The House of Bernarda Alba is a somber and brooding tragedy about a family of girls ruled over by a grim and tyrannical matriarch who seeks to suppress their natural instincts in the interest of her own stern social code. The House of Bernarda Alba (Spanish: La casa de Bernarda Alba) is a play by the Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca.Commentators have often grouped it with Blood Wedding and Yerma as a "rural trilogy". “Lorca’s principal characters,” Gilmour commented, “are tormented souls who, despite their strict Catholic upbringing and proud sense of honour, are incapable of displaying the Christian virtues of love and forgiveness.” Of course, given the theme of Lorca’s last plays, many critics have studied his complex portrayal of gender roles in Andalusian society. Start studying The House of Bernarda Alba. Prudencia’s family, for example, is torn apart by a struggle over money: a disputed inheritance. His collections from this period include Poem of the Deep Song and Gypsy Ballads. Bernarda feels she’s being protective: “For a hundred miles around there’s no one good enough to come near them.” Bernarda leaves, ordering her servants to work. Bernarda and her five unmarried daughters—Angustias, Magdalena, Amelia, Martirio, and Adela—are out attending the funeral of Bernarda’s late second husband. 297-304. 133-55. Lorca’s generation challenged audiences with its daring techniques and often controversial subject matter. There is no “thought,” no “idea” of any significance. She is frustrated with her husband, who refuses to forgive their daughter for an incident long in the past. The mourning women depart, and Bernarda curses what she sees as their hypocrisy: "Go back to your houses and criticize everything you've seen." But I am also sure that Garcia Lorca must have been a finer playwright than he seems in the American theatre. Surrealism and Dadaism exerted influence over a number of arts, inspiring works that sought through imagery to pierce the human subconscious. ." Lorca also served as director and producer of plays for a state-sponsored traveling theater group, La Barraca (“The Hut”). Yet the characters also function symbolically through the use of onomastic imagery (attributing character traits through the names). Maria Josefa is most explicitly a prisoner, for Bernarda keeps her locked in a room and relies on the assistance of family and servants to keep her there. Amelia and Martirio enter. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/house-bernarda-alba, "The House of Bernarda Alba In 1920 his first play was produced; The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, a highly personal allegory about the doomed love of a cockroach for a butterfly, was an artistic disaster. Pygmalion is a comedy about a phonetics expert who, as a kind of social experiment, attempts to make a lady out of a…, EURIPIDES I have now seen Miss Paxinou on the stage in Hedda Gabler and on the screen in For Whom the Bell Tolls and Mourning Becomes Electra, and I must confess that her art continues to escape me. To Bernarda, the outside of the house represents only negative possibility: corruption from which she wants to protect her daughters, and prying neighbors from whom she wants to keep her secrets. Previously, Spain’s Golden Age in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the highpoint of its creativity in the theatre and the other arts. “If he were coming because of Angustias’ looks, for Angustias as a woman, I’d be glad too,” Magdalena comments, “but he’s coming for her money. Angustias expresses a hope that she'll "soon be out of this hell." SOURCES The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico Garcia Lorca adapted by Thomas R. Gordon "A Drama of Women Enduring Oppression " After the death of her husband, Bernada Alba forces her five daughters to endure a brutal mourning period that doesn't allow them to leave the house … La Poncia speaks her mind, warning her employer, “Something very grave is happening here.” La Poncia insists that Bernarda has never given her daughters enough freedom. No men appear on stage. Bernarda violently removes the powder and sends Angustias out. “The Life and Death of Garcia Lorca” in the Nation, September 18, 1937, pp. Bernarda's mother, eighty years old. SOURCES He was one of the earliest casualties of the Spanish civil war, executed by fascist rebels, his body thrown into an unmarked grave. After La Poncia exits, a beggar woman and a little girl appear, but the maid drives them away. Even though Lorca never referred to it as such, it is considered to be part of a ‘Rural Trilogy’ preceded by 'Yerma' (1934) and 'Blood Wedding' (1932). The House of Bernarda Alba. The tragedy in his plays comes from the