La Casa de Bernarda Alba. Everything you have been told about it is wrong.
1. The Stage Set
A white-walled bare stage set with stark lighting making a binary contrast with the cast of characters wearing mourning black, symbolising the triumph of purity over life and representing Lorca's "documental fotográfico". Or something. Because it's actually nothing of the sort.
Act one specifies curtains with bows and frills, pictures on the wall of fantastic scenes of kings and nymphs from legends. The daughters refer to these, recalling fondly how the bizarre stories of the black man fighting the lion coloured their childhood imaginations. Yes, in act three, it specifies that the decor should be of utmost simplicity. But if you think the setting of the play is like that from the beginning, you are missing the point. The point is there is a slow transition, starting from something realistic, to something more symbolic.
The stage directions for act one describe what could be a typical rural house in Andalucia. Thick white walls, rounded arched doorways with jute curtains and wicker seats. And if anything it resembles this kind of house in Sacromonte [video in link] rather than some aristocratic mansion. (More on this later.)
It's daytime; we start with humdrum chat and menial tasks from the servants. Things seem normal. By act three we find ourselves in a different world. The "thick walls" are now more of an effect of light, "azuladas" with the "fulgor" of the interior rooms projected onto the stage. It's night time and the characters look up to the stars and outside to the world of animal noises in the corral. Things have changed. The walls that keep you in are in your mind.
2. Bernarda is in control
Before we meet Bernarda, La Poncia describes her as "dominanta, mandona" and says she is capable of sitting on your heart for a year to watch you die. Although it turns out La Poncia is very fond of saying this kind of thing. And everywhere you look, you see analysis of the play claiming Bernarda is tyranical, and that the tragedy of the play is the direct result of her over-bearing control. Except even before we meet her, her own servants are stealing her chickpeas and sausage. And one of them had been stealing Bernarda's late husband. Famously her first and last words are "Silencio" and this is important. Because far from controlling anything, all Bernarda can do is hush things up or lie about them. Her opening "Silencio" is to the servant who has just told us about her relationship with Bernarda's dead husband. Her closing "Silencio" is to insist on the lie that her daughter died a virgin.
The play is full of examples of Bernarda denying reality. Almost immediately, she corrects the neighbour who says that Pepe el Romano was in the church. As the drama develops, La Poncia constantly tries to warn Bernarda, but she refuses to see. She claims her vigilance puts her in control, but she is clearly blind to what is going on, and ridicules La Poncia for supposedly maliciously inventing "la cosa muy grande". And as Bernarda says, even if something was going on, news of it wouldn't get beyond the walls of the house. Because Bernarda isn't in control. She's in denial.
3. Martirio doesn't like men
There is an idea that the sisters are well-delineated characters with their own voice and defined symbolic roles. You could just as well say that they are hard to tell apart visually, linguistically and thematically. Are they characters or more of a chorus? Is it the case that Lorca's women have individual voices, or is it (as in Blood Wedding), the poet's voice that we hear? Anyway, supposedly Martirio is the doesn't like men one. She feels she is ugly and scared and has happily put aside any desire for a man. Somehow this also makes her twisted and destructive.
In the play she does talk about being scared of men. She tells us how since she was little, she would look out into the corral at the men. She was struck by how strong, loud and masculine they were. And she would nervously imagine that one day one of them might want to come and embrace her. She seems to have spent quite a lot of time imagining this! And of course there was the frustrated episode where she stood in her nightshirt at the window waiting for Enrique Humanes to come as promised. And the sly comment by one of her sisters, probably Amelia, that Martirio seems much better since the new doctor came to the village. So Martirio's desire and jealousy isn't some unfathomable wrench away from her true character. It was there all along.
4. Bernarda is an aristocrat
Bernarda has a house. And some land and an "era" for threshing. And servants and farm hands. And some animals that live in a corral attached to the back of the house. She's a farmer.
She thinks she's better than other people, including Enrique Humanes because although he now has his own farm hands working for him, his own father had once been a gañán. And she thinks that none of the local men are good enough for her daughters. But as La Poncia says, if she went to another town looking for husbands, then her daughters would be the poor ones. Their only inheritance is "pan y uvas" and their tragedy at the end of the play is as much being trapped in poverty as it is about desire.
