SOURCE: Franklin, Caroline. “‘Quiet Cruising o'er the Ocean Woman’: Byron's Don Juan. and the Woman Question.” In Byron, edited by Jane Stabler, pp. 79-93. Edinburgh Gate, Eng.: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998.

In the following essay, originally published in Studies in Romanticism in winter 1990, Franklin chronicles the methods by which Byron challenged traditional ideas about marriage, chastity, fidelity, and female power.

The importance of the debate on the woman question, and of [Christoph] Meiners and [Joseph Alexandre Pierre] Ségur particularly, in framing a context in which to view Byron's ‘sexual Jacobinism’ is plain. In his comic epic, Byron employs the same procedure as the Enlightenment histories of progressing from primitive to civilized countries; the same relativistic sociological stance towards sexual morality; the same assumption of the influence of climate on Northern and Southern mores.¹ Most importantly, he too focuses on female morality as the perspective through which to view...