tension between passion, which is necessarily always entirely individual and personal and whimsical, and the society in which the individuals move, which defines them and also gives a particular value and shading to passion and its manifestations. This was a period of artistic liberation and the development of new artistic forms. The title, The House of Bernarda Alba, draws attention both to Bernarda’s “house” in the sense of her household or lineage, and to the physical space of the house itself, which serves as the central image of the play. Each of the plays in the trilogy has a chorus; in The House of Bernarda Alba the function of the chorus is served both by the neighbors in act one, and the other daughters besides Adela. ." Some critics were particularly indignant about the circumstances surrounding Lorca’s death. Bernarda raises a compelling point of contrast when she chastises La Poncia: “How you’d like to see me and my daughters on our way to a whorehouse!”. Bernarda Alba’s passion is exercised in the extinguishing of passion: the sadist can only have definition through the masochist, his diametrical opposite. INTRODUCTION “Singing Spain” in the Saturday Review, October 2, 1937, p. 18. (Interestingly, in her desperation at the end of the play, Angustias reverses herself and adopts her mother’s proud rhetoric, cursing Adela: “Disgrace of this house!”) Bernarda’s house is also referred to as a house of war, again reminiscent of the lineages of Greek tragedy. La Poncia reports that one of the daughters, Magdalena, fainted during the funeral service. She has more money than the others. It has become in its extremity antipassion. Land is the source of wealth throughout the three plays of the trilogy, and wealth creates stature. Near the conclusion of the play, Angustias stands her ground when a hysterical Adela orders her to tell Pepe that Adela will be his. Adela seems bound by fate not to survive, but Bernarda brings about tragedy through actions that have the opposite of their desired effect. She orders La Poncia to search the bedrooms. One of Bernarda’s few friends in the area. What attitudes to men are conveyed through the play The House Of Bernarda Alba? What she claims to want—marriage to a virile young man and lots of children—is irrational. Adela hangs herself on learning, mistakenly, that her lover has been killed. For me, one of the troubles with the play’s effectiveness is the acting of Katina Paxinou as the matriarch. La Poncia then expresses concern about the daughters, who are growing older and not finding husbands. The daughters wonder why, and Bernarda explains he is away on a trip; Martirio, however, looks suggestively at Adela and mutters, “Ah!”. Still, she does all she can to keep Adela and Pepe apart. The House of Bernarda Alba moves closer to the structure of classical tragedy than the other two plays, but still differs significantly. . In effect, Bernarda is a Satanic spirit, living in an atmosphere of death, perversion, and denial. 172-180, and discussed elsewhere in the work. Honor may finally turn to antipassion, as in Bernarda Alba, certainly with its own power, but the primal force is personal passion. Newton provides her audience with an understanding of the Andalusian region where he was born, as a basis for appreciating his writing. Political life was torn between a desire on one hand to strengthen traditional values and revive past glory, and the need on the other to move progressively forward, to foster intellectual inquiry and learn from the example of modernized nations. Encouraging Maria Josefa to return to bed, Martirio calls out for Adela. . She refuses to contribute a stitch to the making of clothes for the christening of Angustias’s future first child. The language of the play is carefully shaped to expose elements of character, however; it is poetic without overtly sounding like poetry. When Angustias enters, she is chastised by Bernarda for having her face powdered. Maria Josefa passes through with a lamb in her arms, singing a lullaby. . What does she represent? Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba: Garcia Lorca’s Tragic Trilogy, G.K. Hall & Co. (Boston), 1991. . While other artistic innovators appealed primarily to the intellect, however, Lorca was concerned with addressing basic human emotions and needs. Adela, meanwhile, struggles against her fate and fails. The green dress of Adela is the only other color which appears in the play, contrasting the white walls of the house not only in hue but also in theme, for the color is symbolically associated with nature, hope, jealousy, sex. Here again we see Maria Josefa’s madness (couple with the singing) suggesting her insanity. Bernarda retrieves a gun, and shoots at Pepe waiting in the yard. Bernarda, the other daughters, and the servants enter, announcing that the crowd outside is calling for the death of a young woman who gave birth to an illegitimate child, and then in her shame, killed and buried it. Othello (1604) has often bee…, The House on the Hill by Hal Porter, 1970, https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/house-bernarda-alba. She appears to have learned nothing from the experience of losing her youngest daughter, for she exerts the same repressive control against which Adela rebelled with such tragic results. In the United States, the play has been enjoyed in both English and Spanish productions. Lorca went on a short lecture tour of Argentina and Uruguay, and was greeted as a celebrity everywhere he went, even by other major writers like Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Although the term surrealism is specific to the work of a handful of artists at a particular time, it is often used to describe a variety of techniques that seek to express the human subconscious directly, rather than revealing it through external actions, as is the case in realist drama. La Poncia then expresses concern about the daughters, who are growing older and not finding husbands. To the daughters, the outside represents freedom and possibility, as well as romantic and sexual fulfillment. In a veritable hysteria, Bernarda Alba shrieks that Adela died a virgin, forbids tears except in private, and calls for silence, silence, silence, as the curtain descends. The breaking of the unities is consistent with the history of the Spanish theater, and indeed Lorca’s drama was rooted as much in the traditions of the Spanish Golden Age, and those of European puppet farce, as in classical precedent. There is something about her highly mannered style that seems to me grotesque and extravagant, rather than powerful and moving, and this struck me as being all the more noticeable last night because that style happened to be contrasted with the less ornate playing of the other members of the cast. Following Adela’s suicide, do you think Bernarda will continue to maintain such tight control over her surviving daughters? She speaks out against hypocrisy when she hears it, and believes women should be strong and not tolerate poor treatment by men. STYLE Magdalena is the only one who loved her father, La Poncia explains. The conflict between natural instincts and the forces that try to suppress them seems to be one of the dramatist’s favorite themes, and there is no denying that, in The House of Bernarda Alba, he goes about his story with a single-minded intensity that is capable of engendering considerable dramatic power. La Poncia highlights the dominant sense of confinement in the house when she comments to Bernarda: “Your daughters act and are as though stuck in a cupboard.” If larger than a cupboard, the house does function extremely well as a prison. FURTHE…, INTRODUCTION The disturbance brings La Poncia and the other daughters, followed by Bernarda. La Poncia contributes stories about her courtship, and the mood grows lighter. Cleanliness, purity, silence, defining marks of death itself, envelope Bernarda Alba’s house. Others, however, have pointed out the quality of Lorca’s stagecraft, suggesting the plays remain dramatically viable in translation. “I’m thinking,” she says, “that this mourning has caught me at the worst moment of my life for me to bear it.” Everyone exits at the announcement of Pepe’s arrival. A British television production of the play premiered in 1992, directed by Nuria Espert and Stuart Burge (Channel 4). In Lorca’s view, men and freedom are mutually exclusive for Spanish women. Act I The House of Bernarda Alba Questions and Answers. Bernarda and the five daughters enter, and Bernarda says a prayer for her dead husband. Lorca felt acutely the suffering of oppressed people, but avoided direct involvement in politics. Lorca experienced traditional rural life growing up in the southern region of Andalusia, but was propelled into the modern world when his parents moved to the city of Granada in 1909. A minority, however, have suggested that the work pales in comparison to Lorca’s more lyric poetry and drama. Beauty—specifically the beauty of Adela, Bernarda’s youngest daughter—is a source of conflict in the play. She expresses bitterness about Bernarda’s treatment of her and the other servants. Bernarda and the five daughters enter, and Bernarda says a prayer for her dead husband. 