Myths of Seduction and Betrayal by Jonathan Miller

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Introduction Pg.xii If Don Giovanni can be said to be about anything, it is, among other things, about the dangers of over-reaching. Faust loses his soul by impudently using it to purchase omniscience. Don Giovanni spends his soul trying to assert sexual omnipotence. Both characters com to grief by failing to recognize that human powers are bounded and that the identifiability of an individual personality is annihilated by the attempt to include everything.

Pg.xiii Professor Lipking suggests that the role of Donna Elvira implies another kind of hell for Don Giovanni: the isolation be brings upon himself. ‘I myself am hell; nobody’s here.’

Pg. Xiv At that time, women who fell from the position of honorable chastity and who failed to have their sexual conquest subsequently sanctified by marriage, sank into a sort of death in life – a limbo of exclusion from society, of dishonor and disgrace that very often led to suicide.

Libertinism and Promiscuity by Roy Porter Pg. 7 This revaluation of sexuality was reinforced by the advances of physiology. Anatomists researching the nervous system came to see the sense and the genitals, the brain and the minds as forming a single integrated system. The age-old Platonic and Augustinin doctrines of the civil war of Mind against the passions – including sex – yielded to new visions of an intimate dialectic integrating sensation, sex, sensibility and consciousness.

Pg.8 Mainline eighteenth-century thought thus came to regard sex as thoroughly natural, indeed as forming the soul of nature itself. It was universal desire or hunger (in Tom Jones Fielding wrote of ‘the Desire of satisfying a voracious Appetite with a certain Quantity of delicate white human Flesh’). And it was supreme source of pleasure (‘in my mind’, reflected Boswell, ‘there cannot be higher felicity on earth enjoyed by man than the participation of genuine reciprocal amorous affection with an admirable woman’). Moreover, this new sense of the rightness, the right of free sexual expression, as doing what comes naturally, was reinforced by a range of contemporary experience and outlooks.

Pg. 10 In such a climate, desire assumed a primacy; pursuing desire, though deemed a vice or sin, seemed to many the natural course of action unless countered by some weightier obstacle.

Pg. 12 Easily the most common part was that of conqueror. In real life and in fiction, amorous encounters were cast time and again in the metaphors of a war of the sexes, in which it was the male role to contest, lay siege, overcome and gain a victory.

Pg.13 Linked to the role of conqueror was that of Turk. Islam above all presented an advanced society in which polygamy was lawful. Not surprisingly then, the Turk with his seraglio preoccupied the libertine imagination.

Pg.17 It is not easy to assess the history of libertinism, for it is difficult to sift myth from reality, literary stereotype and fiction from real life.

Pg. 18 We might not expect this bourgeois pleasure principle to relate to Don Giovanni, yet is he so very different from Fanny Hill, in his capacity to pursue and to bestow erotic pleasure? As to ruin and avenge but a ‘power of desire, the energy of sensual desire’.

Don Juanism from Below by Robert Darnton p.g.20 Don Juan belongs to the upper classes. A Leporello may leer at a peasant girl or paw at a lady if properly disguised, but he cannot practice the noble art of seduction, at least not on the stage. But what happened off stage? Was there, a plebeian variety of Don Juanism? No scholar, however partial to the Pompadour style of socio-cultural history, would deny a sex life to the working man.

p.g 22 Being endlessly varied, seduction provides limitless matter for stories, and stories are essential to Don Juanism. If Don lacks a Leporello, they will recount their conquests by themselves. For their ‘ism’ is less a pattern of behavior than a kind of narrative: male braggadocio dressed up as opera and drama, or dressed down as locker-room farce and dirty joking.

Donna Abbandonata by Lawrence Lipking p.g.36 In fact this is her catalogue or card of identity: the credentials of an abandoned woman. And the list of complaints makes a perfect match with the libertine’s list of conquests. In a moment she will have to attend and suffer while Leporello reads another catalogue from another book, the sum of seductions that reduces her unique sense of pain and betrayal to one among two thousand and sixty-four. p.g.37 The majority of great heroines and prima donnas, in Western tradition, have been abandoned women. Even the word ‘heroine’ reflects that tradition. It derives from Ovid’s Heroides or Heroic Epistles, the classic book in which fifteen famous women, from Penelope to Sappho, write letters of passion and despair to the men who have left them. Again and again the pattern is repeated: the lover stamps his image on the woman’s heart and goes; she stays, pursues him with her thoughts, and gradually turns her sense of abandonment into a way of life. Ovid acknowledges no other kind of heroine.

p.g.38 It was only with the rise of the libertine, however, that the modern abandoned woman really came into her own. for the business of the libertines is precisely to make as many abandoned women as he can.

p.g.39 To some extent this predicament derives from the word ‘abandoned’ itself. In Italian and other romance language as well as in English, the woman’s ‘abandon’ suggests a basic ambiguity: she may be either forsaken or shameless, abandoned by or abandoned to.

p.g.41 The woman forgets herself, the man’s attention is pricked. Not even Kierkegaard, in his visionary portrait of Elvira in Either/Or, can help noticing her throbbing bosom and streaming hair; ‘her nun’s veil was torn and floated out behind her, her thing white gown would have betrayed much to a profane glance, had not the passions in her countenance turned the attention of even the most depraved of men upon itself.’

