These categories are, as both Caroline Franklin and Wolfson posit, culturally rather than biologically constituted (Franklin, “Juan’s Sea Changes” 86 Wolfson, “Their She-Condition” 591). Signs that seem clear markers of difference can become agents of sexual disorientation that break down, invert, and radically call into question the categories designed to discriminate “masculine” from “feminine”.

Susan Wolfson reads them as producing confusion about sexual orientation: Such subversions draw attention to the function of gender in Byron’s poem, as has been noted by numerous critics. The Don Juan who breaches the sanctity of the harem and finds himself desired by numerous amorous women is also a Don Juan who is made to dress up as an oriental slavewoman and who enacts poses of sentimental heroinism while denouncing libertinism. Yet, these tropes are consistently complicated in the poem and used to undermine the gendered foundations of their traditions. In the harem episode of cantos V and VI, we can recognise an Orientalist premise, a libertine fantasy, and a picaresque adventure, with some traces of the epic and the gothic. Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1819-1824) is a poem which depends on gendered literary traditions for both its originality and its intelligibility. This essay considers the formulation of such subversions through explicitly literary paradigms: what signs of gender are referred to, and how are they made intelligible as fictional constructs? By interrogating the use of gendered tropes, their formation as intelligible concepts within literary history, and their negotiations with sexualised conventions of narrative, I intend to highlight the discrepancies in the heteronormative construction of these literary paradigms and Byron’s use of them to suggest sexual fluidity. In the harem episode of cantos V and VI, we can recognise a libertine fantasy, an Orientalist premise, and a picaresque adventure, but also some traces of epic, the gothic and literature of sensibility. Lord Byron’s Don Juan is a poem which depends on gendered literary traditions for both its originality and its intelligibility.

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