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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

According to feminism, men have oppressed women asserts that men either
consciously or unconsciously have oppressed women, whether knowingly or unconsciously,
by giving them little or no voice in societal matters such as politics, social issues, and
economic matters. Men have repressed women, defined what it means to be feminine, and as
a result, have voiced, devalued, and trivialized what it is to be a woman by not providing
women’s opinions, replies and writings a voice and worth. Women are actually no longer
considered significant others by men.

When it comes to reading, Feminism isn’t a unique perspective; rather, it’s the voice
that women used to fight for theirs after the First World War. When Virginia Woolf penned
“A Room of One’s Own,” she gave it voice by asserting that “It is the men, who define what
it means to be feminine and who runs the political, economic, social, and literary systems.” In
the second sex, Simon de Beauvoir assets the following: “In a patriarchal society, male
defines what it means to be human, which naturally, includes what it means to be women.”

Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) is one of the most influential Spanish poets and
playwrights of the twentieth century. He was born in rural Andalusia near the city of
Granada. ‘‘The Restoration’’ was the era of Spanish history in which Lorca was born. This
period in Spanish history was challenging because numerous organizations were vying for
control of the country. He began traveling throughout northern Spain with one of his
professor, who encouraged him to write his first book, Impresiones y Paisajes (Impressions
and land).his father assisted him in publishing the book, a small volume of his musings about
his recent travels. Garcia Lorca’s creativity would rear its head early, as a child he was
known to carry on conversations with inanimate objects, bestowing upon each object a
personality and speaking with them as if they were living things and might speak back at any
moment.

At the University of Granada, Lorca studied philosophy and law as a young man, but
soon gave up his legal studies in favour of writing, art, and the theatre. He released a prose
book in 1918 that was motivated by trip to Castile, and in 1919 he moved to the University of
Madrid where he produced theatrical productions and kept reading his poems aloud.
Throughout this time, Lorca got connected to a group of artists known as Generacion del 27,
 2

which included the Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and Rafael Albert are three artists. Lorca
remains an important and tragic figure in Spanish drama and poetry.

It was during the height of his popularity in Spain that Lorca traveled abroad to New
York. It has been reported that before his journey to New York, Lorca suffered from a severe
period of depression. He stopped reading his poetry in public entirely. Fernando de los Rios,
his friend and mentor, convinced him to make the trip to New York. He later called the city
of New York, “Babylonic, cruel and violent” and “filled with modern beauty”. He also spent
time in Vermont and Havana, Cuba. His collection of poems, A poet in New York was written
during this time. These poems were filled with the themes of alienation and isolation and the
negativity of the materialistic society and its cruelty towards the underclass. Lorca was in
New York during the time the stock market crash of 1929 and that experience in evident in
the poems he wrote at that time.

Lorca returned to Spain in 1930 and was invited to direct a government sponsored
Theatre Company of students, which toured Spain, giving rural audiences an opportunity to
see classic Spanish theatre. The interpretations of the classic texts were radical and modern.
Lorca wanted to bring theatre to rural areas that had never been exposed to it before. Until
1936, the group toured to 74 villages with thirteen different productions. During this tour,
Lorca wrote his most famous plays often referred to as the “rural trilogy”. The plays
included: Blood Wedding (Bodas de Sangre), Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba. Lorca
deals with women in his drama as submissive. He praises their beauty but neither gives
women names nor any choice of free will. Women are nameless and without any status.

Blood Wedding (Bodas de Sangre) is the first and most enigmatic of Lorca’s trilogy of
rural Andalusian tragedies and has been widely praised by the critics for the achievement of a
tragic form. Lorca’s Blood Wedding is a Spanish society. The Zenith of the arc, the center of
the play’s structure is the wedding itself. Here two men contend for the bridge, a vessel that
contains the potentiality both for life and death. The Bridegroom offers her the fulfillment of
her tribal destiny, peace and fertility within nature. Leonardo offers separation from the tribe-
an individuation that contains death. For Leonardo and the Bride both situations are tragic.
This highlights the ways in which women in Spanish society are victims of feminism. And
deals with the theme of love and marriage and highlights the customs and traditions of
Spanish society. In Blood Wedding, a marriage of convenience is violently subverted when
Leonardo, who is already married but has always longed for the Bride, carries her off the
 3

forest. He is killed by the outraged villagers, and the Bride is excoriated by the Bridegroom’s
mother.

Under Franco’s regime, the feminist movement that began in 1920 came to end, and
Spain temporarily regressed to its past ideologies about women’s role and place in a society
which was dominated by patriarchal principles and ideological conservatism imposed by
church and the state. The paradoxical nature of being a woman in the literary world of Lorca
through the vulnerable and painful female characters presented in The House of Bernarda
Alba (La Casa De Bernarda Alba) as they participate in their own oppression through
patriarchy. Garcia Lorca described the play in its subtitle as a drama of women in the villages
of Spain. The House of Bernarda Alba was Garcia Lorca’s last play, completed on 19 June
1936, two months before Lorca’s death during the Spanish Civil War. It is a feminist play in
characters, with the exception of the male object of desire for the sisters in Bernarda Alba’s
house are all female, and represents the various female archetypes in Spanish matriarchal
society on the eve of the Spanish Civil war. Bernarda runs her house like a dictator. No one is
free. She is violent and limits free speech. She willfully ignores the failings of some and not
others. She sees herself as above the poor villagers around her, most of them not fit to marry
her own daughters. Bernarda is suspicious of the servants, the villagers, and her own
daughters. Lorca presented this family as an allegory for the Spanish state, and the impending
catastrophe of violence the natural result of the culture of violence that exists within the core
of the culture itself. In the end, the girls fight over the affections of man who clearly prefers
the young and beautiful sister, conquering her will all the while courting the oldest and
ugliest for her inheritance. Bernarda exacts terrible justice when the truth becomes known,
leading to the romantic tragedy of youth and beauty. It is a sad and predictable end.

1.1 Lorca as a feminist writer

As no other male writer had done before like Federico Garcia Lorca the female soul.
His vivid presentation of the effects of oppression and the internalization of emotion that
women endure, in the plays Blood Wedding (Bodas de Sangre), Yerma and The House of
Bernarda Alba (La Casa de Bernarda Alba), is unique and profound. Moreover, Lorca was
highly influenced by the period of “modernism” that was ensuing in Spain during his
lifetime. He was indeed, close friends with Cubist painter Salvador Dali. Modernist writings
reflects less on society and more on individuals, thus it gave Lorca the opportunity to delve
deeper into the psychological “state” that is womanhood. The spirit that Lorca was most
 4

interested in investigating was undoubtedly female, as one can see in his plays, and some of
his characters possessed it while noticeably others don’t. Lorca seems to be referring to this
throughout his plays. .

The theory of Canadian poet and critic Janis Rapoport is that these plays should be
seen as a complete set with Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba being
seen as a thesis, antithesis and synthesis, respectively. She sees the women in Blood Wedding
as being like mirrors due to their ability to make the audience reflect on social conventions.
In the House of Bernarda Alba she sees the women as collectively forming a kaleisoscope as
they reflect and refract off each other. She goes so far as to say that the house in the play
represents the soul of one individual woman.

In Blood Wedding women are bound by their social functions. The characters are not
endowed with names, thus they lose a sense of their identity. The principle women are the
Bride, Mother and Beggar Woman. Perhaps the most interesting woman to analyse is the
Bride. The Bride is continually bound by her circumstances. We see women oppressing
women in the form of her servant lady attempting to instill morality into her. For the Bride
this acts as an imprisoning ideology which hinders her pursuit of sexual fulfillment.
However, this pursuit results in tragedy due to the societal expectations of virginity before
marriage that are put on the Bride. The Mother is an affected character rather than an
affecting one. She is greatly affected by the grief that she feels for her husband and son (and
eventually sons). The Beggar Woman symbolizes one of the play’s more profound themes-
the mysteries of life and death- conveying that she is somewhat liberated by old age.
However, Lorca highlights how all women are bound throughout the generations in different
ways. A young woman’s is centre around her sexuality whereas an older woman’s is centre
around the lives of her sons. Lorca uses water imagery to portray a contrast between a free
and a controlled woman. The control and oppression of women is very much the central
theme of the play. Hardship is common to all the women in Lorca’s work and bonds them to
the whole history of Spain. Widespread presence of women in Lorca’s plays gives him plenty
of opportunities to address all concerns in the theater. Propagating Spanish Folk Literature is
part of these concerns as shown in Lorca’s use of female characters with all their traditions
such as folk songs and lullabies, and it gives a lyrical and poetic richness to Lorca’s works.
Using this most prominent characteristic we can know the unique fiats of Lorca’s works.
Although Lorca’s plays are more sensible than poetic, primarily bases on dialogues he
utilized in plays we can sense a poet in the back of the story. In reality, the importance of
 5

individual in the story is much less than that of fate which drives them. Nobody is capable of
exchange fate arid set him or herself free. They feel their failure on the outset and their
destiny is predestined. And even though this justifies most of those insane deeds, they
understand nicely that their anger is in vain.

In the House of Bernarda Alba with its ‘thick walls’, embodies the soul of a single
woman. Each of the sisters becomes fragments of woman’s soul. Adela is the most significant
of the sisters perhaps due to her naïveté. She longs for freedom but does not appreciate that it
may result in more oppression under the sexual authority of Pepe EL Romano- her lover.
Bernarda, despite her tyrannical behavior, is as much a victim of the patriarchy as her
daughters, if not more as she has absorbed such oppressive values into her own psyche. The
different views and lives of the women reflect off each other in the play.

These females’ bullfighters put their lives at danger in order to further their
objectives. Duende is a product of their earthiness, demonic behavior in (in the view of their
community), willpower, and awareness of morality. Lorca masterfully and elegantly sews the
fabric of themes that transcend time and space. Even though the women in these plays live in
a time he has never known, there are numerous occasions when he have felt defiant for the
sake of his gender. He recognizes these women in himself, other women around her, and
women he does not know. In these three plays, Lorca has suffering with a lyricism that
speaks to the soul and the lives of women everywhere; women who harness the energies both
physically and metaphorically and embrace the tragedy this may involve all relate to Lorca’s
lyrical expression of sorrow.

