins of Romanticism: The Women of Don Juan’s English Cantos

Abstract

The essay uses the women of the English Cantos of Don Juan to tease out the debate on Byron’s position on the margins of Romanticism relative to Neo-Classical or Romantic expectations. The essay also raises the question whether Byron’s Romanticism is ironised out of existence and whether his Neo-Classicism is as straightforward a return to Popean satire as it might on occasion seem. The three main female characters, Adeline, Aurora and Fitz-Fulke help the reader to focus on these questions, since the whole tissue of the English Cantos returns to them time and again and underlines the fact that the experience of reading Don Juan is often paradoxically elegiac, for all its humour and sense of the energy of life.