The Seduction of Women by Jane Miller p.g. 48 To do that is not just to misname but shamefully to over-react. Yet it is possible to construe women’s inclusion as willing participants in their own seduction as a sleight-of-hand disguising their exclusion from the language which performs it.

p.g.49 It is not merely that myths and legends of the Don Giovanni kind tell stories which place women anomalously in relation to men’s designs on them, but that women who read such tales, or write them, are cast as androgynous, duplicitous and at fault.

…

Foucault, who taught us to think about sexuality in terms of historical discourse and their relation to power, contributed, nonetheless, to a tradition which offered the libertine as a kind of libertarian, hero, free spirit and individualist.

p.g.50 It has above all been difficult for women to write of seduction and of seductive men and seducers within a tradition which has measured the seducer’s claim to general sympathy or disapproval in terms of his stealing another man’s property and thereby contravening civil law, divine law, or both.

…

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ‘Tis woman’s whole existence; man may range The court, camp, church, the vessel, and the mart; Sword, gown, gain, glory, offer in exchange Pride, fame, ambition, to fill p his heart, And few there are whom these cannot estrange; Men have all these resources, we but one, To love again, and be again undone.

p.g.54 Lovelace is, as he puts it to Bedford, ‘a notorious woman-eater’. The association of seduction with the hunting, the preparing and the eating of food is explicit and emphatic in the novel and is, of course, central to the value put on women and to the options open to Clarissa herself. She has learned from her brother that ‘daughters are chickens brought up for the tables of other men.’

p.g.58 The male tradition of seduction narratives focuses on female sexuality as a value commodity, worth a certain amount of money on the open market. It is a commodity owned by men and prized. The seducer of women disrupts the ordinary process of bargaining and exchange: intruding on the transaction by recognizing and appealing to the woman herself and to her sexual nature.

p.g.60 Stories and novels are bent, like operas, on seduction. They are out to cajole complicity from readers imagined in postures of mutinous independence. So long as the narrative of male seduction ignores the woman as its reader, or at best assumes her to be androgynous, the text will have closed in on itself, protecting its embalmed view of men’s and women’s libido, as Clarissa does, by identifying an independent sexuality in women- their refusal of the seducer- with the chaste and the corpse-like.

Odzooks! A Man of Stone Earth, heaven and hell in eighteenth-century tomb sculpture by Malcolm Baker

p.g.68 Placed in this context, the statue episode in the Don Juan myth may be seen to have had for the audience of Mozart’s opera a particular intensity that depended on contemporary perceptions of tomb sculpture. When the figure of the Commendatore comes alive, da Ponte is not only employing a convention about animated statuary, he is also bringing into play a set of far more powerful responses associated with the imagery of monuments.

The Father’s Revenge by Peter Gay p.g.71 Each province of the mind, the id, the ego, the superego, must somehow be satisfied in the act of creation which celebrates a truce in the maker’s mental economy, a liberation of energies. Moreover, each work of art is a work of memory, a representation of things seen, heard, felt and stored away. Nor do these elements alone make the landscape, the sonnet – or the opera.

p.g.72 there is a much-quoted sentence from a letter to his father which has sometimes been written off as boasting within the family, but which seems to describe, quite soberly, the intensity of Mozart’s absorption in his world: ‘Komponir ist schon alles – aber geschrieben noch nicht’ (‘Everything is already composed, but not yet written down’)

p.g.75 In Hoffmann’s famous novella, ‘Don Juan’, the Don, just before the curtain rises on the opera, has consummated his conquest of Donna Anna in the obscurity of her maidenly bedroom and aroused in her a criminal love for her irresistible seducer. This is possible; certainly Mozart scholars like Alfred Einstein have made Hoffmann’s version their own. But it is quite as likely, and indeed psychologically more persuasive, to think of Donna Anna as continuing to mourn, not for the Don, but for her father.