As stated in “A composition to Federico Garcia Lorca,” several critics commend

Lorca for his dramatic method, a blur of words, dramatic portrayal and topics drawn from
Spanish society: Lorca has come to embody the clichés associated with Spain and particularly
Andalusia whether it is in terms of his Latin temperament or the perceived folkloricism of
some of his texts.

Fundamentally, Lorca, remarkably whilst being a man himself, strikingly presents life
for women in rural Spain and the psychological and philosophical impact of oppression-
perhaps because he, himself, was a homosexual who would later be killed under Franco’s
fascist regime.
 6

1.2 Lorca, historical theatre, and productions of his plays

Lorca’s dozen or so full-length plays, written during a relatively short period of

sixteen years, reveal a great variety of influences, both Spanish and foreign. As far as
European theatre in the first quarter of the twentieth century was concerned, there was
amongst dramatists and practitioners who wished to see the theatre flourish and progress a
clear reaction against the Naturalist movement of the 19th century. Naturalism in the theatre
created a social leveling in terms of the classes presented on the stage and as well as that,
blurred both the distinctions between the ‘high’ and the ‘low’, the serious and the comic and
those individual moments in a play which are ‘dramatic’ and ‘undramatic’.

The early years of the 20th century were also marked by the development of other
significant movements in the Arts, such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Expressionism, and
later in the 1920’s, Surrealism. Expressionism, dating from about 1910, was given an added
impulse by the terrible atrocities of the 1914-18 War and was often concerned, therefore with
positive values such as the creation of an equal and just society and the rejection of the
machine age in favour of a more simple society. In order to communicate its message
Expressionist theatre, in the hands of dramatist such as Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser,
employed exaggeration and distortion in characterizations, language and staging.

Surrealism, associated in particular with the Paris Surrealists of the 1920s but evident
before that, was concerned in part with the unconscious mind, with the illogical and the
irrational, and with the expression of feelings and emotions uncontrolled by reason. In Spain
itself Naturalism had its equivalent in writers such as Benito Perez Galdos (1843-1920) who
parts from being Spain’s greatest novelist of the 19th century, who wrote twenty two plays.

Of the dramatists who, influenced by cultural trends outside Spain, attempted to

advance the cause of Spanish theatre through bold experiment, the most important figure
before Lorca was undoubtedly Ramon del Valle- Inclan. His technique moreover, is highly
reminiscent in its synthesis of the ideas on theatre of Symbolist stage designers and producers
such as Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig. Lorca’s first play, The Butterfly Evil spell,
reveals the very clear influence of symbolism. Lorca explores the themes of love, frustration
and death which are so central to his own existence. This moreover, is enhanced by Lorca’s
highly stylised presentation of the characters and events which transforms the particularly of
the on-stage action into a visual metaphor with which we can all identify. The concerns of
 7

Symbolism, including concepts of staging which are strictly anti- naturalistic, are to be found
throughout Lorca’s theatre.

These various influences come together as well, of course in Lorca’s great plays of
the 1930’s, including the so-called ‘rural trilogy’ of Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of
Bernarda Alba. In one sense plays whose subjects, characters and settings are located in the
Spanish countryside and suggest Naturalism rather than any kind of stylization. Despite the
fact that Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba have their origins in real-life
events. In the first place, the names which Lorca gives his characters have, for the most part,
a generic and archetypical quality: in Blood Wedding the Mother, the Father, the
Bridegroom, the Bride, the Wife the neighbor. And in The House of Bernarda Alba, the
surname Alba has associations with ‘dawn’ and therefore ‘brightness’ and ‘light’. Lorca’s
constant linking of the characters of these plays creates a very strong sense of their
universality. In the final acts of Blood Wedding moreover, the effect is enhanced and a sense
of timelessness created by the appearance of non-human figures: in the former Moon and
Death (the Beggar- Woman).

The fascination surrounding Federico Garcia Lorca and his works has been term the
‘cult of Lorca’, holding irresistible attraction for theatre-makers and academics since his
execution at the beginning of the Civil War. However, by leaving works unfinished and
unperformed, Lorca’s early death, John London posits, meant not only that his extant works
were ‘the product of a martyr, but his murder also created a distortion which has never been
fully rectified’. With his theatrical future prematurely ended and subsequently under-
explored, the Lorca best- known for Blood Wedding and the House of Bernarda Alba would
remain a colourful, castanet- clicking gypsy with a tragic, social conscience in the chronicles
of theatre history.

Lorca’s use of poetry in both plays and especially in Blood Wedding, and also has the
effect of universalizing the particular through suggestive metaphor, while his suggestions for
staging- stark, stylized settings, dramatic lighting effects, and bold movement, including
dance- reveal an intention at the opposite extreme from Naturalism. And even if, in The
House of Bernarda Alba, the poetry of the other two plays is pared away and there seems to
be a greater realism, a closer examination suggests that Lorca’s predilection is still for an
overall stylization. Indeed, in their different ways the three plays of the rural trilogy can be
seen to combine elements of Symbolism, Expressionism, Surrealism- consider the forest
 8

scene of Blood Wedding- and the puppet tradition, all fused into an anti- naturalistic style of
which he increasingly proved to be master.

The production of Lorca’s first play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, which opened at the
Teatro Eslava in Madrid on 22 March 1920, was an unmitigated disaster. It was again
Margarita Xirgu who played the lead part in the premiere of The Shoemaker’s Wonderful
Wife at the Teatro Espanol in Madrid on 24 December 1930. Particularly interesting about
this production was the fact that Lorca himself, dressed in a star spangled cloak, read the
prologue in which the Author appears on stage and informs the audience of the need for
poetry and magic on the contemporary stage. In terms of its staging, the play evidently put
into practice Lorca’s intentions.

In 1993, premiere of first Andalusian tragedy, Blood Wedding, an expressionist work

that recalls ancient Greek, Renaissance, and Baroque sources, Lorca achieved his first major
theatrical success and helped to inaugurate the most brilliant era of Spanish theatre since the
Golden Age. In 1933-34 he went to several places to overseas the productions of his play and
gave lecture series about his plays. Lorca’s ultimate play, completed on 19June 1936, months
before Garcia Lorca’s demise at some stage in the Spanish Civil welfare. The play became
first performed on eight March 1945 at the Avenda theatre in Buenos Aires. The play
facilities on the activities of a house in Andalusia during a period of mourning, wherein
Bernarda Alba (aged 60) wields overall control over her five daughters.

There were not going to be any productions in Spain, but Lorca was still working on a
number of different ideas. The work that has already been covered, as well as the plays he
was either planning or composing, offers ample proof of how hungry he was to try new
things and find new methods to express himself on stage. The notion that such a creative
dramatist should have also excelled in the popular theatre of his time, however, is even more
astonishing.
 9

Works Cited

Barthes, R. (2000). Mythologies. Trans by Jonathan Cape. London: Vintage

Bonalodd, Federico (ed.) 2007. A companion to Federico Garcia Lorca. Wood bridge:
Boydell & Brewer Ltd.

Federico, Garcia Lorca, ed. Herbert Ramsden, Bodas de sangre (Manchester University
Press, Manchester, 1980).

Garcia Lorca, Federico (1958). “Poeta en Nueva York”. Madrid.

Garah Baghi, A. (1990). Lorca’s Life and Plans. Tehran: Ebtekare Honar Publication

Gibson, Ian, Federico Garcia Lorca. London: Faber & Faber. (1989).

Gwynne Edwards, Lorca: The Theatre Beneath the Sand (Marion Boyars, London, 1980). A
comprehensive study of Lorca’s theatre which includes sections on staging.
 10

Chapter 2: Women’s suffering in Blood Wedding and The House Of

Bernarda Alba

In Federico Garcia Lorca’s plays the women has continually performed important
roles in one of a kind societies under distinct situations, accordingly, during different
durations novelists and playwrights have made use of women’s in their works. Lorca is one
of these writers who had a closer take a look at women of their modern; they meant to show
the plight of ladies in their reputable societies. An strive is made in this text to examine
Lorca’s works particularly Blood Wedding, to delineate the placement of ladies and their
position in Lorca’s present day society in Spain.

Lorca’s characters are vivid and alive and sometimes were taken out of records.
Although Lorca’s plays are greater sensible than poetic, primarily based on dialogues he
utilized in performs we will experience a poet in the back of tale. In truth, the significance of
individual inside the story is much less than that of destiny which drives them. Nobody is
able to alternate fate arid set himself unfastened. They sense their failure at the outset and
their fate is predestined. And despite the fact that this justifies most of those insane deeds,
they realize properly that their anger is in useless.

The first play in the trilogy, Blood Wedding (1932), centers on the marriage of the
Bride and Bridegroom and the aftermath of the event when the bride runs away into the night
with her former lover. And the final play is The House of Bernarda Alba (1936), which is
about a family of women forced into an eight-year mourning period after the death of their
father and how the nighttime activities of the youngest daughter affect the whole family.

Lorca was the artistic director of La Barraca, a university theatre company that toured
Spain performing the plays in small towns. His later works, such as the country trilogy, were
influenced by his work with the theatre company, where he developed an interest in engaging
the public in conversation through his work. In the latter stages of his career, he turned to
tragedy in order to achieve this, since it had worked well with his earlier experimental work.
This allowed him to establish a shared reality with the audience on stage. The lives of
individuals, who were marginalized, however, constantly piqued his interest, and he felt a
connection to them throughout the course of his career. The sympathy for society alienated
groups is evident in much of his poetry as well as in his empathetic portrayal of female
characters. All three plays focus on the lives of women who struggle against societal norms;
 11

his female characters find themselves in a world where they’re expected to be modest,
honorable and obedient. This world is impossibly hellish for these women, a sentiment
vocalized by Angustias, the oldest daughter in the Alba family. In the House of Bernarda
Alba, the daughters are imprisoned in a gleaming, clinical white home where they must wear
mourning black and spend their days working on needlepoint projects. The oppressive heat of
the Andalusian sun makes them restless and irritated. It is evocative of asylum, exacerbated
by appearance of Bernarda’s own mother, Maria Josefa, who appears mad and is literally
locked away in the house with ‘two turns of the key’.

