Don Juan
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Don Juan is a legendary fictional libertine and seducer who debuted in the Spanish proto-picaresque novel The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest, whose story has been told many times by different authors. The name is sometimes used figuratively, as a synonym for "womanizer." He is the male counterpart of the femme fatale.
Intertextuality between Faust and Don Juan
- Certainly Faust is a reproduction of Don Juan. ... Like Don Juan, Faust is a demonic figure, but at a higher level. .. --Either/Or, Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard, who had been working up a project on the three great medieval figures of Don Juan, Faust and Ahasuerus (the Wandering Jew), abandoned his project, although he later incorporated much of the work he had done into Either/Or
The literary characters that most influenced Kierkegaard were Don Juan (representing pleasure), Faust (doubt) and the Wandering Jew (despair), and that he used characters based on them in his writings. For example, both Don Juan and Faust personify the demonic in Kierkegaard's Either/Or, Part One ..
L'homme fatal
Men who are fatal include Don Juan, Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, most of the heroes in Lord Byron's books (termed the "Byronic hero"), as well as such diverse characters as Billy Budd, Count Dracula, Tadzio in Death in Venice, Harthouse in Charles Dickens' Hard Times, Georges Querelle in Jean Genet's Querelle of Brest, James Bond, and Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith's "Ripley" novels.
