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DON JUAN, AN EXAMPLE OF A SERIAL SEDUCER

Don Juan is one of the great myths of the West, a character of legendary origin who soon became the embodiment of
the irrepressible seducer, the unscrupulous and morally-less libertine, the serial conqueror, but also the ungodly and
deceitful atheist who mocks not only women but also laws and even God. This figure bursts in literature, in poetry, in
opera (where Mozart excels), in film, but dominates especially in the theatre, where he became the protagonist of
important plays, starting with Tirso de Molina's El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra and ending with the
Commedia dell'Arte, Molière's masterpiece and works by contemporary authors’.

Don Juan is the embodiment of unbridled sensuality, he’s a libertine and a conqueror of females, who despises rules
and loves transgression, who is not afraid of death, who scorns the afterlife and divinity itself. The myth was born at
the beginning of the 17th century as a consequence of the theatrical, sensual and passionate atmosphere of the
Baroque society, embodying an entire era characterized by the borderline between good and evil, pleasure and moral
duty, transgression and punishment.

Psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati says that "Don Juan's desire reflects the phantom unconscious (or conscious) male
desire: to enjoy one's own irresistible charm, to transform woman into conquest, to endlessly lengthen the list of one's
seductive exploits.... However, the first obstacle that this drive is bound to encounter is that in none of the women
seduced... can ever find the woman he seeks because “The Woman" does not exist... Don Juan knows no guilt. He
decides to be unrepentant, to play with the truth: he loves the mask, the trick, the artifice. The only law he knows is
that of his own enjoyment reckless’.

DON JUAN, Byron, 1818 (from Norton)

The poem breaks off with the sixteenth canto, but even in its unfinished state Don Juan is the longest satirical poem,
and indeed one of the longest poems of any kind, in English. Its hero, the Spanish libertine, had in the original legend
been superhuman in his sexual energy and wickedness. Throughout Byron's version the unspoken but persistent joke
is that this archetypal lady-killer of European legend is in fact more acted upon than active. Unfailingly amiable and
well intentioned, he is guilty largely of youth, charm, and a courteous and compliant spirit. The women do all the rest.

Byron's literary advisers thought the poem unacceptably immoral, and John Murray took the precaution of printing the
first two installments (cantos 1—2, then 3—5) without identifying Byron as the author or himself as the publisher.
Byron aimed at creating a comic yet devastatingly critical history of the Europe of his own age, sending the
impressionable Juan from West to East and back again, from his native Spain to a Russian court (by way of a
primitive Greek island and the 1790 siege of the Turkish town of Ismail) and then into the English gentry's country
manors. These journeys, which facilitated Byron's satire on almost all existing forms of political organization, would,
according to the scheme that he projected for the poem as a whole, ultimately have taken Juan to a death by
guillotining in Revolutionary France. But the poem breaks off with the 16th canto,