The mother in Blood Wedding, who has lost both her husband and son, resides in her
sole surviving son was constantly in danger, and she was terrified. In reality, the Bride is in
love with Leonardo, her ex-lover. These heroines do not have the liberties that many women
in the western world today take for granted, such as the freedom to go out whenever and
whenever they like, to work and support themselves, and to live alone. However, the
characters in these plays exist in a world where fascism is spreading across the continent and
political polarization continues to develop, ultimately leading to the Spanish Civil War in
1936 (which broke out as Lorca was working on The House of Bernarda Alba) and the
consequent dictatorship that lasted a devastating forty years. This historical context puts the
sense of isolation and imprisonment the female characters experience into perspective.

However, a generational divide is also becoming apparent. A common topic

throughout the entire trilogy is the quest for independence, which is especially relevant to the
Bride’s younger female characters, Yerma and Adela. All three women actively seek to gain
some autonomy over their lives so that they may reach a place where they can be happy can
fulfilled. In the case of the Bride, this means running away from her wedding part with
Leonardo; and for Adela, it is attempting to run away so that she can be with her lover, Ppe el
Romano. The fact that these young women serve as a voice for a generation moving toward a
more liberal way of life is evident elder female characters, Bernarda and the Mother, who
stand for traditional conservatism, must contend with and battle against thinking.

Through Lorca’s duende theory, which he developed in his 1933 lecture play and the
Theory of Duende, it is possible to comprehend the idea of struggle and pain. The flamenco
dancers and singers of southern spain are known for having a certain internal drive known as
the duende. In his lecture, Lorca defines duende as a ‘force not a labour, a struggle not a
thought.’ The words ‘force’ and ‘struggle’ suggest action, a process. The female characters
 12

fiercely combat a culture that aims to make them dependent in the plays. The three main
heroines, Adela, Yerma and the Bride, each have a consuming internal power that drives
them on. So, then, we can say that these women have duende in the sense that they struggle,
have deep and meaningful emotions as the source of their struggle and connect with the earth
(the Bride with the forest and Adela with the farmyard) as a means of finding authenticity.
Lorca asserts that all Spanish art is based in our soil and refers to duende as “the soul of the
earth” and “it’s no accident”. The rural settings of the plays enable the dramas to be anchored
in the earthiness of the spirit that is at the heart of duende. Spanish culture, and especially the
cukture of southern Spain, where flamenco has its roots, is characterized by an earthiness and
a force. The duende’s passion, struggle, and determination are strengthened by the night and
are able to manifest to their full potential.

On four different levels, explores the Blood Wedding. The first level focuses on
imagery of the female body, is biological. It also focuses on how various female bodily parts
are represented by important imagery in feminism literature. As an illustration, the neighbor
lady in the book comments, ‘beautiful’, her face had a saintly light to it. This demonstrates
how women are portrayed as being the epitome of beauty. When the Bride initially appears,
“her hands fall in modest stance and her head is bent,” this demonstrates her subservience.
Only as a representation of beauty are women seen. Male is drawn to women because of their
physical attributes. Like Leonardo tells the Bride “it’s not my fault, the fault is of earth and
this fragrance that you exhale from your breast and your braids”.

Women in this play cannot share her feelings with her male counterpart. There is no
space to outlet her feelings. If she tries to express her feelings male does not allow her to
express. As the dialogue between wife and husband shows this:

Wife: don’t leave me like this, not knowing anything.

Husband (Leonardo): stop that.

Wife: No, I want you to look at me and tell me.

Husband: let me alone. (he rises)

Wife: where are you going love?

Husband: (sharply) can’t you shut up?

 13

Father also reprimands Bride when she meets the mother formally.

Father: you shouldn’t be so solemn. After all, she’s going to be your mother.

Sons are prioritized in Spanish society. According to the conversation between father
and mother, sons are necessary since they have the strength and masculinity to work the land.
The lives of women are unpleasant. They rely on males for everything. Males do not treat
women with respects. Feminists contend that a woman’s perception of herself, her society,
and her environment is shaped by society, and her environment is shaped by society. The idea
of a maid and a pure lady are too deeply ingrained in Spanish women’s minds to adequately
describe. Because of how society views women, women in Spain are so severely oppressed
that they secretly wish they were men. I wish I were a guy, as Bride says, “Have not I done a
man’s labour.” The only characters in Lorca’s play are female. It examines their pain in a
society where males can act irrationally and expect pardon while women are pushed to
impossibly high standards. The drama subtly criticizes mindsets that forbid female sexuality
and compel women to uphold irrational moral standards. It delivers its most devastating
remark through Bernarda: expectations for women of women are so strict that matriarch with
great authority herself upholds these distorted ideals and behaves masculinely, as though the
only way to be in charge is to deny and violate her own femininity. However, calling Lorca’s
play feminist might be too political of an interpretation. Sex, death, and repression are
universal humanist issues that pique his interest.

In The House of Bernarda Alba, the conflict between oppression and the longing for
freedom is addressed in Lorca’s play, with a focus on the subtle ways in which women are
injured. The play’s setting by Lorca, which is both concrete and vague, makes it adaptable to
any setting. Lorca criticized the complicit silence around violence towards women- the same
retrograde conversation that would end his life.

In the play, Bernarda’s daughters are suffering from three spaces, physical space,
metal space and social space. Bernarda puts her five daughters to eight years of strict
mourning following the death of her second husband, declaring that “no breath of air is
going to come into this house.” The five daughters are now four in ‘Cornelius’ modern
adaption of the story and the length of the confinement at home in eight weeks. They are not
allowed to live freely and outside world is not allowed to interrupt. Bernarda is now
Bernadette, without the internet. Bernarda is strict to her daughters because she has fear of
society. In the house, they stay as prisoners are encaged. They suffer physically, socially and
 14

mentally. Bernarda’s obsessions are illustrated thru her behavior, specially with her
daughters. She wants to maintain her daughter’s dignity. While her daughters cry on their
father’s funeral, Bernarda forbids her daughters from weeping loudly. Because she does not
longer need her daughters cry at guy.

The House of Bernarda Alba is a stunning drama with poetry that is laden with
symbolism. As a gay man, Lorca was all too familiar with the agony of forced quit.
Bernarda’s first and final words in the drama are ‘‘silence’’ emphasizing her intransigence
and misuse of authority in his portrayal of domestic dictatorship. This is precisely where
Cornelius’ compelling investigation of gender and power in the twenty- first century begins.
And it couldn’t be more appropriate.

Since all three plays are tragedies, there will inevitably be bloodshed. Furthermore, it
is not surprising that all of the deaths take place in the dramatic second portions of the plays.
But all four deaths-two in Blood Wedding, one each in Yerma and the House of Bernarda
Alba-occur at night, which is another factor that unites them. It’s interesting how these deaths
impact the female characters in the plays. The deaths that take places in Blood wedding are
those of the two central male characters: the Bridegroom and Leonardo. Although it’s men
who lose their lives, it is the women who are affected. Leonardo’s wife has lost her husband
and must face bringing up a child alone. The Bride has lost two men in her life: her husband
and her lover. She can’t bear to be without them. Returning to the Mother’s house in the final
scene she cries: ‘I’ve come so that you’ll kill me and so they’d take me with them.’ After the
tragedy, Mother has no one left. She may be herself now, but she has nothing to fear because
all of her loved ones have passed away. She is no longer required to go to bed with a shotgun
or a knife in her back.

In the final act of The House of Bernarda Alba, when Adela attempting to escape, her
sister Martirio, who also has feelings for Pepe and is jealous of Adela’s relationship with him.
However, Adela is defiant and Martirio motels to what seem like her best option: to call for
her Mother, Bernarda. Finally right on the end of the play, Bernarda becomes aware about the
secrets of her household. Livid, she is going out and shoots at Pepe, who escapes alive. The
bitter Martirio lies to Adela, telling her that Pepe is dead. That is the end for Adela. Adela
seizes the very last harzard she has left at freedom and hangs herself. The countless darkness
of death engulfs her turning her right into goddess of the night. The parallel among the
darkness of the night time and the darkness of dying unite and intertwine, waving into the
 15

fabric of freedom’s open embrace. Here, death is not sadness, fear or despair. Here, death is
hope, release and self-determination. If life is the tight, vice-like grip of the day, death is the
fluidity and emancipation offered by night.

The awareness of death resides in the women of these tragic poems, growing and
manifesting itself through their struggle of self expression and means of communication. The
Bride is well aware that she faces death if she runs away with Leonardo, but still, she does it.
So too does the Mother acknowledge death, when she allows her last son to marry a woman
who was once involved with a man belonging to the family that murdered her husband and
son. Adela deliberately dances with death and travels a perilous path to destruction. This path
is likewise taken by the single woman at the end of act two of The House of Bernarda Alba,
also treads this path, aware of its dangers.

2.1 Love, Passion and Control

Garcia Lorca has captured in his works the splendor and glory of Spanish culture,
traditions and customs very successfully on the one hand, and on other, has chronicled the
tragic fall of Spain with distinct pathetic undertones. There is a genuine lamentation for the
disappearance and destruction of a civilization which was so dear to him and which had
nourished his creative and literary abilities and talent in his songs and dirges. His trilogy of
Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba made him popular in the world of
dramatic art in Europe. In these plays women with their passions, unfulfilled desires and
ambitions are the central figures. The world of Blood Wedding is the world of celebration of
erotic passions and rituals dominated by folk traditions and lyricism which enable the readers
to bear the pain and pangs of tragedy with fortitude.

The intensity of the lovers’ passion for one another indicates how serious the issue is
and how it differs from simple acts of destructive or antisocial willfulness caused by
ignorance or selfishness. Romeo and Juliet, a well-known Shakespearean literary couple, are
comparable to the lovers. Similar to Romeo and Juliet, they must abandon their socially
prescribed roles and declare their own distinct wills in order to rebel in good faith. Romeo
and Juliet’s uprising teaches each family the foolishness of their continuous animosity toward
one another. The particular rebellion recounted in Lorca’s play, however, signified to many
of Lorca’s audiences the playwright’s criticism of socially conservative Spain. His
 16

conservative critics perceived an implied feminist call for women to be more autonomous in
his portrayal of the Bride’s grumpiness and sadness.

