Character Analysis
Haidée
Haidée is an ardent, beautiful and sensuous young woman in search of perfect love. She is all heart, and her mind has received little, if any, formal training. She has had religious instruction, however; Byron tells us that she is pious and has been taught the tenets of the Greek Orthodox Church. She is also not without experience in courtship. By the time she is seventeen she has had a number of marriage offers.
She has turned down her suitors because none of them is exactly what she is looking for. Haidée is not entirely nature's child, as Byron once says she is. She has had some formal instruction in religion and she has had experience in the arts of courtship. She knows the difference between right and wrong, but her ardent nature is her enemy in moments of crisis. The pull of the flesh is strong in her. When she finds Juan lying unconscious on the shore of her island, she
deemed herself in common pity bound,
As far as in her lay, "to take him in,
A stranger" dying-with so white a skin. (Canto II, St. 129)
She possesses some of the courage and stubbornness of her father, as she shows when her father commands Juan to surrender.