The libertine’s Progress by Peter Conrad

p.g.81 He is less a person than a potential, whose migration through time, place and metamorphic changes of identity declare his ambition to experience an infinitude of possibilities.

p.g.82 The first sponsor of this prolific offspring, in the play attributed to Tirso de Molina and dating probably from 1616, is located in ethical orthodoxy. El Burlandor de Sevilla is monkish propaganda, demonstrating the vengeful triumph of death. The ‘Burlador’ burlesques religion, and is punished by the heaven he offends. By 1664, when Moliere wrote his Don Juan, the cultural judgment of the character was shifted.

p.g.83 Mozart’s Don Giovanni compounds this version of the character with a different evaluation which soon replace it, adding to the classic reason of Moliere’s sexual mathematician a tempestuous romantic irrationality.

p.g. 85 In 1843, Kierkegaard used the opera to elaborate the dialectic of his treatise Either/Or, in which he opposed the dull wisdom of ethics to the happy irresponsibility of aesthetics.

p.g.86 As a libertine proceeds through these permutations of identity, his victims undergo corresponding changes. Kiekegaard’s theory depends on a reinterpretation of Elvira. She is defined as Don Giovanni’s ‘mortal enemy’, or ‘his epic fate, as Commendatore is his dramatic fate.’

p.g.88 In England, however - defying the injunctions against language of both Hoffmann and Kierkegaard – the libertine appears as a garrulous talker. The Hero of Byron’s Don Juan is more an anecdotalist than a seducer, and the vastly chatty poem through which he wanders transforms libertinism into a parliamentary liberalism.

p.g.89 Linklater extends the libertine’s life by gainsaying his meaning for, as Kierkegaard’s condescension about Papageno’s mating implies, it’s impossible to imagine Don Giovanni with children.

p.g.90 The end comes for the emigrant libertine when America obliges him to reform, conform and pledge allegiance to the flag. This happens in 1949, in a Warner Brthers film called Adventures of Don Juan, directed by Vincent Sharman. The music is by Max Steiner not Mozart, and Don Juan is played by that alcoholic reprobate Errol Flynn, whose wicked, wicked ways the film might be expected to relate – but the truth is stranger.

p.g.91 Linklater has presented Juan’s birth as an allegory of Whiggish progress. ‘the Eighteenth century was dying, and Time was already busy with a nursery for the nineteenth.’ The lord bastard is ‘the coming child of Chronos.’

p.g. 92 The archetypal Don Giovanni doesn’t even respect God, let alone a monarch. But, to our dismay this twentieth-century Don Juan has at last made good. When that occurs, his flame is extinguished. There is no more to be said about him.

Valmont – or the Marquis Unmasked by Marina Warner p.g. 93 Elvira knows, pursues, succumbs again- almost. As for Mme de Merteuil, it was Valmont’s fame as a seducer that spurred her original longing for him (one of the planks of the legend is that all women secretly want to appear in Don Juan’s catalogue of conquests).

p.g.94 but there are deeper points of contact and difference between Don Giovanni in the opera and Valmont in Les Liaisons dangereuses, as well as changed nuances of emphasis between Laclos novel and the film version by Christopher Hampton. They reflect sharply current unease about sex and the state of play – of battle – in the bedroom; in short, the modern politics of seduction can be read therein.

p.g.95 her own male protectors dead, a widow without parents or children, she plays with women too, as does Don Juan, in order to humiliate and disempower men; she has taken up occupation of a masculine place in the code of chivalry, and her scheming and pursuits seem in the novel all the more diabolical for this trespass across the boundaries of gender.

p.g. 98 (…) Don Juan, as Ovid made clear in the Art of loving, is God’s gift to women, only giving them what they want: A man who kisses a girl and goes no further deserves to forfeit even the pleasure of kissing her. Obviously one wants to do a great deal more than that, and if one does not, one is being, not civilized, but silly. ‘Oh, but I should hate to use brute force,’ you say. Why, that is exactly what girls like: they often prefer to enjoy themselves under duress. The victim of a sexual assault is generally delighted, for she takes your audacity as a compliment; whereas the girl who could have been raped but was not is bound to feel disappointed…

p.g.103 The rebel character of the hero made him a pattern of Romanticism: a loner, a kind of suicide, a saint of love and the personal quest for knowledge, whose final incarnation perhaps was Genet, seen through the eyes of Sartre.

p.g.105 But one has to take care with this type of lure: a fantasy of control will always seduce the disenfranchised. (Unemployed teenagers wear combat fatigues and gigantic boots; prostitutes solicit business by boasting of their dominatrix methods.) This is perhaps the final twist in the seductions of Don Juan, that the victims are flattered into believing themselves charge.

p.g.106 when Valmont looks at himself in the glass, he always sees the Marquise at his ear, urging him to do better. Every age gets the Don Juan it deserves; Valmont is the face of Don Giovanni for our time.

Reading Don Giovanni by Joseph Karman p.g. 109 Don Juan, on the other hand, is now little more than an abstract idea left over from the past, awaiting an occasional new embodiment. Berger called his Don Juan novel, G, not J.