Ans: “Don Juan” is a wonderful poem by Lord Byron who is one of the most powerful satirists of England during the 19th century. The satirical genius of Lord Byron was essentially outstanding. His highest achievement “Don Juan” begins as a romance and ends as a satire. He unearths hypocrisy and corruption of high society in a convincing manner with the help of wit, humor, and irony,

In the opening stanzas of “Don Juan”, we see Donna Inez design special education for her son Juan. She tries to keep from having sexual affairs. Ironically enough, Juan remains permanently boyish and immature in sexuality and his later life is dominated by sexual love.

In the poem, Byron satirized the code of love prevailing at the moment. There is no existence of true love no conjugal happiness. Women are hypocrites and unfaithful to their husbands.

In the poem, Byron satirizes marriage without love. Society may support marriage without love but we know that it paves the way for illicit love affairs as we find in the conjugal life of Jose and Inez as well as Alfonso and Julia. Byron here satirizes arranged marriage and the free sex of society which even gives birth to an illegitimate child. He conveys this satire through the information of Julia’s grandmother who begot Julia’s father without marriage.

The hypocrisy of women is satirized in the character of both Inez and Julia. Don Jose and Donna Inez are a married couple. But their conjugal life is not a happy one. They are different in mentality. Inez cannot keep pace with the passivity of her husband. There was a rumor that Jose had a mistress or two. Jose’s having a mistress is the source of the quarrel between Inez and her husband. They are so different in their temperament that they wish for each other’s death but not divorce. But they were very clever. They never showed their ‘outward signs of inward life’.

Though Inez is pious and devoted Christian, she had a love affair with Alfonso before her marriage and continued the affair even after her marriage. She pretends to maintain a friendship with Julia in order to continue her affair with Alfonso. She lets Juan mix with Julia to open Alfonso’s eyes in order to keep him the way of an illicit love affair.

In the characterization of Julia, we get a clear instance of Byron’s satire of the hypocrisy of women. Although Julia is married and chaste and fully conscious about the social, moral, and religious laws, she indulges in the secret vice of an illicit sexual relationship with young Juan. The cold satire of Byron becomes more apparent from the episode containing the incident of the physical love between Julia with Juan in her bed. She rebukes Alfonso for suspecting her. To prove her innocence she even pretends to weep and goes into a fainting fit to proclaim her own fidelity. But at last, Juan is discovered in her room. Then he is sent to the convent for moral purification. We find Julia as a perfectly confident hypocrite here.

To sum up we can say that Byron is a successful satirist in the English language. In the poem, he attacks abuses of virtue and morality, the hypocrisy of women, and the infidelity of both husbands and wives. So there is no doubt that “Don Juan – Canto 1″ is a social satire.