Lord byron
...ad continual affections towards married woman and he described his own marriage to Anne Isabella Milbanke as “not all sunshine.” So, when the narrator in Don Juan claims that love does not exist in marriage, it is difficult to separate the highly unfortunate love events in Byron’s life and the extrememly cynical voice of the narrator. Also, in the first canto Byron describes Donna Inez, the mother of Don Juan with close relation to his own ex-wife Anne Isabella Milbanke. He writes that she was extrememly intellegent and “perfect past all parallel.” Then continues to say, “ But – oh ye lords of ladies intellectual!/ Inform us truly, have they not henpecked you all?” Addressing his audience directly, the narrator expresses a clearly contemptuous outlook on intellectual wives. This parallels Byron’s ex-wife in that she too was intellegent and her escape from their marriage most likely left him with feeling of detest. When considering the form of the poem, Don Juan presents critics with a highly controversial topic; the random combination of comedy, romance, and political conversation creates a hodge podge of genres. In the first canto Byron maps out the story of Don Juan claiming the story’s end and writing that his story is a different kind of epic, one that is truthful. As the poem progessses though, he moves into an unstructured, digressive story that includes love affairs, cannibals, and romantic love relationships. Frederick Beatty writes that, “Byron’s repeated assersations that the cantos of Don Juan, whether organized around topics or episodic narrative, could go on almost indefinetly suggest a looseness of structure and an open-endedness that challenge conventional notions of form.” This looseness and shapelessness of the form that Beatty describes in his discourse on Byron mirrors Byron’s personality; Byron was often described as moody and unstable. Rutherford describes Byron’s personality as contradictory; He would change moods immediately from “severe melancholy to reckless gaity.” So, perhaps when writing Don Juan, Byron’s move from the cannibals in canto two to the lovely romance between Juan and Haidee is a relfection of his own changing moods and passing thoughts. Furthermore, the structure of the poem represents Byron’s feelings towards society and life. Beatty writes that the “form or formlessness, accuratley reflects Byron’s view of life and man’s disordered, incongrous and unpredictable state.” Byron’s reflections upon his own writing as strictly anti-romaticist is apparent in Don Juan through the first canto. When developing the character of Juan, Byron discusses his childhood, writing that although Juan grew up with only his mother, he was educated properly: But that which Donna Inez most desired And saw herself each day before all The learned tutors whom for him she hired Was that his breeding whould be strictly moral. Much into all his studies she inquired, And so they were submitted first to her, all Arts, sciences; no branch w...