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... ” This quote from one of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Ballads represents the common string that holds all of Lorca’s plays together, among them; Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba all have the common aspects of passion, honor, and blood or death. There are the themes of gender roles, women in a male-dominated society; the individual and the community, and poetic language versus prose. These ideas are forcefully obvious in Lorca’s work; and nothing strikes a chord more readily than yearning desire, that “something else” that cannot be easily defined, the struggle to achieve the dream while maintaining family honor, and the tragic, fate-driven death that ends it all. However, the three themes mentioned above are quite consistently held to in Lorca’s “rural trilogy” and shall be explored.
The role of women in Lorca’s trilogy is a strong one, albeit the feminine residence in a patriarchal society. ... Also, these plays focus mostly on the emotions of women, the roles of women in the family, and the measures men drive them to take. The individual on his or her own and the communal penchant for song, riot, and celebration or mourning create a shining contrast to one another; but in each of Lorca’s plays this seems to be a common idea. That the singular being should be prey to worries, pain, and doubt; and that society should be oblivious, indifferent, or unalterable gives the impression that Lorca wished for the main character of each of his plays should be alone and wholly responsible for the measures their indefinable desire leads them to commit. Lorca’s use of poetry in his drama denotes moments of great agitation, momentous feeling, or “excitement or disposition of the theme” (Maurer, Intro, xiv). His prose was reserved for the development of the story, the banal goings-on of everyday life in the houses of his characters. ... Here, rather sparingly, Lorca writes the Mother’s lines in verse form to show her agitation, her intense feelings on the subject of this object of death that has played such a prominent part in her life. ... how you dare carry a knife on you…why I allow this serpent inside the cupboard (Lorca, 6). ... This is one example of the types of communal songs in Lorca’s drama. ... The Wife asks if Leonardo is riding the horse too hard, but he denies this saying, “I hardly use him at all,” to which the Wife replies that some of the neighbors saw him at the far end of the drylands, which is where the future Bride of the Bridegroom resides (Lorca, 20). ...
In Act I Scene i, the initially perceived individual melting into the larger picture of the community through song emerges, and we see how one voice transforms into every voice. ... The rivers of the world carry your crown (Lorca, 42). ... This is an example of the use of poetry, verse, and song to denote community and knowledge of a part of life that everyone is acquainted with in one way or another. ... What good did it do me to have pride…It only poured fire over me…When things reach deep inside you, nothing can pull them out (Lorca, 47). This pained and lyrical expression of how he feels gives yet another example of Lorca’s use of verse to show intense emotion, this time in Leonardo. ... I am mad…I have a scream in my throat—always there—that I have to choke back and hide under my shawl (Lorca, 60). The sudden topic of death hangs over the wedding like a suggestive cloak of fog, and Lorca uses the Mother’s poetic speech to set the stage for the extreme action that will soon follow. ... His family of corpses in the middle if the road (Lorca, 80). ... At this point in the play and from now on, the language used is all very poetic in order to represent the hurried, frantic search for the Bride and Leonardo; the impending death proclaimed by the woodcutters, the Moon, and the Beggar Woman; and the great burning passion claiming the Bridegroom, making him hunt his wife and a man on a horse that is the only horse in the world to him (Lorca, 85).
Approximate Word count = 3337
Approximate Pages = 13.3
(250 words per page double spaced)
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