The White-

Bled Jasmine
Garden:

Federico Garcia Lorca’s Doňa Rosita la

Soltera as a Spanish Tragedy

Muhammad Yahya Cheema

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©2006 Cheema, Muhammad Yahya

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 Cheema 3

Muhammad Yahya Cheema

Professor Shaista Sirajuddin

European Literature

16 October 2006

Doña Rosita is life tame on the outside and burning on the inside, of a

Granadine maiden who, little by little, is converted into that grotesque and

pitiable thing that is a spinster in Spain. (qtd. in Lima 244-5)

Set in Granada of 1900, Dona Rosita is a study of individual suffering through

commitment, and the social attitude of its disapproval. In the Spanish society of early 20th

century, where love is interpreted through the language of flowers and fans, a maiden sets

out to pin her hopes on a memory stating that “there is nothing more alive than [it]” (188),

and awaits the return of her fiancée remaining a spinster till the end. She, the heroine Dona

Rosita, goes slowly, painfully, but silently, from her blossoming youth to shattered old age

in a fashion much similar to a Rosa Mutabile which is “red in the morning – in the evening

it changes to white, and at night it shatters” (138). In the lines quoted above, Lorca hints

upon the cruel fact that spinsters were not socially acceptable in the early 20 th century in

Spain. Dona Rosita’s sadness, in the play, springs stronger from the fact that she is being

rejected by the society which she is a part of than from her endless loneliness that she

endures. Her choices, however, were always limited because she never found true love and

the tragedy of the play seems to be that the only true love that she did find, proves to be no

more than a promise, a mere hope. Laden with serious issues and burdened with sorrows of

loneliness and social isolation, Dona Rosita is worthier of being dubbed as a tragedy than a

comedy.
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From its exposition to the final catastrophe, the play follows a structure much

similar to that of a tragedy. Although the language of the play is humorous and witty, the

themes discussed and the situations elaborated are never ‘truly’ funny. On the contrary, one

feels a strange yet fascinating blend of beautiful, flowery milieu and saddening episodes of

grave matters that take place in it one after another. The flowery imagery affects the

audience emotionally, resulting in the heightening of the tragic effect at the end. Lorca is

reported to have detailed the foundations of the play in an interview, saying:

I'm writing a comedy on which I place all my illusion: Doña Rosita la soltera o

el lenguaje de las flores. ‘Family reveille divided into four gardens.’ It will be a

work of sweet ironies, of pitiable bits of caricature… and diluted in it, the

grace and delicacy of times past and distant eras. I think the evocation of

those days, in which nightingales really sang and gardens and flowers had a

romantic connotation, will surprise many. (qtd. in Lima 241-2)

This quotation explains the “grace and delicacy” of the milieu of the play. The

flowery imagery, despite being delicate and graceful, however, is laden with sorrow to

correspond to the thematic concerns of the play. The play opens with flowers and ends on a

song about Rosa Mutabile and we are made aware of the fact early in the play that the

flowers are not to be associated with happiness and joy. They are symbolic of death and

decay, sorrow and misery; and unsurpassed dolour is what perfumes them. To the

Housekeeper, El Ama, they “smell like a child’s funeral, a nun’s taking holy vows, or a

church altar” (135). For her, they are symbolic “of death” (135). These lines occur fairly

early in the play and, thence, set the tone for the reader. The same sort of sadness is

associated with flowers throughout and the flower imagery in the play carries out the

parallel themes of love, fidelity and social rejection. Later in the play we come across
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Rosita’s expression of “jasmine of sorrow” (147) and “white-bled jasmine garden” (150)

which tell us that the heroine herself doesn’t associate any happiness or joy with the flowers.

The song of flowers in the second act, titled “what the flowers say?” (169), lists

almost all popular flowers of the world. What is notable about the song, however, is that it

associates laughter only with iris (the flower is called a “fleur-de-lis” in the play (169)). All

other flowers are paired with emotions that can neither be called cheerful nor euphoric:

FIRST SPINSTER. A mustard flower means disdain;

………………………………………………………..

AUNT. The honeysuckle lulls to sleep;

And evergreen puts you to death.