In Blood Wedding, Federico Garcia Lorca explores the essence of love and how
intense love can impact a person’s ability to regulate their lives. Lorca portrays the Bride and
Bridegroom’s relationship as a lovely and rational union that, on the surface, should be happy
for both parts. The Bride appears to actively desire to marry her fiancé for practical reasons,
despite the fact that she is obviously less invested in the relationship than he is. Her true love,
however, is with Leonardo, one of the bridegroom’s opponents and she finds herself unable
to carry out the marriage. She tells Leonardo to keep his distance the entire day when he
initially shows up to her wedding in an effort to fight her feelings. Later, she rushes to the
Bridegroom and demands that they complete the ceremony quickly in the hope that doing so
well prevent her from giving in to her genuine yearning for Leonardo. Lorca suggests that the
Bride is terrified of what she could do while under the strong impact of love in this passion.
Lorca shows that love is irrational and perfectly able to squashing a person’s self-control, no
matter what he or she does to stave off the yearnings of the coronary heart.

Even after the Bride marries the Bridegroom, she isn’t secure from her own goals.
This turns into glaring whilst she elopes with Leonardo during the marriages after party,
having subsequently given into her yearnings. This lapse of self-discipline illustrates how
hard it’s miles to withstand passion. “You have to follow your instinct,” says the Greek
chorus of woodcutters, who comment on the Bride and Leonardo’s elopement, saying that
“they were right to run away.” Leonardo justifies what he and the Bride have finished by
using upholding that the fault belongs to the earth, implying that it might be unnatural to deny
certain romantic bonds, which might be stronger than people themselves. In this manner,
Lorca indicates that although following one’s relating to heart may end in tragedy (due to the
fact both Leonardo and the Bridegroom sooner or later die due to the elopement) it’s
pointless to face up to the simple strength of love and passion.

The world of Blood Wedding is the world of family feuds, bloody rivalries and
clashes over the issue of marriage, land and honour, a society which permits human
relationships within the social and moral peripheries and any deviation from the established
social canons of behavior is not only prohibited but also censured and punished severely. It,
undoubtedly, presents a world of clash between the two principles, the principle of order
through society’s old aged traditions and conventions and the principle of disorder and chaos
 17

through the revolt and rebellion of the characters motivated by their erotic passions. It is also
a world where passion, a world where death lurks round hovering over the characters waiting
to strike them dead. For an understanding of these opposite principles a study of symbols and
images is essential.

In such a society death should be accepted as inevitable and this idea is developed
through the character of the Mother who laments and wails over the deaths of her husband
and son killed in a family feud. The passionate bond between Leonardo and the Bride, the
lovers shapes another aspect of death. Their bond represents human life which is severed by
the forces operating against it. Death, therefore, not only separates them but also puts an end
to everything which makes us human. The flight of the lovers precipitates the violent
catastrophe. The inevitable happens in the Third Act of the play where Lorca abandons the
stylized realism of the previous two acts and introduces symbolism. The greatness of Lorca
as a playwright is that he never lets the dramatic tension, built up so skillfully in the last two
acts, collapse. The woodcutters in Act three, on the one hand, give us a significant insight
into the tragic situation which is about to happen and on the other; refer to an elemental
instinctual force of life, passion.

This is another dimension of the imagery of blood. The lovers would be discovered
soon but before that happens they would have fulfilled the demand of their passion;

First Woodcutter: By now he must be loving her.

Second Woodcutter: Her body for him; his body for her.

Third Woodcutter: They’ll find them and they’ll kill them.

First Woodcutter: But then they’ll have mingled their bloods. They’ll be like two empty jars,
like two dry arrows.

The Beggar Woman as a death like figure appears to encounter the Bridegroom in
order to make him her prey. She asks the Moon to illuminate the path so that the victims
should be seen properly. It is important to see that “the transposition of drama on to a plane
of poetic symbolism causes the spectators to see the tragic action purely as a consequence of
the collision of antagonistic forces that are inevitably in opposition”. The dialogue between
the Moon and the Beggar Woman highlights the mad pursuit of the lovers and their struggle
to escape.
 18

The death scene comes to an end with opening of her black cape as the stage is
enveloped in darkness. She makes her appearance in the final scene of the play, not in the
fascinating locale of the forest, but on the threshold of the house of death, a symbolic
suggestion, where the women arrive to lament the deaths of the young men. The forest scene
is symbolic. Here Death and the Moon are symbols of fate of the lovers. This is the scene of
erotic rupture played out almost literary in the shadow of death. The lyric poetry of their final
scene is at once a celebration of the lover’s erotic passions and a eulogy to its inevitable
termination in death. In the final scene the Beggar Woman appears and confirms to girls the
deaths of the young men.

Blood Wedding is the first drama of the trilogy. It is tragedy where “love is conflict
with realities and social customs and tradition”. An important issue, which has persisted in
the Spanish culture, and turns out to be manifestation of folkloric tradition, is the rite of
sacrifice. The themes of honor and passion are linked with that of life-death in many passages
in which recurrent images of water and blood are the unifying principle. The woodcutters
anticipate the spilled blood and link it with the tainted passion of the lovers. The play’s
improvement of this problem offers credence to the ones critics who see the play as a
grievance of sectors of Spanish society unwilling to countenance trade. These views will ring
true so long as there is a need for individuals to claim themselves against their society whilst
its institutions or legal guidelines do now not permit for reasonable happiness and creativity
of its contributors. Since the play generates sympathy for the ardour of the fans, it can be
visible to generate sympathy for the forces of change.

Lorca maintains to use symbols in deliberately extreme ways, the heat of summer
stands to relate the passion that overwhelms those women, the darkish typhoon of the night
earlier than conforms to the upcoming trouble that comes from Adela’s passion for Pepe, and
the nightgown that Martirio sews is supposed to represent the secret the part of every lady.
Poncia remind us that a girl is by no means seen in nightgown, which conforms to the manner
guys are painted in the play- they stop worrying lengthy before they ever realize the character
inside.

Both Adela and Martirio are in love with Pepe and the violence of the language here
suggests the strength of their passion. It also suggests how, in the society as heavily
restrictive as that in rural Spain in the 1930’s, people are forced to suppress so many desires
 19

and passions that they end up exploding destructively destroying that individual and/ or the
ones they should care about- e.g. their family.

Bernarda has succeeded in maintaining her control and her honor, the only one to
escape this miserable state of existence is Adela, who through death is free but as sterile as
the others. Adela, the one character in Lorca who tries to overcome the fate of sterile society,
becomes one of his most tragic figures. Again, the only means of avoiding sterility inherent
in this house is to disobey her mother- a symbol of the Spanish code- and this leads to her
inevitable destruction. Like the Bride in Blood Wedding she openly flaunts the codes of
honor and sex and must, therefore, become sterile in her own way through death.

Adela is the youngest daughter of Bernarda Alba, she has a great enthusiasm for
living and life that is suffocate by the ideas of her mother. Adela’s love for Pepe el Romano
is foreshadowed in the opening act but it is not clearly understood then whether or not her
love is more than the interest in men that all the daughters of Bernarda Alba display at this
particular time. It is in the second act that her apparent passion and desires for the young man
becomes more open and clearly understood. Adela’s major conflict is that she is zestful and
lively and has an inbred rebellious steak in a house that is doomed to convention and death.
She values her rights and desires as a person over the code that is being enforced by her
mother. She is strong and her passion and love guide her actions away from the prudent side
of life.

2.2 Violence and Retaliation

In Blood Wedding, Lorca researches the allure of violence, investigating the abnormal
manner that humans are interested in acts of revenge and attribution. With the aid of telling a
tale approximately households that have long been at war with one another, the playwright
invites audience contributors to impeach the motivations that lie in the back of the diverse
acts of violence fueling the feud.

Lorca penned Blood Wedding ceremony in 1932, a time when Spain turned into
hinged on excellent unrest and violence, some years earlier than Spanish Civil conflict. Land-
taming and tilling it and the landscape are pivotal to Lorca’s human beings right here.
However at the side of the association with the land, his text is also about bloodshed.
Households are run by way of widows, old and young women, mother and spouse, having
lost their son and husband in acts of violence.
 20

In contrast, the bridegroom’s mother frames violence as a petty matter while waxing
poetic in the opening scene about how absurd it is that a thing as small as a pistol or a knife
can put an end to a man. The bridegroom’s mother appears to understand the complete
vapidity of the conflict between her family and the felix family. She eventually succumbs to
the rivalry though, wanting to see her adversaries pay for the deaths of her husband and son
though suffering. While portraying violence as s trivial thing and waxing poetic in the first
scene about how strange it is that “a thing” might be a thing, the bridegroom’s mother
appears to realize the absolute pointlessness of the conflict between her family and the Felix
family. She accepts the various mindsets that fuel the quarrel by whining that incarceration
isn’t a severe enough penalty. Additionally, the viewer sees an unneeded inclination toward
violence as the bridegroom pursues Leonardo with the purpose of killing him eloping with
the bride. In fact, these individuals are so consumed with getting even with their opponents
that they fail to stop and contemplate the fact that their own conduct. Accordingly, the
Bridegroom perishes in his pursuit of vengeance a pursuit that promotes vengeance for its
own sake. By highlighting this pointless circle of violence, Lorca makes the argument that
getting even is pointless and detrimental because it only leads to bad luck for all those
concerned.

