Blood Wedding

As early as 1933, the year after he wrote Blood Wedding, Lorca announced his intention to write a trilogy of “the Spanish earth,” of which Blood Wedding was the first part. The second play, Yerma (1934), was immensely successful staged, and continues to enjoy success worldwide. In 1935, the year before his death, Lorca claimed to be close to finishing the final play in the trilogy, but Francoists murdered him before he completed the work. Other than fragments, the manuscript of the final play, The Destruction of Sodom, has never been found. Since his death, theater critics have included Lorca’s final play, The House of Bernarda Alba (1936), in the trilogy. Despite its thematic relationship to the two previous plays, Lorca never intended it as the conclusion.

Lorca calls Yerma “a tragic poem.” It focuses on its titular character’s obsession with becoming a mother. In an inversion of Blood Wedding, the happily conventional marriage is unsettled by a woman’s desire for what would make it even more conventional. Yerma’s husband is uninterested in children. Despite his wife’s constant requests for a child, he doesn’t reveal his intention to remain childless until they are on a pilgrimage to a mountain-top shrine reputed to make women pregnant. Yerma refuses to leave her husband since it will damage her honor. Upon discovering that her husband is unwilling to have children, she strangles him.

Yerma is similar to Blood Wedding in several ways. Yerma is largely the victim of the oppressive rural culture which defines her existence as a wife and mother. Her inability to have a child mirrors the Bride’s inability to be with Leonardo, as does each woman’s fate of becoming a community pariah after pursuing their desire. Yerma is a drama of the land. Much of the play includes verse and prose, with several peasant songs and local folklore, reminiscent of Blood Wedding. While Yerma is on the mountain top, in the third act, two figures from chthonic culture act out a universal coupling, echoing the natural figures personified at the end of Blood Wedding. Lorca suggests that nature itself is taking an active interest in the lives of his characters.

In contrast, The House of Bernarda Alba is set entirely inside its titular house. Bernarda Alba is a domineering matriarch who rules her five daughters with tyrannical ease. Upon the death of her second husband, she imposes a mourning period of eight years, which isolates her daughters even further from their Andalusian community. The characters are all women. A male character, a supposed love interest for several of the sisters, never appears. The play ends with the suicide of one of the daughters, who believes her mother has killed her lover.

The play is a meditation on the insular world of women. After a lifetime in the world of the honor code and church, Bernarda has internalized the patriarchal system. She imposes it upon her daughters, jealously policing their bodies and forcing them to suppress their passions. Similarly to Blood Wedding and Yerma, the suppression of desire leads to death and tragedy. An indifferent society and the whim of men control women and their bodies. However, unlike Blood Wedding and Yerma, there are no nature figures in this play. The earth is absent, and there is no music or poetry.