Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba: Visual and Aural Cues Contributing to an Appreciation of Interaction

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James S. Bowling

Professor Leonard

MALS 775

29 March 2005

Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba: Visual and Aural Cues Contributing to an Appreciation of Interaction

"She... died a virgin. Do you hear me? !Silencio!, !Silencio!, I said. !Silencio!"-Bernarda Alba, The House of Bernarda Alba

Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) belongs to that class of Spanish poets and artists (e.g., Dali, Picasso) that came to prominence in the inter-war period.¹ If their antecedents in the latter years of the 19th century retain a sometimes wry perspective of the human condition - Ibsen plays, even in their darkest moments, retain an element of whimsy - Lorca's so-called "rural" trilogy most assuredly do not.2 Arguably, the massive number of military and civilian casualties incurred during World War I, combined with the social and political upheavals such a disaster fosters, can produce a type of self-destructive nihilism within the human psyche.3 Unlike Ibsen, in Lorca that destructive impulse does not so much arise out of the actions - however innocent - of others, but rather, manifests itself sui generis, an implacable, chthonic urge to reorder the human condition into something it naturally is not. In Lorca's grimly claustrophobic drama, The House of Bernarda Alba, for example, the protagonist is determined to organize her progeny into an enclosed society at variance from normative social behavior and, equally important, immunized against any "taint" from the outside world. It is a world in which the values of society at large are distorted into a parody of themselves. Here, premarital chastity ceases to be a virtue and becomes an end in itself. The Alba household is the world of the ideological tyrant in a microcosm; in many ways, it reflects Lorca's resistance to the conservative values of the Spain in which he lived.4

It must be understood that Lorca was first and foremost a poet, albeit a poet who had a life-long relationship with the stage. As a playwright, Lorca relies on visual and aural cues that assuredly would have appeared as apposite phases in a work meant to be read rather than seen and heard.5 These unspoken references are a subtext to the spoken word and associated action, giving the latter both special context and added meaning. From the opening act in the play, imagery propels drama. The desire to escape - a desire so strong that it ends in tragic consequences - emerges as a leitmotif against which Lorca employs a continuity of metaphorical imagery to shape dialogue, foresee action, accentuate vital information, and advance narrative. The House of Bernarda Alba is the summit of Lorquian poetic drama - for in this dark and lyrical tragedy, intense imagery and operatic passions seamlessly align with dramatic reality.

Background

Lorca's rural trilogy follows a number of the conventions of classical Greek theater.6 The love triangle, blending drama and poetry, closely resembles a Greek tragedy, in which death hovers over the whole play. Central themes of love, pride, passion and violent death also mark Lorca's own life. Like Greek tragedy, only a few characters - who gain their definition through their interaction with the protagonist - are present at any one time. Bernarda herself has all the qualities of the forceful Greek tragic heroines Clytemnestra and Medea, characters that dramatically embody the Grimm Brother's Wicked Queen in action. The equivalent of a Greek chorus appears: at the outset, represented by the townspeople who mourn the recent death of Bernarda Alba's husband (the inciting event that sets in motion the rising action events that will end in so much personal destruction); and throughout the plot, in the form of a senile and closeted grandmother, Bernarda's eighty-year-old mother, Maria Josefa, who is the only perceptive being in this stultified, stifled family that intuitively sees into the situation and predicts the outcome. As such she voices all the fears and desires which the younger women feel but are afraid to disclose in the presence of Bernarda. Her shouts are their innermost secrets. Further, her escape from the guarded room and her subsequent re-incarceration are previews of what will occur later in the drama.
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The Mise en Scène

Thirties Spain is a provoking place; the simmering hostility and mood of impending tragedy are captured by Lorca in the opening setting of the play. Calling his work a "photographic documentary", Lorca positions the drama, and in particular Bernarda's house, as analogous to Spain on the threshold of a rightist invasion. Twice-widowed Bernarda Alba lives with her five daughters in a poverty-stricken village what was once the Moorish kingdom of Granada. In absolute terms, the Alba family's condition is modest; at best, in the relative terms of the village, the family is quite ...

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