In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Federico Garcia Lorca's The House ofBernarda Alba: A Hermaphroditic Matriarchate BETTINA L. KNAPP The House ofBernarda Alba (1936), a tragedy in three acts by Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-I 936), concentrates, as the title promises, on a house, a symbolic image that may be viewed as the concretization of a psychic condition. It is within this structure that Bemarda Alba rules and seeks to maintain her matriarchate. With great skill and a marked economy of images, words, and actions, the playwright explores the means by which this archetypal, domineering, and domestic tyrant uses her absolute power to preserve the most regressive of traditional conventions. The tribal primitivism of those involved, Bemarda Alba's obsession with ecclesiastic forms rather than truly spiritual matters, her ferociously sanguinary thoughts and deeds - all are centered on the role and function of virginal chastity and marriage, and on the unconscious. Another component ofthe play has the same center: her daughters' rejection of her immaculately experienced (without blood or semen) sadomasochistic sexual views. Bemarda Alba is, in effect, her house. The house reflects her consciousness, her rule as chthonian mother: a woman who has never awakened to the dormant possibilities within her own being. The house is accordingly a restrictive, corrosive construction - not a home where gentleness, love, and relatedness are encouraged. The house controlled by Bemarda Alba serves to imprison her five unmarried daughters, from twenty to thirty-nine years old. It cuts them offfrom all contact with the outside world, with men in particular, who she believes might sully them. Her goal is to guard her daughters - projections of her own psyche - from the world, especially from sexuality which she considers evil unless used for procreative purposes. While Bemarda Alba has denied her daughters the right to be themselves, forcing them to fit into the mold of her preconceptions, she has also blocked her own energies through her obsessive lust for power and possession: her ego has overridden her maternal instincts. Instead of expressing her love for her offspring, she uses what nature has Lorca's House ofBernarda Alba bestowed upon her as a weapon to dominate and scourge her daughters. Instead of directing her energies by the eros principle, seeking relatedness and affection, her whole being focuses on combative tyrannical ways, on the fulfillment of an unrelenting power drive that often yields to sadomasochistic behavior in attempting to control her environment. Her blind urges, comparable in psychological terms to the mythical dragon figure ofancient days, reach back to an illo tempore: a time in the distant past when titanic beasts spewed forth fiery breath, scorched their sacrificial victims - usually helpless maidens. But in those days, there was a Saint George to rout the destructive primordial forces. I According to Lorca's play, nothing can stop Bernarda Alba. Her house is the paradigm of an attempt to force a static condition upon others. She requires that her daughters remain sexually undeveloped, thus encouraging a degenerative, insalubrious climate to fester. In alchemical terms, putrefactio is operational here. It is not surprising that in Bernarda Alba's house, in this stifling, stultifying atmosphere, incidents of sadomasochism and voyeurism mUltiply. Bernarda Alba's house is a repository for outworn, restrictive rituals. It has become a breeding ground for unbalanced and unacknowledged inner frustrations, for covert instincts and emotions resting somnolent in the darkened world ofthe unconscious. Her stratified medieval views ofMariolatry represent in part the outcome of the romantic notions held by Spaniards in general concerning women. Indeed, the subtitle ofLorca's tragedy is A Drama about Women in the Villages of Spain. For centuries, Spanish women were idealized as willing saints and martyrs, passionately wishing to devote their entire lives to their Savior God;2 or they were envisaged, in diametrically opposite terms, as whores worthy of hell and damnation, torture and burning. For Lorca, such views were not only invalid but calamitous, hindering any possibility of growth either individually or collectively. To idealize such a moral absolute, woman as sacrificial victim - as the Spanish masses did and as Bernarda Alba does - is to permit one's self and being to exist only through projection. Though such an outlook may yield some positive results, perhaps...

pdf

Share