The House of Bernarda Alba

Author: Federico García Lorca

setting

• Bernarda’s house during and after her husband, Antonio María Benavides’, funeral
• The beginning of eight years of mourning

characters

• Bernarda Alba
  • Harsh, controlling matriarchal dictator
  • Tension: tradition versus modernity
• Pepe el Romano: main love interest
  • 25, best looking man in town
  • Intent on marrying Angustias
• Adela: youngest daughter
  • Rebellious
• Martirio
• Magdalena
• Poncia: servant
• María Josefa: Bernarda Alba’s mother
  • Crazy, wants to get married

plot

• The servants, then the daughters, discuss Bernarda’s tyranny
• Town gossip, emphasis on tradition and shaming those who are not “proper”
• The girls learn of Pepe’s plan to marry Angustias

themes

• Continuation of tradition
• Circular time
• Internalized misogyny
• Societally imposed gender roles
  • Control
• Classism
  • The commodification of image
• Freedom
• Spinsterhood is inevitable
  • Women who don’t want to be inside the house
  • Women not being married
• A woman’s place in the home
• Sexual behavior of Spanish women
  • Repression
  • Lack of fullfilment
    • Closely related to gay people in Spain

symbolism

• Stick: represents power and control
  • Strong movements of fascist dictatorship
• Windows: passage into another world
  • Still barrier
• Women
  • Adela
    • Rebellion
    • At child-bearing age, yet still single
    • Desire for liberation from tradition
  • Paca la Roseta
    • Outsider
    • Loose woman
    • Class issue
    • Free
    • Sexuality
    • Ridicule and envy of freedom
  • María Josefa
    • Idealization of marriage
    • “Expiration”
    • Seashore: water, freedom
    • Fulfillment of desires
    • Bad influence
      • Lock up: wartime treatment of those who think differently
• Colors
  • Green
  • White (Alba)

questions and discussion

• Can the daughters truly be free from oppression after leaving the house?
• What are “topics and issues people are afraid to address” in the first act?
  • Sexuality, gender roles
  • Class issues
  • How religion affects image (Catholicism)

analysis

The House of Bernarda Alba Act I.pdf

• Stage direction (5)
  • Frozen in time (🔗 One Hundred Years of Solitude)
    • Bells
    • Interior
    • Repetition
• “A drama of women in the villages of Spain”
  • Realist to show truth
• “A needle … for men” (21)
  • Women inside
  • Men outside
  • Emphasis on class
• “In the eight years … cutting out sheets” (21)
  • Tradition imposed
  • Not followed freely
  • It’s still the father and grandfather’s house despite them having passed already
• “It gave me … men’s conversation” (25)
  • Afraid of daughters being exposed to new ideas by outsiders

notes

“A needle and thread for women. A whip and a mule for men.” (21)

background

• The Rural Trilogy
  1. Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding), 1932
     • Themes
       • Impossible love
       • Oral culture
         • Imitate ways of speaking
       • Ancestral myths of the Andalusian land
         • Popular culture, not high culture
       • Symbolism of life and death
         • Knives
         • Razors
         • The moon (🔗 18 The Moon 🜄♃♆)
           • Birth
           • Death
         • Horses
         • Orange blossoms
           • Spain = land of oranges
           • Creation of new life
         • Running water (🔗 00 cups - water 🜄)
           • Stagnant = death
           • Running = new life, freedom
       • Successful in Spain and US
  2. Yerma (Barren), 1934
     • Lack of women’s rights
       • Lack of fulfilment
     • Repression of feelings and emotions and social pressures
     • Fertility vs. infertility
     • Concept of honor
       • Modernization through his plays
       • Forces people to do things
     • Cannot divorce despite wanting a child (her husband is infertile)
       • Why expecting loyalty and babies at the same time?
     • What is honor?
       • Dependent on time and perception
       • Legal definitions
       • Examples
         • Killing wife and lover
• Directly related to situation in Europe
• Finished manuscript June 19, 1936
• “Intended to be a photographic documentary”
• Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939)
• First performed in Buenos Aires
  • Performed in Spain after dictatorship ended
    • 30 years later

related

• Can writers do justice to stories that are not their own?
• If there is no love, there can only be death

related

• One Hundred Years of Solitude