MOTHER. Evergreen that stands for death,

Flower of the folded hand;

You best exist whene’er the wind

Must sadly weep upon your wreath. (168-69)

The flowery imagery, consequently, does not bring happiness or joy to the play.

Contrarily, it serves to provide the sorrowed parallel in the external milieu. The flowers,

also, become symbolic of different conditions of the characters. Rosita, for example, sings

the song of Rosa Mutabile thrice in the play, denoting the similarities between herself and

the flower; both fade away too soon and without fulfilling their desires. Don Martin, later in

the play, talks of his talent being a “natural flower” (179) which never blossomed.

The imagery of the play is not the only thing which evokes tragic effects. The actual

situation, in fact, is quite tragic in its nature. Dona Rosita’s falling in love with her cousin

terms misery for her. Shortly after they get engaged, the cousin departs, never to return.

Rosita waits for her fiancée-cousin day after day, freighted with thoughts of consummation,
 Cheema 6

which is never to come. The notable point here is that her sense of time totally depends on

the external world. “If it were not for seeing people”, she says, “I could believe that it’s just a

week since he left” (160). In her longest speech in the play, which occurs shortly before the

play ends, she gives a voice to her sorrow in elegant articulation. She tells her Aunt that she

knew long ago that her fiancée had married. But she chose to believe in his deceitful letters.

And what she says next becomes important:

…if no one but I had known of it; his letters and his lie would have fed my

illusion like the first year of his absence. But every one knew it, and I found

myself pointed out with a finger that made my engaged girl’s modesty

ridiculous, and gave a grotesque air to my maidenly fan. (185)

This is the key theme of the play. Dona Rosita would have lived without her

sweetheart, and would have been happy too, only if the society didn’t reject her. The social

rejection is too much for Dona Rosita. The social disapproval is the real tragedy for her.

One may ask why didn’t she marry when she was young, when she knew that her fiancée

had married some other girl. Rosita herself gives us the answer: “I was tied”, says she, “And

besides, what man came to this house sincerely to gain my affection overflowing with

tenderness? No one.” (186). She had no sincere lover in her life. No honest smiles were ever

her fate. No one came to her begging for her love. There was no Romeo for this Juliet. And

the only one she thought was fair enough with her proved to be a liar. Consequently she

chose to stick to her original idea of love. And she would’ve been happy. But the Spanish

society mocks her attitudes, her fidelity. This is the tragedy of Rosita, this is her catastrophe

and the catastrophe of many Spanish women like her who “wait for love and never receive

more than the glance of a promise” (Lima 245).

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Dona Rosita is a tragedy in its form and essence. The thematic concerns of the play

are very serious and enjoy a dearth of pleasures. Even its humorous language is filled with

the flower imagery which denotes death and decay. Rosita ends a spinster, alone and

isolated, with no one to turn to for her sexual fulfilment. This is truly a tragic end. Lorca

once remarked:

How many mature women will see themselves reflected in Doña Rosita as in a

mirror! I've wanted only the purest line to lead my comedy from beginning to

end. Rather than comedy, it would be best to call it drama, drama of Spanish

distastefulness, of the desire for fruition which women must forcefully repress

in the deepest part of their fevered heart.

(qtd. in Lima 245-6)

The play can appropriately be called a tragedy; and there may not be actual deaths in

the play like there are in Blood Wedding, Yerma or House of Bernarda Alba, but the outcome

of Dona Rosita, nevertheless, leaves us no happier than we are at the results of these other

plays.
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Works Cited and Consulted

Brenan, Gerald. The Literature of the Spanish People: From Roman Times to the Present Day.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1951. Print.

Campbell, Roy. Lorca: An Appreciation of His Poetry. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1959. Print.

Lima, Robert. The Theatre of Garcia Lorca. New York: Las Americas Publishing, 1963. Print

Lorca, Federico Garcia. Dona Rosita: the Spinster. Trans. James Graham-Luján and Richard

L. O’Connell. Federico Garcia Lorca: Five Plays: Comedies and Tragi-Comedies. London:

Penguin, 1963. 135-191. Print.