91-97. Source: Richard Watts, Jr., “The Grim House of Bernarda Alba” in the New York Post, January 8, 1951. Character description, analysis and casting breakdown for María Josefa from The House of Bernarda Alba Join StageAgent today and unlock amazing theatre … The motivation and energy for plot are in passion; the definition of character is through passion. "I'm thinking," she says, "that this mourning has caught me at the worst moment of my life for me to bear it." The House of Bernarda Alba continues to be revived and read all over the world. Maria Josefa, who is ‘mad’ is seemingly the most free, as she is not constrained by the power of social expectations. Additionally, Lorca did make subtle use of the classical technique of the chorus that comments on the action of the play. Additionally, her sons work Bernarda’s fields, so Bernarda controls the economic fate of the entire family. The act ends with everyone grabbing hold of Maria Josefa to subdue her again. The play is also reminiscent of Greek tragedy in its focus on a household or lineage, its powerful sense of fatalism, and the cathartic quality of the final scenes. Franco’s victory stalled the flowering of the arts in Spain, which had been ongoing for several decades. The House of Bernarda Alba finally had its stage premiere nearly a decade after Lorca’s death. Water is another important symbol for Lorca, suggesting sexual potency. Bernarda strikes her when she learns that Angustias has been looking out the cracks in the door at the men departing the funeral. Upon his return to Spain in 1930, his play The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife was produced successfully. Death comes to characters in situations with no hope, who are helpless victims of their destiny. But even servitude to a husband would likely provide Bernarda’s daughters with more freedom than they have under her tyrannical authority. Being banned in Spain, it was first performed at the Avenida … . The House of Bernarda Alba is the third show for which he’s done light design: He designed light for The Broken two years ago and Mrs. Packard last year. The other sisters enter, arguing about the inheritance. Drama for Students. When Angustias enters, she is chastised by Bernarda for having her face powdered. 259-79. Literary critics, meanwhile, have found much of interest in the complex themes of the play. As the conflict with her mother’s will intensifies, Adela’s defiance is symbolized in her breaking of the walking stick with which Bernarda has beaten her daughters. The action opens in a "very white room in Bernarda Alba's house.'' Based on historical records, how successful does Lorca seem to have been at depicting the issues faced by women of this time? La Poncia, who is 60 years old, is perhaps the most complex character in the play. Peer Gynt (186…, BORN: 1898, Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, Spain Other plays of note followed, including Yerma and Blood Wedding. Some translations call this maid "Blanca"; others call her "Servant." There is a final rightness about Lorca’s characters who strive toward goals that define them as they live, as there is about Oedipus, and to fail is simply—and greatly—to be human. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Magdalena ... Bernarda Alba. Like Martirio, she claims not to care if she lives or dies. She is 80 years old. She explains to her sisters how Pepe asked her to marry him. We may thus read these tragedies as concluding on a pessimistic note: the world of Bernarda Alba is one in which human impulses may not range freely, must be constrained, even expunged, even at the risk of the ugliest consequences, of perversions of passion and of life, including madness, self-stimulation, torture, suicide. Magdalena goes to fetch Adela, and when they return, everyone questions the youngest... (The entire section contains 1379 words.). Martirio and Amelia are happy about this news, but Magdalena is more cynical, feeling that Pepe is only interested in Angustias for her money. There are black curtains on the windows. La Poncia persists in trying to make Bernarda recognize there are real problems brewing in the house. Maria Josefa, Bernarda's mother, calls from within, where apparently she has been locked-up against her will. Realistic to the point of pessimism, she is convinced she is never going to get married. Another critic, writing in the publication Blanco y Negro, traced patterns throughout the trilogy of plays about the lives of Spanish women. The housekeeper forces the issue, however, and warns Adela, “if you like Pepe el Romano, keep it to yourself.” Gradually the other daughters enter, showing off the lace that has just been delivered for Angustias’s wedding sheets. Magdalena goes to fetch Adela, and when they return, everyone questions the youngest daughter about what she did the night before. Lorca did not include it in his plan for a "trilogy of the Spanish land" (which remained unfinished at the time