This is precisely the kind of thinking that leads to violence in the first place, and the
old woman’s preoccupation with retribution blinds her to the fact that it doesn’t really matter
whether or not the murderers are still alive, as her loved ones will still be death regardless.
Nevertheless, she tacitly condones violence by playing into the narrative of revenge.
Although the Bridegroom’s mother is supposedly so afraid of violence, she has no problem
encouraging it when her son’s bride runs away with Leonardo Felix. Urging the Bride’s
father to help her own clan track down Leonardo, she says, “The hour of blood has come
again. Two sides. You on yours, me on mine. After them! Get after them!” As such, the
audience sees that she has suddenly become an impassioned supporter of violent retribution.
When she asserts that “the hour of blood has come again,” she perpetuates the aggressive
mentality that has driven the feud between that has left with a dead husband and son. As
such, the audiences come to understand that the Bridegroom’s mother has gotten swept up in
the strange appeal of revenge. Similarly, her son also gets wrapped up in the idea of making
his enemy pay for stealing his bride, calling his pursuit of Leonardo “the greatest hunt of
all,” a phrase that denotes his belief that revenge is a respectable and meaningful endeavor.
Of course, what he fails to see is that killing Leonardo will do nothing to help his situation,
 21

since even if he does defeat him, it won’t change that fact that the Bride doesn’t love him.
Whilst both he and Leonardo end up dying due to bloodthirstiness, the audience sees how
self- defeating it’s miles to invest oneself in violence and retribution. Via outlining this
avoidable tragedy, Lorca communicates the futility of revenge, which only leads to
unnecessary sorrow.

In The House of Bernarda Alba, the motif of violence is used by Lorca to reveal
Bernarda as a cruel and oppressive tyrant. Bernarda using her cane to gain the attention of all
the women in the house and how she uses this object to control of direct everyone else. This
creates an initial impression of Bernarda as violent and dictatorial- her violence is a literal
manifestation of the metaphorical violence done by the oppressive forces of conservative
Spain. Bernarda’s dominance as it becomes clear that the daughters are not even allowed to
think for themselves as Bernarda will make all their decisions for them. Again Bernarda’s
behavior towards her daughters is rough and humiliating- Augustias is a fully grown woman
of 39 and is being treated like a child by her mother. Significantly the power being removed
from her face may represent those kinds of luxuries that the daughters are not allowed to
indulge in during a period of mourning. This suggest that the strictness of the social rules of
the time and how Bernarda is bent on maintaining appearances.

The violence here shows Bernarda and the own family’s desperation to maintain the
shameful actions of the ‘mad’ grandmother hidden from view. Substantially Maria Josefa’s
insanity is a form of freedom- she continuously speaks of going away and going to the sea
suggesting each symbols of freedom and in a totally actual feel, her insanity approach she
isn’t certain by way of the identical rules of concept as different people likely Maria Josefa
isn’t always clearly ‘mad’ at all simply different and so Bernarda’s difficult treatment of her
would recommended how roughly Bernarda dismisses freedom and those who’re one of a
kind.

The important thing moment in this play is the suicide of Adela as it is able to advise
the quantity to which she is rebelling in opposition to her mother and society- suicide is a
cardinal sin and Adela breaks this rule in the identical manner that she breaks the rule
approximately intercourse before marriage and familial loyalty. Her death can also represent
how there’s no place in this society for a colourful, energetic and unfastened individual like
Adela. This reveals how the mores that dominated rural Spanish society within 1930’s
averted the character from being who they want to be and ultimately destroyed that man or
 22

woman. In the end the handiest way for Adela to be who she desires to be is foe her - the
implicit criticism being that there is no location for individual as lively, colourful and
energetic as Adela in Spanish society of the time.

Conclusion

In Federico Garcia Lorca’s plays, Women suffering are one of major problems. The rigid
adherence to a moral code and code of honour that are in and of themselves quite is what
causes the condition of Lorca’s women in play. The male is the guardian of the reputation of
the family and the energy behind reproduction that gives rise to the female. Thus, there is a
barren woman who experiences tragedy in each of Lorca’s plays: the Bride, Adela and the
Mother. These tragedies are either caused by woman’s dishonourable passion or the
husband’s absence or neglect.
 23

Work Cited

Anderson, Reed. Mcamillan Modern Dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca. London: Macmillan
press, 1984, Print.

Cuddon, J..A. dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Andre Deutsch.

Crow, John A. Federico Garcia Lorca. Los angelas: university of California Press, 1945

Honig, Edwin. Garcia Lorca. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1961.

The best and most comprehensive study of Lorca, his poetry and Drama.

Jung, Carl G, “Approaching the Unconscious” Ed. Jung, Carl G.Man and His Symbols.
London: Aldus Books

Lorca, Garcia Federico, Blood Wedding. Trans. Lujan, James Graham O’Connell, Richard L.
ed. Block,Haskell M.

Morris, C.B. Garcia Lorca: Bodas de Sangre, Critical Guides to Spanish Texts.
Valencia/London: Grant & Cutler, 1980. Spanish Writers and Surrealism; Ferderico Garcia
Lorca.in Surrealism.

Smith, P.J. The Theatre of Garcia Lorca: Text, Performance, Psychoanalysis, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
 24

Chapter 3: Women’s right in Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding and The

House of Bernarda Alba

All of us have a claim to human rights. These include the freedom from violence and
discrimination, the best possible level of physical and mental health, the right to an education,
the right to own property, the right to vote and the right to a living income. But across the
globe many women and girls still face discrimination on the basis of sex and gender. Gender
inequality underpins many problems which disproportionately affect women and girls, such
as, domestic violence, lower pay, lack of access to education and inadequate healthcare.

The view of Feminism as a crisis of women supports the socially dominant belief that
the only positive role for a woman was that of a wife. Having to seek work because they were
not married was not seen as a natural course of events. From a modern point of view, the idea
of a woman seeking a job is perfectly normal. In the first two decades of twentieth- century
Spain, however, women were trained to work in the home, not in the factory. Needing a job
because they could not find a husband to support them was a crisis at the time. The new laws
of the Second Republic did not change the view of working women entirely, but they took a
positive step towards the liberation of an entire sex. For the first time, all women had the
right to have a voice in their society, government and industry. They were able to pursue
education and fulfillment outside of the home.

In addition to reforming education, the Republic made great strides in the area of
women’s rights. The cultural norm during Lorca’s life allowed socially for two basic roles for
women: wife and mother or nun. During the early the 1920’s much of Europe was moving to
reinforce traditional gender roles: “Whether overtly articulated or not, the reinforcing of
traditional gender division was clearly felt to be one of the keys to stabilizing societies in
flux, along socially and economically traditional lines” (Graham 100). Spain was moving in
opposite direction, giving women more rights than they had ever had before. However, even
when the laws of Second Republic provided equal rights for men and women, the equality
was only conditional. Although women were to join the workforce and the world of politics
they were only favorable depicted in their new roles if these new positions did not conflict
with their true callings as wives and mothers.

Women who are on the verge of marriage have a number of traits that set them apart
from women who play traditional roles and give them subversive personalities. The ladies
 25

studied here have unquestionable character and have adhered to the customs and traditions
that women (namely, appropriate marriages). These women were also typical. They were a
sign of the instances in a century of political upheaval, monetary melancholy, mass
emigration and struggle. During much of twentieth century, the only women in Spain that
were allowed any power over property or children were widows. By using literal and
figurative widows, these playwrights are able to create socially acceptable powerful women.
The rights of all women were severely affected, pushed forward or dragged backward, with
each governmental shift.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, due in part to Spain’s 1898 losses of the
colonies, women were having trouble marrying, despite their desire. This inability to marry
gave rise to social phenomena: a strong feeling of feminism in Spanish women. The female
characters reveal themselves maximum without difficulty and deeply in conversations with
other women. The poetry which erupts at moments of emotional depth commonly comes
from the mouth of women. Especially in the three great tragedies which are known as his
“trilogy of rural life,” Lorca chooses women to exemplify the human life which is crushed
by Spanish customs and social life. However, Lorca does not let the needs of his women fall
through the cracks. As they struggle to live in environments that stifle their actual aspirations,
he offers his female characters a voice that speaks for Lorca’s entire female characters
struggle with the most are those between reason and desire and conformity and revolt.

The play Blood Wedding’s presentation of feminism is influenced by the numerous

societal changes occurring in Spain at the time that Lorca was composing it. Spanish women
did not have many civil rights in 1928, the year of the murder in Nijar on which the drama is
based, including the inability to vote, obtain a divorce, or have an abortion. Additionally,
women did not have the same rights as males in terms of employment and adultery was a
criminal. These limitations have a significant impact on the Bride’s worldview; marriage was,
in fact, a legally binding and in some ways oppressive life choice- to an extent that modern
women can only imagine- but it was the only option available because women could not be
certain that they would be able to sue.

Women’s standing started to improve in 1930, with the advent of the left learning
Spanish Republic. Spanish women got all the civil rights enjoyed by their counterparts in the
United States and the rest of Europe. Blood Wedding, which was first performed in 1932,
would have been written with these changes in mind; in fact, the events of the play are
 26

somewhat incomprehensible in a society where women have equal rights. Nevertheless,

attitudes took longer to shift, particularly in rural communities, and just because divorce was
legal did not mean it was accepted. Whatever the reason, the democratic blooming the Lorca
saw was fleeting. Many of newly-granted women’s rights were rescinded with the election of
Franciso Franco in 1939, following a protracted and violent civil war, and the Catholic-
influenced government urged women to stay at home. Women didn’t once again receive the
rights stated in the 1931 constitution until 1975.

The two magnetic poles of the Mother and the Bride alternate in Lorca’s tale Blood
Wedding. The Mother has adopted the restrictions and norms of her hard rural society. She
has tight rules around money and marriage and disdains empathy. She has strong views on
traditional gender roles (women belongs in the home and men belong in the fields), the value
of procreation and about relations between sexes. Son there is no surprise when the Mother
defines marriage for the Bride: “A man, some children, and a wall two yards thick for
everything else.” Small wonder that the Bride rebels against this confining society, which
stifles her voice in addition to her sexuality. After the formal interview with her novio and his
mother, she abruptly bites her hand and cries in inexpressible rage and choice, she really
desires Leonardo. Inside the moments surrounding the wedding, she shuns physical touch and
struggles to disclaim her thwarted ardour. Best after she has run away with Leonardo whilst
alone in the wooded area together with her lover.

