Federico García Lorca wrote The House Of Bernarda Alba in 1936, completing it just a few months before he was tragically murdered.
At the time, Spain stood on the brink of its Civil War, a battle which would ultimately bring the country firmly under the fascist regime of General Francisco Franco. The stifling oppression would last for decades, until Franco’s death in 1975.
Part of Lorca’s classic ‘Rural Trilogy’, which includes Blood Wedding and Yerma, The House Of Bernarda Alba touches on many themes that recur frequently in his work. In the play, Lorca asks several questions about the role of women, the nature of authority and authoritarianism, and the repression of oneself – questions which remain relevant today.
THE ROLE OF WOMEN
Bernarda: That’s what a woman does.
Magdalena: I hate being a woman!
On the surface, it might appear that The House Of Bernarda Alba is a feminist work. After all, its cast comprises only women and the male characters are defined precisely by their absence; the death of Bernarda’s husband takes place before the play begins, and we never get to meet Pepe el Romano, the man who catches the eye of not just one of Bernarda’s daughters. Women and their concerns, it would seem, are the order of the day.
But it soon becomes clear that Lorca intends to highlight the limitations – rather than the freedoms – that apply to his female characters. “That was the way,” says Bernarda when she imposes eight years of mourning upon her daughters, “In my father’s house, and in my grandfather’s house.”
They live, die, grieve and celebrate within the confines of a patriarchal system. They are defined solely by the roles that tie them to the men in their lives. As wives, daughters, objects of lust, and bearers of children, all of them are subservient, in some way or other, to their menfolk.
AUTHORITY AND AUTHORITARIANISM
Bernarda: Until I am hauled out from this house feet-first,
I will make all decisions around here, for all of us!
Bernarda rules her household with an iron grip – she spies on her daughters, and directs them how to behave. Church bells toll relentlessly in the background, and the daughters garb and conduct themselves according to custom.
This idea of authority – whether in terms of age, religion, or tradition – echoes throughout Lorca’s play. Such authority can be benign, of course: there are, frequently, many good reasons to obey our elders, to trust that our churches and our conventions were established to help us become better people.
But authority can also turn very easily into authoritarianism: when rules hinder rather than help those who are ruled; and questions and doubts are discouraged to avoid upsetting the system. Lorca’s characters are trapped within this construct: the daughters are all kept under lock and key (both in physical and metaphorical terms), and all of them – Bernarda included – live within a society that places oppressive demands on them.
A CROSS TO BEAR
Bernarda: Women in church must never look at a man,
unless he is the priest.
In the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War, the role of the Catholic Church was an issue of intense debate. The Republican coalition of liberals, socialists and anarchists felt that the rules and requirements of the Church had become antithetical to modernity and progress. Franco’s Nationalists, on the other hand, championed the Church as the bastion of Spanish values and tradition.
Lorca wove this debate into the very fabric of The House Of Bernarda Alba, which opens and closes with the sepulchral tolling of church bells. Bernarda insists that her children display a pious respect for the dead, but she takes it to such an extreme that any hopes her daughters might have had of marriage, children and freedom are effectively extinguished. This was what the Republicans – and Lorca himself – no doubt thought was wrong about the religious tradition: instead of freeing people from the mundane concerns of everyday life, it imprisoned them all the more.
KEEPING UP APPEARANCES
Bernarda: I don’t care if she throws herself in.
I care if the neighbours can see her from their windows.
Motivating Bernarda’s extreme piety is her all-consuming need to present a perfect image of herself and her family to the world around her. Within her little community, Bernarda’s family is one of the wealthiest, and she conducts herself accordingly, refusing suitors for her daughters who do not meet her high standards. “My blood will never mix with the blood of the Humanes family,” declares Bernarda about a young man who once expressed interest in her daughter Martirio. “His father was a farmhand!” The irony, of course, comes in peeking behind closed doors, and realising that the coffers of the Alba household are not as full as they once were.
In caring too much for what others think, Lorca’s characters become their own worst enemies. When Bernarda’s household crumbles slowly around her, she has only herself to blame. Worst of all, it proves to be a cycle that’s almost impossible to break. In the play’s final, haunting scene, Bernarda’s private grief must once again be subsumed in the public show she insists on putting up.
REPRESSING ONESELF
Amelia: We women have been the true enslavers of our own kind,
enforcing the very laws of men to bind ourselves – to imprison ourselves…
The play opens with the death of Bernarda’s husband – the patriarch of the household is gone. In theory, his wife and daughters should now have less reason to follow whatever rules he may have laid upon them.
And yet, even within the walls of their own home, Bernarda continues to demand that her daughters adhere to an unforgiving, unyielding moral code: one that easily outstrips in extremity and rigidity what is required in the outside world.
This idea of repression forms the bedrock of Lorca’s play: the great tragedy of his characters is that they have taken it upon themselves to behave in the way that society deems fit. They might chafe at these restrictions on occasion, but they nevertheless continue to suppress their own impulses and desires. In the end, it is Bernarda’s determination to perpetuate a system of stifling discipline and tradition that brings her children to the brink of desperation.