of his murder). At age 60, she feels out of place in the village, sure that everyone in the town despises her. The act opens at night, in a room in Bernarda’s house adjacent to the corral. The first act is set in a room near the entrance hall, appropriate for the public nature of the funeral and the visitation of neighbors, which Bernarda must endure. Drama for Students. She is concerned about Martirio’s health even if Martirio is not. From his experience directing a production of the play, Eric Bentley discovered the paramount importance of the house, observing the significant role of windows and doors that serve as both barriers and bridges. family deep within the house may prove impossible now that the neighbors have awakened. Bernarda Alba climaxes this trilogy of the tragedy of passion by seeming to assert that it is “honor,” passion perverted by a sense of the social that excludes the human, which somehow survives and even triumphs, however abominably, over the personal passion. A servant enters, announcing there is a big crowd gathering in the street. Bernarda questions La Poncia about the men Angustias was watching. Lorca asserted that the play was a “photographic record,” suggesting an attempt to capture rural Spanish life in a naturalistic manner. Some critics have claimed that qualities of Lorca’s style, especially his feel for the sound of language, are impossible to capture in translation. At the time of Lorca’s death, Humphries and other critics have noted, Lorca’s work was not widely available in English. Federico Garcia Lorca, Ungar (New York City), 1984. La Poncia (the family’s housekeeper and Bernarda’s confidant) and an unnamed Servant prepare the house for the return of the funeral party. © 2019 Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. Yelling at the daughters, “not a one of you is going to marry,” Maria Josefa expresses a desire to return to her home town and be married herself. La Poncia returns with the picture, which she found in Martirio’s bed. She is in many ways a younger picture of her mother, called “a poisoned well” by La Poncia. The tyranny of Bernarda is fueled by her own sense of honor and tradition. Its setting is specific to the values and customs of a rural Spanish people, but the play’s appeal is universal rather than national. The grandmother, Maria Josefa, enters after escaping from her room. When Adela defies Bernarda near the conclusion of the play, she highlights her mother’s role as warden, saying: “There’ll be an end to prison voices here.” While it is Bernarda’s mother, daughters, and servants who are most explicitly imprisoned in the house, the play suggests that Bernarda is herself a prisoner. A reviewer in La Nation identified Lorca’s work with that of Calderon de la Barca, who also focuses intensely on issues of honor. The House of Bernarda Alba. GENRE: Drama, Poetry Understanding Federico Garcia Lorca, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia), 1995. Therefore, it’s best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publication’s requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. "The House of Bernarda Alba "The House of Bernarda Alba" was written in 1936. Franco’s forces were victorious, however, and by 1939 he controlled all of Spain. After speaking more about Adelaida’s difficulties, Martirio concludes: “It’s better never to look at a man.” Magdalena enters, deep in mourning. Martirio feels that God has made her weak and ugly and that all things considered, “it’s better never to look at a man.” She hypocritically says having a boyfriend does not matter to her, but she is consumed by jealousy and sexual frustration. Shanley, John P. “Garcia Lorca Work on ‘Play of the Week’” in New York Times, June 7, 1960. Adela and Martirio are left alone, each accusing the other of trying to steal Pepe away from Angustias. Bernarda and La Poncia enter, discussing the division of the inheritance. Even his settings always seem nearly barren, simply all whites or all blacks, so that only the colors emerge that are evoked by the action and the characters. There is merit to both perspectives, and unsurprisingly, while Lorca’s plays are respected by the English-speaking public, they retain their greatest impact in their original language. Bernarda leaves, ordering her servants to work. Overview. The family and a guest, Prudencia, are eating. Reviewing a production by the Actors’ Workshop of San Francisco, Stanley Eichelbaum, as quoted by Dennis Klein, wrote that the play was “superbly atmospheric to the eye and gloriously affecting to the ear.”, The House of Bernarda Alba has continued to be produced and read extensively, both in Spanish and in translation.
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