A very similar pattern rules the all-feminine landscape of The House of Bernarda
Alba. Bernarda is like the Mother in the sense that she embodies the harsh, restrictive social
codes that repress women. Her law for the sexes is “Needle and thread for women. Whiplash
and mules for men”. She too is concerned with maintaining class distinctions, with amassing
money and with putting up a good front of “family harmony” no matter how miserable her
daughters may be.

3.1 Feminist parable that is both ingenious and potent

Garcia Lorca writes in The House of Bernarda Alba that “these three acts are
intended to be a documentary snapshot.” If Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen had been
connected the depiction of women who were at odds with their eras because Garcia Lorca is
portraying a picture of a woman who is full of aggressive force, is a component of her time
and a tradition, which encompasses Spain. A drama called The House of Bernarda Alba about
 27

matriarchal oppression and a rebellious daughter. Bernarda has her power from the tradition
of which she is a branch, thus she doesn’t need to go through a series of psychological
changes to get it. This is how lady is a hindrance to advancement: She appears in plays by
Ibsen and Shaw, the progressive element’s component. Bernarda wishes to maintain the
status quo, and wants to protect what she believes to be her household’s position in society.

The fact that Lorca created female characters shows how brilliant his theatre is. He
uses his female characters as tragic heroes to comment on the social roles of women in a
patriarchal society. Lorca witnessed the rise of the fascists and devastating Civil War in his
country. In 1936, Lorca was tortured and executed by fascist troops. Even before his death,
Lorca was well aware of the murderousness of patriarchy. It’s unsurprising that, like
Tennessee Williams, he often wrote about oppression of women: his tortured relationship
with his own sexuality gave him a unique insight into the mutilations that patriarchy inflicts
on the feminine psyche.

In The House of Bernarda Alba, Lorca looks squarely at the tyranny of the patriarchal
women. Bernarda, the newly bereaved widow of a wealthy man and the mother of five
daughters, declares eight years of mourning, effectively imprisoning her daughters in the
house. There are no men in this play, nor are there in Patricia Cornelius’s ingenious and
powerful adaptation. In their absence, the wounds that men inflict move to centre stage.

Bernarda’s tactics for gaining and using her power are oddly entangled. As the
traditional matriarch of the family, she is first and foremost in charge. She makes use of
physical force as well as exploits the power of class distinction to separate her household
from the rest of the community, and even make a strong dividing line between herself and her
servants- including Poncia who is both servant and confidante. Knowledge is directly related
to power, and Bernarda uses it against the family and the community by spying directly and
indirectly on both.

As soon as she steps onto the stage, Bernarda commands silence. The comments made
by her servant clearly preface this authority:

Poncia: “Tyrant over everyone around.

She’s perfectly capable of sitting on your heart and watching you

Die for a whole year without turning off that

 28

Cold smile she wears on her wicked face. Scrub,

Scrub those dishes!”

The nature of Bernarda’s authority is autocratic. She acquired it from a culture that
promoted a matriarchal system. The physical and emotional cage she has built for her
daughters is one source of Bernarda’s power. Garcia Lorca describes how the house is like a
coffin, lined with white silk. The scene: “A very white room in Bernarda Alba’s house.” As
if to accentuate the coffin-like atmosphere of the house, a bell is heard tolling outside, and a
real coffin is brought into the house - the dead husband of Bernarda Alba. In a separate room
within this prison, the insane grandmother is also imprisoned.

Poncia: “There’s the grandmother! Isn’t she locked up tight?”

The sanctimonious Bernarda exercises her control in this prison. The walls of her
home and tradition that Bernarda has built around her Daughters are resilient as the
civilization that produced them (initially) the power in Mrs. Alving. As the townsfolk gather
in Bernarda’s drawing room to honour her dead husband, Bernarda orders one servant to be
silent, and even asserts her control over a child who merely states a simple fact: “eating is
necessary for living.” Bernarda: “At your age, one doesn’t talk in front of older people.” a
Bernarda sets the terms of the sentence-eight years while building this prison around her
daughters:

“For the eight years of mourning, not a breath of air will get in this house from the
street. We’ll act as if we’d sealed up doors and windows with bricks. That’s what happened
in my father’s house-and in my grandfather house. Meantime, you can all start embroidering
your hope-chest linens. I have twenty bolts of linen in the chest from which to cut sheets and
coverlets. Magdalena can embroider them.”

Magdalena is required to follow orders because Bernarda says that is what women are
for, it is her duty and she is member of this house. Bernarda uses tradition to support her
decision as she sentences the defendant to eight years of incarceration in a tomb. However,
the girls must perform a penance that is they must embroider white sheets, which double-
edged and represent the symbol of the prison of their virginity, but in reality, they appear to
be preparing not bed sheets but winding sheets. The future’s potential irony is shown in
Bernarda’s hope chest because she won’t let any of her daughters get married while she’s still
around. Another source of power is class, which is nested within the complex of tradition.
 29

Bernarda links her girls to the restrictions of her class because she is acutely aware of it. She
that Angustias “has been staring at a man from the village” raises suspicion and humiliates
her by:

“Is decent for a woman of your class to be running after a man the day of her father’s
funeral? Answer me! Who were you looking at?”

Despite confiding in Poncia, Bernarda withdraws into herself when she was to keeps
the servant out of her presence. Angustias is in her late 30s, according to Poncia, she should
have man now. Bernarda dismantles the argument with more than just her rage not only with
the logical fallacy of her speech, but what someone has “none of them has had a sweetheart,
and they’ve never needed one! They get along very well.” The effect of Bernarda’s power
over her household is dramatically realized by the grandmother. She is imprisons by
Bernarda, but in her insanity, she finds a strange form of liberation. The reaction of the
servants is quite different. Although they do Bernarda’s bidding-spying on the neighbours
and becoming silent at her orders, they attain the limited bounds of freedom within their own
class. The effect on the daughters is most pronounced. They bow to the power of Bernarda,
and even the mildest of revolts is crushed.

Bernarda: “In this house you’ll do what I order.”

In this description of their situation, Angustias calls it hell and Magdalena adds, “even
our eyes aren’t our own.” Adela refers to the situation as a prison.

The superior, Bernarda, orders flagellations, performs penances and offers prayers at
the coffin. Poncia says to Bernarda: “your daughters behave in a certain way although
imprisoned in a cabinet. However, neither you nor anyone else can maintain look to
someone’s heart.” Poncia is completely accurate when she intimates that Bernarda can
control the girls and lay them away in cupboards or coffins, but she cannot control their
hearts. She has so effectively restrained their inherent sensuality that it is certain to find
expression and come out. It is obvious from the outset that Bernarda wants to exercise tight
control over her daughters, presumably to stop them from marrying anyone outside of their
social class. She achieve this by their freedom of movement, by monitoring them, and by
conditioning them by instilling fear, by punishing them, by reference to authority, and by her
stifling and powerful will. Bernarda is unable to comprehend the sensuous drive that drives
her daughters to rebel due to her own sense of class and Spanish womanhood pride. They
 30

recognize the unnaturalness of the liaison between Pepe and Angustias, but Bernarda does
not. According to Magdalena he should “be after you, Amelia or our Adela who is twenty-not
seeking for the least probable one in this house, a woman who, like her father, talks through
her nose.”

The virility of this young man and the resulting longing shatters Bernarda has iron
grip over her daughters. Adela physically owns him and Martirio have a strong bond. “A
daughter who disobeys stops being a daughter and becomes an enemy,” Bernarda cautions
the audience and Prudencia. Poncia warns Adela that her desire for Pepe poses a threat, and
she recommends a cautions course of waiting, but the uprising has already started. Adela,
once afraid of Poncia, declares: “Well you’ll have to! I’ve been afraid of you. But now I’m
stronger than you.” The rivalry and the jealousy disintegrate the power which Bernarda once
directed against her daughters. Adela snatches away her mother’s cane and breaks it in two.
“There’ll be an end to prison voices here! This is what I do with the tyrant’s cane. Not
another step. No one but Pepe commands me!” Thus, the power of command leaves Bernarda
and becomes Pepe’s. Bernarda regains control as a result of Adela’s suicide and subsequent
chaos caused by Adela’s mistaken conviction that Pepe has been shot dead. Only through
bringing her family’s dynamics back into balance was Bernarda able to restore control. Pepe,
a change agent, posed the greatest threat to her authoritarian rule, but she was unable to act
because of her unshakeable pride recognizing this danger. During the crisis period, she was
powerless but as soon as Pepe left, and the enemy in her family, Adela, commits suicide, she
immediately begins to exert her authority, calling on the voice of respectability to support
her. She keeps up her proud public display by claiming Adela is a virgin. As she did at the
start of the play, she demonstrates her strength by commanding silence.

The authority Bernarda exercises is circumscribed. The impact of her surprise at

becoming so powerful still lingers. There are still four daughters each with her own basic
needs to be satisfied. Pepe still exists in the community, and in the economy and in the
memory of the girls. Bernarda grows older. The audience is convinced that her authority is
waning despite the appearance that she has restored the equilibrium she needs to keep it, and
the equilibrium is only a tenuous one.

In Blood Wedding, mother is the strongest presence in Lorca’s play. She recognizes
and acknowledges the likelihood of the impending disaster, and she speaks openly about how
things ought to be rather than how they frequently turn out. As a wife, mother and widow
 31

who has trod the path of social respectability and duty. She has accrued the considerable
social power available to women in her society; this power is clearly substantial even if it is
less instrumental than in her society. Even though it is less useful than that of men, this power
is unquestionably significant. She exerts virtually complete control over her son, for instance,
demonstrating the indirect power that women have over events that take place outside the
home. The play makes much of her stoic suffering (suffering that occurs due to the deaths of
loved ones). On the one hand, her acceptance of life’s bizarre unfairness and her choice to
suffer in silence are admirable and strengthen the leader’s perception of her exceptional
moral fortitude. However, in so far as her limited access to public life keeps her ignorant of
the histories of the Bride and Leonardo. And she is attentive and prepared to give instructions
and advise, she might have been able to stop this most recent tragedy if she weren’t so
completely bound to do the home’s private area. Women are unfairly excluded from public
events and spaces in this culture, as suggested by references in the play to married women’s
lives. When these specific conditions are taken into consideration, the Mother’s stoicism has
a new significance. It is obvious that the Mother supports the disparate responsibilities that
are assigned to men and women as well as the limitations on her tremendous authority that
this involves. Her stoicism and sense of duty are similar to quietism in this regard, which is
the passive acceptance of things that may or should be changed.