5. Bernarda bricks up the house and no-one is allowed in for 8 years
Bernarda does not brick up the doors and windows. She doesn't even say she is going to. She says, "think of it as if...". When she talks about eight years, we already know that this house is full of people who throw out exaggerated timeframes. Sitting on someone's heart for a year. Sitting in a locked room spitting on someone... for a year. It's also not the case that no-one comes into the house. Or even that men are banned from the house. There are 200 women on stage at one point. And a presumably similar number of men in the patio. The lace salesman comes into the house after the supposed edict of mourning, and the man who comes to sort out the inheritance. And the neighbour Prudencia pops in. And Pepe el Romano is hanging around at people's windows. At the end of act two it's quite possible that most of the family go out into the street to throw stones at someone. There is a period of mourning, and it seems the trip to the noria to eat watermelons is cancelled. But people come and go, life goes on.
6. It is a portrayal of the morals of society of the time
Lorca gave the play the sub-title of "Drama de Mujeres en los Pueblos de España". And it is set in small town society in the early 20th Century that is timeless in its conservative attitudes. But what goes on in the house is down to Bernarda's delusions rather than a strictly puritan society.
The world outside the house is one of nature, crops and animals rivers and norias, flowers and olive groves, songs and music and dancing, desire and fertility. The harvesters with their music and fun and their bodies like árboles quemados. The lady in the sequined dress with the accordeon. Paca la Roseta who went "muy conforme" with flowers in her hair, carried like a guitar by Maximiliano on his horse to spend the night in the olive grove while her husband was tied up to a pesebre.
This all contrasts with the thirst, heat, stagnant water and poison referred to inside the house.
Of course, there is the horrifying example of la hija de la Librada, beaten and stoned to death by the neighbours after killing and hiding her illegitimate child. But it's Bernarda who equates her sin with her sexual transgression, "carbón ardiente en el sitio de su pecado", rather than for the death of the child. And Adela knows that the whole village will be against her if she steals her sister's husband and that she will have to go and live in a shack by the river, like Pagnol's baker's wife.
But Bernarda's motto that "una hija que desobedece deja de ser una hija y se convierte en una enemiga" is just Bernarda's personal morality. La Prudencia, for example, has another view. She says "yo dejo que el agua corra". And we have the ridiculous example of La Prudencia's husband who having fallen out with his family, refuses to go out of his front door and instead sneaks out the back with a ladder. Bernarda thinks this makes him "a real man".
I am not going to get further into the idea that this is a portrayal of Franco's Spain. Because it's clearly not. Whatever the internet says.
7. It is Lorca's masterpiece
It is possible to cover up for some of the unfinished elements of the play. Straight forward textual "corrections" in details like "el día de la muerte de tu padre" being changed to "el día de la misa de tu padre". Or the confusion over ages. Or the difference between "the one who loved their father" and "the only one their father loved" in reference to Magdalena.
Then there's the inconsistencies. In act one there is famously no river. Whereas in act three one has now been provided. Or the ambiguity over whether the action takes place over the afternoon, evening and night of a single day, or a longer period of time. Or whether the daughters are clearly delineated characters or an undifferentiated chorus. We can construe this as a clever shift in reality, undermining our certainties in a transition to a crescendo of symbolic meaning taking over from reality. But much as we like to write about these ideas in our essays, the play doesn't really bear them out.
Especially with the ending. As well shall see.
8. Lorca is criticising an anti-feminist society
I can't get away from the idea that Lorca is deeply misogynistic. He puts women's suffering on stage for our entertainment. He uses exotic stereotypes of Andalucian passion, death, violence, extremes, in an act of cultural appropriation where women are decorative and disposable. Just as in Romance Sonámbulo.
The "tragedy" of the play is only in its final moments. Until then it's about the vigorous stuggle of desire against ineffective repression. With extra ingredients of jealousy and denial for good measure. With a bit of superficial prefiguring with the bad luck of the spilled salt, shooting stars and pearl engagement ring. And the clumsy "te vas a tronchar el cuello".
We can find other ways to explain away the offensive ending, to pretend it's not about the spectacle of disposable women. We could say that the play is a projection of Lorca's own suppressed desires. I am sure it is. But how do we interpret the ending? That all of a sudden the manipulating super ego leads to the death of the id? What psychological lesson does Lorca want us to learn? Or is it still just drama for drama's sake?
Or we can intellectualise it and say that in Ancient Greek theatre this form of non-penetrative death is coded for virginity? Antigone in her innocence. Jocasta, rejecting her marriage and her motherhood. And the idea of death predicated on a lie like Theseus killing Hippolytus. Does this help? Or is this further incrimination of Lorca using the death of women to display his erudition?
This is the Lorca play that leaves me feeling uncomfortable with the idea of a man portraying a drama of feminine desire and suffering, for our entertainment, ending with the contrived spectacle of the death of a young woman. It's the work that acts as the key to unlock the adoration and hagiography of the Lorca of whom no criticism will be admitted. Especially when so many of the things written about it are wrong...
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