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A review by mobullock
Three Tragedies: Blood Wedding, Yerma, Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca
4.0
From Blood Wedding:
“...it’s so terrible to see one’s own blood spilled out on the ground...When i got to my son, he lay fallen in the middle of the street. I wet my hands with his blood and licked them with my tongue--because it was my blood.”
From House of Bernarda Alba:
“AMELIA: To be born a woman’s the worst possible punishment.
MAGDALENA: Even our eyes aren’t our own.”
Lorca’s women have a volcanic ferocity. Their passions vehement, their sorrows chasmic and eternal, and their joys transient, most of the major women characters in these three plays (Blood Wedding, Yerma, House of Bernarda Alba) seem to be at war with a man-made narrative of “proper” womanhood. One thing Lorca might be exploring in these plays is the nature of desire, how a woman can be seemingly resolved to cultural patriarchy and yet is emotionally rife with longing and regret for a life she can never live. This is evident in Blood Wedding where a bride is torn between her duty to her husband and her love for the man who arrives horseback outside her window every night. It is perhaps personified in Yerma, in the titular character’s near psychotic need for motherhood, what she seems to interpret as the ultimate expression of not only womanhood but freedom, or rather escape. It is what tears five sisters apart in House of Bernarda Alba as they live under the thunderous cane of their domineering mother. Desire. Repression. Frustration. Longing. Repentance. These words danced through my ears as I experienced these plays. I thought of Lorca and his own unrequited desires living as a gay man in mid-Civil War Spain. Maybe it was his deep familiarity with such passions that enabled him to render so palpably the heartbreaks of these women. There’s more to my feelings about these plays that are inexpressible at the moment, but we all know the tragedy of living without fulfillment and longing with no remedy.
“...it’s so terrible to see one’s own blood spilled out on the ground...When i got to my son, he lay fallen in the middle of the street. I wet my hands with his blood and licked them with my tongue--because it was my blood.”
From House of Bernarda Alba:
“AMELIA: To be born a woman’s the worst possible punishment.
MAGDALENA: Even our eyes aren’t our own.”
Lorca’s women have a volcanic ferocity. Their passions vehement, their sorrows chasmic and eternal, and their joys transient, most of the major women characters in these three plays (Blood Wedding, Yerma, House of Bernarda Alba) seem to be at war with a man-made narrative of “proper” womanhood. One thing Lorca might be exploring in these plays is the nature of desire, how a woman can be seemingly resolved to cultural patriarchy and yet is emotionally rife with longing and regret for a life she can never live. This is evident in Blood Wedding where a bride is torn between her duty to her husband and her love for the man who arrives horseback outside her window every night. It is perhaps personified in Yerma, in the titular character’s near psychotic need for motherhood, what she seems to interpret as the ultimate expression of not only womanhood but freedom, or rather escape. It is what tears five sisters apart in House of Bernarda Alba as they live under the thunderous cane of their domineering mother. Desire. Repression. Frustration. Longing. Repentance. These words danced through my ears as I experienced these plays. I thought of Lorca and his own unrequited desires living as a gay man in mid-Civil War Spain. Maybe it was his deep familiarity with such passions that enabled him to render so palpably the heartbreaks of these women. There’s more to my feelings about these plays that are inexpressible at the moment, but we all know the tragedy of living without fulfillment and longing with no remedy.