3.2: Women’s Subordination

The main barrier to the advancement and development of women is patriarchy.

Although levels of dominance vary, the basic tenet that men are in charge remains the same.
This control may take different forms. Therefore, in order to fight for women’s growth in a
systematic fashion, it is vital to comprehend the system that maintains women’s dominance
and subordination as well as to unravel its workings. Patriarchy there creates barriers for
women to advance in society in the modern world, where women succeed on the basis of
their merits. In Andalusia, the community’s social environment is tightly segregated into
separate, restricted male and female worlds. Given the physically demanding labour needed
to extract wealth from one’s lands, no one in this agricultural community undervalues the
importance of having male heirs. The area outside of the home- the public spaces- is
considered to be man’s sphere. The world of women is the interior of the private areas of the
house. Male dominance in both the public and private spheres is referred to as patriarchy.
 32

Feminists use the term patriarchy in this way to both characterize the power dynamics
between men and women and to identify the underlying causes of women’s subordination.

The patriarchal ideal of the Mother is represented by her earlier worries over her son’s
choice of woman in this tragedy, which is infused with genre’s sense of inevitability that
prevail over her culture’s conventions. Undoubtedly as a result of the trauma of losing both
her husband and a son, her perspective has become more harsh. It turns out that in Blood
Wedding, love not reputation, is what motivates betrayal, with this motive’s purity
functioning as a counterweight to the conflicting messages of patriarchy’s standards, even if,
as we shall see, there was motive to motivate the Bride’s illegitimate suitor to demonstrate his
merit by presenting her his victory. As a result, the Bride and Leonardo’s love is based on an
equality that the patriarchal order’s structures and interests do not acknowledge. For instance,
forced marriages, which are arranged with the two families financial interests in mind and are
tied to issues of inheritance and lineage, do not consider foolishly, and undervalue those
affairs influencing people with their ability. We assume that Leonardo and the Bride’s three-
year romance ended because he was deemed unsuitable for her. Leonardo’s harsh admission
to her is much and one wonders what degree his affection for her is now intertwined with his
urge to prove himself.

After Leonardo separation with the Bride and later married her cousin, with whom he
had a child and is expecting a second after they had already split from the bride. However, we
only have the mother’s word that the virility has been passed on from father to Leonardo has
outperformed himself in this area, son, no doubt. Though by the time he decides to act on the
feelings that he has harbored for the Bride since they split, the children have already been
born, it is apparent that he does not find children to be enough; the situation is no longer
reversible. Even with all of its flaws, patriarchal culture offers a suitable setting for exploring
this tension, which takes many different forms. It can be seen in the conflict between social
mores and the urge to love, but it can also be seen in the way that society’s rules and
expectations are in conflict with one another. Additionally, individuals who are structured in
accordance experience internal tensions to the contradictory, if not impossible, dictates of
patriarchy. Anderson grumbles, “The conflicts demonstrate the principles that the
protagonists take to be true. Due to the play’s action being poor, if not critically lacking,
both at the level of the experience of the individual and the level of communal life.” These
ideas also subject the protagonists to excruciating pain that is unavoidable.
 33

Desire is put against social norms in Blood Wedding, and patriarchy’s intolerance and
incoherence ensure tragedy. The play highlights the inadequacies in a system characterized
by irresolvable tensions: between the restrictions of familial honour and the whims of
masculine reputation, between the comfort and status that come with owning property and the
fulfillment that love implies for the individual; and, of course between a women’s shame and
the intensity of her yearning. In the end, the Bride’s refusal to comply exposes the absurdity
of patriarchy’s obsession with the ideals of female modesty and restraint.

Conclusion

Thus, one of the finest tragedies based on Shakespeare’s style is Lorca’s Blood
Wedding. This drama’s themes, which include feminism, generational tensions, and physical
emotional isolation are interpreted in numerous ways. Many critics offered a variety of
explanations for this drama’s terrible conclusion. Although the bridegroom’s to be wife’s
elopement with Leonardo is the immediate cause, there are social and economic issues that
support this. The characters in Lorca’s play are exclusively female. It examines how they are
forced to suffer in a society where males are free to act however they choose and are
expected to be forgiven, but women are expected to live up to impossibly high expectations.
It delivers it most devastating critue through Bernarda: women are subjected to such harsh
expectations that a matriarch who holds great power nevertheless upholds these distorted
ideals by acting masulinely, as if the only to be dominant is to deny and violate her own
feminity.
 34

Work Cited

Asselineau Roger and Folsom (1999). Whiman and Lebanon’s Adonis. Walt Stainton, Leslie.
Lorca: a Dream of life(Farrar Straus)

Bergen, Beata. Repression, Rebellion, Death and Desire: The Political and Preudian
Dialectic in Federico Garcia Lorca”s The House of Bernarda Alba. The University of British
Columbia, 1999. Thesis.

Bird, Iris Scribner. A Study of vImage, Symbol and Theme in La casa de Bernarda Alba.
University of the Pacific, 1971. Thesis.

Blake, Thomas. “Bernarda Alba and Frogs with No Tongues.” MP Journal, vol.3, no.1, Aug.
2010, pp. 23-38

Burtton, Julianne. “The Greatest Punishment: Female and Male in Lorca’s Tragedies.”
Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols. Ed. Beth Miller. Berkeley: u of
California Press, 1983. 275-79

Edwards< G. lorca: The Theatre Beneath the sand. London; Marion Boyars, 1980. –
Dramatists in perspective: Spanish theatre in the twentieth century. Cardiff: university of
Wales press, 1985.

Gershator, D. (ed.). 1984. Federico Garcia Lorca: Selected Letters. New York: New
Directions

Gibson, I. Federico Garcia Lorca: a life, London; Faber and Feber, 1989

Lima, Robert. The Theatre of Garcia Lorca. New York: las America publishing company,
1963.

Lorca, F. G.(1989). Blood Wedding. David Johnston(trans). London: Hodder Education.

 35

Chapter 4: Lorca portrays the victim and the mirror of an andocentric

culture

Culture has been an important factor in the production of literary works throughout
the world. Federico Garcia Lorca, one of Spain’s most well-known playwrights who
portrayed the oppressed and exploited, illustrates the plight of Spanish women living in a
patriarchal society. He presents the cultural organization of power as well as patriarchal
social structure and resistance to such system in his society through the female characters in
his plays. Feminist contribution and resistance to patriarchy were the main themes of Lorca’s
La casa de Bernarda Alba (the House of Bernarda Alba).

The House of Bernarda Alba, which was finished in 1936, the year before the Spanish
Civil War and subsequently, the Francoist regime that got its start in 1939, illustrates the
existence of Spanish women in that era’s andocentric social framework. The nationalist
asserted in 1939, the triumphs of the female movement, which had its beginnings in 1920,
were rendered obsolete end, followed by a brief return to traditional views of Spanish women
role and place in society: to the time when the patriarchal principles and the ideological
conservatism implanted by the Church and the State still dominated. These two institutions
restricted women’s social activities to the domestic sphere and household labor. The main
theme of female oppression presented in The House of Bernarda Alba reflects the political
situation during that time period. Through The House of Bernarda Alba, the audience
member discovers the circumstances of the female figure living in a society governed by the
Spanish patriarchal system. Spanish society of that time had certain expectations for women.

Women, “like submissive creatures, would have to be accustomed to the

unreasonable demands made by men. Lorca’s work shows us that the women, for their desire
to claim equality, were considered irrational and thus were always placed in the background
of the society being submissive was one of the essential characters that an honored women
must possess”. As seen through la Poncia’s words, “after fifteen days of marriage, a man
leaves his bed for the table, and later on from the table to the tavern, and the woman who
cannot accept it will waste away, crying in a corner’.

Each of the women in Bernarda’s house reacts differently, living under such injustice
and female oppression in a dictatorial regime. Some of them only complain and pity
themselves, like Amelia, who believes that to be born a woman is the greatest crime.
 36

Magdalena, who makes a resentful comment on her miserable state “Curse on all women”, or
Angustias, who follows her mother’s instructions without objection even though deep down
inside her she truly feels oppressed living in the home that is not so much different from a
living hell. According to Blake, “woman must be subordinate to male authority; she must
sublimate her desire. Although all people are subjected to the parameters of the order, these
women (and all women occupying a patriarchal social structure) are far more confined. Not
only must they answer to cultural codes that demand their deferral to paternal law, they must
endure the tyrannical reign of a mother that respects these codes to the letter”. Blake also
adds that “the very act of ‘participation’ in culture constitutes conformity, to some extent, to
clearly delineated codes of conduct, an obligation that fundamentally suppresses agency and
personal freedom. Further still, the ‘we’ denotes women in particular, subjects who occupy a
patriarchal symbolic to which they must answer but which they have not constructed”.

Another female figure belonging to this category is Bernarda. La Poncia mentions that
she is of the same school as Bernarda. We can interpret this as an implication that Bernarda
also controlled the household while her husband was still alive. The scenes of Bernarda
holding her cane remind readers of the absolute authority and domination granted to the
female figure, as opposed to the patriarchal social system where men are in authority over
women. According to Blake, “one might imagine that, no longer straitjacketed by inherited
notions of ‘appropriate’ feminine conduct, Bernarda would transform her home into an oasis
far removed from the injustices of the outside world. Sadly, Bernarda actively rein scribes an
overtly misogynistic social structure”. Blake emphasizes, “Repression of the feminine follows
when the mother uses her position to transmit and perpetuate the priorities and practices of
patriarchal conditions”. By imposing her command on the household [Bernarda] confines
her daughters to the domestic sphere as a gesture of respect for the patriarch. In deference to
paternal law, Bernarda perceives the continuity of traditional values as justification for
imprisoning her daughters (Blake 24).

