Byronic Heroic Elements in 'Don Juan':

Before going to labor our topic it is better to have a sound knowledge about Byronic hero. W. H. Auden analyzed the conception of the Byronic hero as follows: Byron spent his early years in comparative poverty with a mother who alternately hit him and covered him with kisses and a Calvinist nurse who spoke to him of hell-fire and predestined damnation... Unhappiness sharpens a child wits and he soon realized that his parents were violent and odd people, that this ancestors were violent and odd too and that his deformity made him different from other children. Further as usually happens when the parents are separated he idealized the absent one, the father. Out of this background came the Byronic Hero. Father made him passionate, Nancy made him doomed ancestors and the little lame foot made him aristocratic yet the bitter enemy of society.

Byronic Hero Characteristics:

There are certain characteristics which are commonly to be found in all the heroes of Byron-childe-Harold, Lara, Manfred, Bonnivard, Mazeppa. The heroes of Byron share certain common qualities, and out of those has emerged the general Byronic hero covering the essential traits and qualities all the heroes of Byron. In the Byronic hero are represented the essential qualities and characteristics that were found in the character of Byron himself.

The Byronic heroes are essentially projections of Byron's own personality, his likings and disliking’s, his hatreds and antipathies. The heroes of Byron; hare his enthusiasm and hatred, his opposition to tyranny and oppression, his cynicism and melancholy, and his disregard for the values of life. In fact, the Byronic hero is the person of Byron himself He was himself the beginning, the middle and the end of all his own poetry, the hero of every tale, the chief object in every landscape. Harold, Dara, Manfred and a crowd of other characters were universally considered merely as loose incognitos of Byron and there is reason to believe that he meant them to be considered so."The wonders of the outer world, the fagus, with the mighty feels of England riding on its bosom the flowers of cintra over hanging the Shaggy forest of cork trees and willows etc. Were all accessories, the background to one dark and melancholy figure, the figure of Byron."

Let us note the common characteristics of the Byronic hero. All are almost all. His heroes have minds which seem at variance with their forhenes, and exhibit high and poignant feelings of plan and pleasure; a keen sense of what is noble and honorable, and an equally keen susceptibility of injustice or injury, under the garb of stoicism or contempt of mankind. His heroes are men who have arrived by different roads to the same goal of despair, who are sick of life, who are at war with society, who are supported in their anguish only by an unconquerable pride resembling that of Prometheus on the rock or of Satan in the burning marl, who can master their agonies by the force of their will, and who, to the last defy the whole power of earth and heaven. It appears that the heart of his heroes has withered, and their capacity for happiness had gone to melancholy. They are the authors of scorn, misanthropy and despair." In short we may say that the Byronic hero is the embodiment of pride, bravery, restlessness, wickedness, melancholy, cynicism, freedom, opposition to oppression and restraint. His heroes are sadists to a certain degree. They take pleasure in inflicting pain upon other. They are proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on their brows and misery in their hearts, corsair is proud, capricious, scornful, revengeful to the point of cruelty, prey to remorse and magnanimous enough to submit to the most barbarous torberes rather than kill a sleeping enemy. Cain is a murderer, and sardanapaus is proud, brave and voluptuous.

Bonnivard and Mazeppa are like Byron, lovers of freedom and critics of oppression. The final estimate of the Byronic I Zero is that he is the projection of Byron himself. The first appearance of the Byronic hero came in Childe Harold and the last appearance of the same hero is Don Juan.

In context of the delineation as stated above we come across that the poem 'Don Juan' is abound with the elements of Byronic hero and Byron achieves success in evoking it to a great extent.

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