Critics+on+House+of+Bernarda+Alba

Federico Garcia Lorca **  Lorca's major plays -- //Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba//, as well as //Mariana Pineda, The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife//, and //Doña Rosita the Spinster// – are among the most woman-centred plays in dramatic history. In these plays, the pivotal characters are women. Women are the ones who suffer from desire and pass through conflict to tragic or comic resolution. Most of the scenes take place in women's spaces, the domestic interiors which they rule and from which men are estranged (or, as in //The House of Bernarda Alba//, completely prohibited). The f emale characters reveal themselves most easily and deeply in conversations with other women. The poetry which erupts at moments of emotional intensity usually comes from the mouths of female characters. 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. In //Blood Wedding//, Lorca's story oscillates between the two magnetic poles of the Mother and the Bride. The Mother has internalized the mores and constrictions of her harsh, rural world. She is strict about money and marriage and contemptuous of feelings. She is deeply conservative about gender roles (men belong in the fields, women belong in the house), about the importance of procreation ("Your grandfather left a son on every corner"), and about relations between the sexes ("I looked at nobody-I looked at your father, and when they killed him I looked at the wall in front of me"). So 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 as well as her sexuality. After the formal interview with her novio and his mother, she suddenly bites her hand and cries "Ay-y-y!" in inexpressible rage and desire. Clearly she desires Leonardo, but why? Does her need spring from love or lust or the frustration of a life with no choices and no control? In the moments surrounding the wedding, she shuns physical contact and struggles to deny her thwarted passion. Only after she has run away with Leonardo-while alone in the forest with her lover and then grieving with the bereaved Mother-can she unleash torrents of poetry, harsh and vivid images of her love and liberation and eventual tragedy. 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. And she is fiercely strong-as Poncia says, "perfectly capable of sitting on your heart and watching you die for a whole year without turning off that cold little smile." In opposition to her are her daughters with their silenced lusts. Are they "bad" as the servant says? "They're women without men, that's all," answers Poncia. "And in such matters even blood is forgotten." No one else could have slammed the door more irrevocably on her children, kept them more confined, than Bernarda herself. As a homosexual, Lorca had a special sympathy for oppressed, powerless groups and individuals, especially women. An English critic, Paul Binding, puts the case this way in his insightful book, //Lorca: The Gay Imagination// (1985): The homosexual writer, with singular qualification, can view women as autonomous beings; freed from the endowments of desire or acquisition, they can stand before him in all their complexity and their tragedy. Tragedy -- because he, more than his heterosexual fellows perhaps, can understand just what cost to their psychic life their enforced surrender to convention so frequently entails. Just as the gay man has had to put up with expectations from those around him that he has neither inclination nor ability to fulfill, so women, especially in traditional societies, have had to acquiesce to criteria of judgment -- founded on others' convenience -- which may find them wanting and which, in their inmost beings, they resent and despise.
 * Women and the Drama of Sexual Liberation [|**[1**]]

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