Another example of how feminist contribution and resistance to patriarchy are

intertwined is Martirio. When she argues with Adela, she tells her younger sister that the
stallion pen is not where a virtuous woman should be, which, shows how important it is for
women to preserve their honor and virtue. Nonetheless, Martirio herself puts on her
nightgown standing by the window waiting for a man to stop by until dawn, which is
considered indecent and unacceptable at that time. According to Blake, “Bernarda’s
daughters have, from their mother, internalized this message [that woman has no subjectivity
 37

that is her own. Just as Bernarda thinks that societal norms should not be questioned,
Martirio has no faith in the legitimacy of her material reality, but, as do her sisters, she
robotically conforms to cultural expectations”

Adela’s submission to patriarchy must not be forgotten. Even though she looks like
she’s resisting, it also shows how submissive she is to patriarchy. In terms of how she resists,
she first rebels by wearing a green dress while walking towards the pen so that all the men
can see her. After that, she expresses her desire to go out. As the conflict becomes more
serious, Adela breaks Bernarda’s cane, the symbol of her mother’s authority, before
committing suicide as her last resort to fight against the phallocentric structure that has
always dominated her life, putting an end to the persistent desperation that always harried
her. In terms of her contribution to the patriarchal system, Blake states that “Adela is
rejecting the messenger but not the message. Even in her act of insubordination and total
disregard of her mother’s authority. Adela embraces the role of that which enables male
subjectivity”. Blake explains, “Though Adela ignores Angustias’s ‘rights’ to Pepe, and by
passes the necessity for marriage in pursuit of her sexual satisfaction, she embraces the
underlying structures of a phallocentric social economy. That is to say, she reduces herself to
the status of object and is thus in collusion with her own oppression”. First of all, she claims
that she would become whoever he wants her to be, even if the whole world were against her,
that she would put on a crown of thorns, the one that a woman desired by a married man
wears. For her, Pepe is the only one who can control her life and issue orders to her.
Regarding Adela’s behavior, Blake asserts that “claiming that she will be whatever he wants,
she will mold her subjectivity around his projection of desire. Unwilling to be the daughter
Bernarda demands, she elects to be the woman for whom Pepe el Romano yearns. Each
‘identity,’ however, is prescribed. She merely changes the setting of her confinement”. That
is, nothing has changed in fact. Her dream of having Pepe by her side, in a little house where
he can visit her any time he wants, whenever he desires her also strengthen Blake’s previous
argument. The author concludes that “Adela has occupied a home in which her movement
has been restricted. Her relocation situates her in the same position. Only this time, her
movement has been restricted not by her mother, but by Pepe el Romano. Essentially, she, as
did her mother, dutifully conforms to the absolute power of male authority”. Again, even
though it might appear to us that Adela is the person who opposes female oppression the
most, she is still sucked into the whirling cycle of a life controlled by the demands of men
and phallocentric traditions.
 38

In other words, under the fascist regime governed by Francisco Franco in Spain, the
Spanish citizens lived without freedom as “their lives were threatened by the very
civilization, the regime, which was supposed to protect them” and those who disobeyed
would be harshly punished (Bergen 11). This is correct in the case of Bernarda’s household,
as she has the authority over the suffering inhabitants of her house, including her mother, her
daughters, and servants. The tyranny by Bernarda over the inhabitants of her house reflects
Freudian civilization which has gone wrong or superego and is a premonition of Franco’s
regime in Spain which is an example of such civilization.

The way Bernarda runs her family mirrors how Franco manipulated Spanish residents.
According to the author detrimental leaders as those who disregard others voices, demand
unwavering support and create hostile and violent surroundings and solutions. The other
women in the home and female characters residing in an androcentric social structure
function as their followers, while the patriarchal society in general and Bernarda as its vivid
representative fit into the role of a destructive leader. Bernarda and society aren’t the only
ones. They disregard the opinions of other women and use force to deal with oppressed
people, either physically or emotionally. Women who are oppressed are unable to speak up
about emotional abuse. Regardless of how it affects them, and must continue to advance
existing ideology if not, they would face criticism and be shunned by society. When it comes
to emotional abuse, repressed women are unable to speak out and are forced to spread the
current ideology regardless of how it affects them because doing so would make them a
target for criticism and exclusion from society. They have to constantly endure such a life
without escape. Both the patriarchal ideology and Bernarda abuse other women physically.

The reader learns how oppression and resistance characterize Spanish women through
Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, as well as the reasons why these women oppress other
women while also experiencing their own oppression. Ultimately, the women formed by
female characters living and phallocentric concepts of subjectivity in general. As Mara Josefa
claimed, one could say that inside Bernarda’s home in particular, frogs with no tongues. As
asserted by Blake, “these women, without tongues, can neither adequately articulate their
frustration nor can they participate in the public dialogue that serves to construct the very
laws to which they are subordinated”
 39

Work Cited

Byrd, Suzanne W. (1991). “Garcia Lorca’s Legacy: Live Theatre at the Battle Front” in
Manual Duran & Francesca Colecchia (ed.), Lorca’s Legacy: Essays on Lorca’s Life, Poetry
and Theatre. New York; Peter Lang, pp. 205-213

Delgado, Maria M. Federico Garcia Lorca. New York: Routledge, 2008

Edwards, Gwyne. Lorca: The Theatre Beneath the Sand. London: Marion Boyars, 1980.

Garah Baghi, a. (1990). Lorca’s life and plans. Tehran: Ebtekare Hnar Publication.

Genet, Jean. The Maids and Deathwatch. Tr. Bernarda Frechtman. Grove Press Inc, New
York, 1961.

Honig, Edwin. Garcia Lorca. New Directions, New York, 1963.

Jones, David Richard and Susan Jones. “Federico Garcia Lorca: A Study Guide”.
www.repertorio.edu. 16-2-2009

Lorca, Federico Garcia. La Casa de Bernarda Alba. Ed. Herbert Ramsden. Manchester,
England: Manchester University Press, 1983.

Lorca, Federico Garcia. The House of Bernarda Alba. Trans. A.S.Kline.

www.poetryintranslation.com. 20-1-2009

Smith, Paul Julian (2003). Contemporary Spanish Culture: TV, fashion, Art and Film.
Cambridge/Oxford/Malden: Polity Press.
 40

Chapter 5: Conclusion

The concept of importance in Women is crucial to understanding Federico Garcia

Lorca’s plays, whether you’re a reader or a production. The work demonstrates that women
are the targets of feminism by examining how women’s physical appearances are presented,
society’s attitudes about women, language and Spanish culture. It is challenging to come to a
conclusion when the future of Lorca’s reputation and his work is somewhat unpredictable and
depends on so many factors, including the kinds of productions that will be made in the
future and any fresh revelations about his life. Conclusions are tough to reach when
considering Lorca’s future reputation and his work is rather unexpected and depends on a
variety of productions that will develop in the future. Because audiences, reviewers and
theatre professionals are unable to escape Lorca’s magnetic presence, the poet’s image is still
insufficient. The only conceivable diversion is although his assassination has made this all
but impossible; this myth will be realized if the image of Lorca is completed.

The tight moral and honour codes that Lorca’s women follow, which are in and of
themselves exceedingly strict are what cause them to be sterile by their interpretation of their
obligations to these codes they kill in themselves and others the life force which could make
them fecund and vital.

In Spanish society, women are responsible for bearing children and building an
appropriate facade for the community in which they live. Children are important because they
give a way for the family name and heritage to be carried on and because they become the
tillers of the social to do so on the customs of Spain.

He gained popularity in the theatrical community in Europe with his trilogy of Blood
Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba. The main characters of these plays are
women who are driven by their passions, unmet ambitions and embitters. The notion that
feminism represents a crisis for women promotes the widely held attitude that women should
exclusively play the role of wife. The humorous societal changes taking place in Spain at the
time that Lorca wrote the play Blood Wedding had an impact on the feminism that is
presented in it. On the other, the feminine in The House of Bernarda Alba, Bernarda
represents the stringent social norms that oppress women, much like the Mother in Blood
Wedding would. Through Bernarda, it offers its most damning commentary: expectations for
 41

women are so strict that who is strong herself upholds these distorted ideals by acting manly,
as if the only way to be successful and violate her own femininity.

Because of the manner that Lorca uses his female characters as tragic heroes to make
statements about how women are viewed in patriarchal society; the fact that he developed
female characters demonstrates the brilliance of his theatre.
 42

Bibliography

Barea, Arturo. Lorca: The Poet and His People. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1949.

Barry, peter. 1995. Beginning theory: an introduction to literary and culture theory. New
York: Manchester University Press.

Block, Haskell M., and Shed, Robert g. (ed). Masters of Modern Drama. New York: Random
House, 1962. An interesting introduction to Blood Wedding and modern drama.

Bonalodd, Federico (ed.) 2007. A companion to Federico Garcia Lorca. Wood bridge.
Boydell & Brewer

Boyd, James P. (ed.). The Drama, Spanish and Portugese. London: Smart and Stanley, 1903.

Bluefarb, Sam. “Life and Death in Garcia Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba,” Drama Survey,
4, No. 2, (Summer, 1965).

Bressler, Charles E. 1994. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to theory and Practice. New
Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Duran. Manuel. Ed. Lorca : a collection of critical essays. New Jersey: prentice-Hall,
inc.,1962

Flores, Angel. (ed.). Spanish Drama. New York: Bantam Books, 1962. An anthology of
plays from the classical age in Spain to Lorca.

Garcia Lorca, Federico. Three Tragedies. Tr. James Graham-Lujan and Richard L.
O’Connell. Colonial Press, Massachusetts, 1959.

Loewan, Mathew. The nature of Tragedy in Lorca’s Blood Wedding.

Lorca, Federico Garcia. 2005. Blood Wedding. Translated by Simon Scardifield London:
NHB

Lorca, Federico Garcia. The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca. New York: New
Directions, 1955.
 43

Lorca, Federico Garcia. Three Tragedies: Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda
Alba. Trans. James Graham-Lujan and Richard L. O’Connell. Connecticut: Greenwood
Press, 1977.