The House of Bernarda Alba (Criticism)

Criticism

Christopher G. Busiel

Intertwined with other complex images and themes, Bernarda’s house serves on a number of levels as the central image in The House of Bernarda Alba.

In order to arrive at an understanding of the complex images and themes in Federico Garcia Lorca’s last play, The House of Bernarda Alba, one must start with the title. Lorca did not call his play Bernarda Alba, or even The Family of Bernarda Alba. (The latter would have been especially appropriate given that, like many of the great tragedies of classical Greece, the play focuses on a lineage and the impact of characters’ actions on subsequent generations.) 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.

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. The symbolism of what is inside the house and what is outside could not be more important to the themes of the play. To the daughters, the outside represents freedom and possibility, as well as romantic and sexual fulfillment. Throughout the play the daughters run repeatedly to the windows to observe the outside world: the crowd departing the funeral, the men going to work in the fields, and the arrivals and departures of Pepe el Romano. Bernarda upbraids Angustias for looking out through the cracks of the back door, becoming so angry that she strikes her daughter. 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.

The house is a self-contained society which Bernarda rules with an iron hand. “To Bernarda’s way of thinking,” wrote Dennis Klein in Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba, “virginity is decency and sex corruption.” Therefore, it is understandable that when Adela commits suicide, Bernarda’s first thought is to make the world believe her daughter died a virgin. Bernarda’s rule also means that sexual activity always takes place outside the house: Pepe and Adela meet in the corral, and the maid speaks of Bernarda’s husband lifting her skirts behind the corral. The story of Paca la Roseta, who spends a night with some local men deep in an olive grove, is to Bernarda a perfect example of the corruption which runs rampant outside her domestic space. The displacement of sexual activity to the outside is reflected in the symbolism of the weather. The daughters suffer in the heat of a house which is shut up tight for a period of mourning, during which, Bernarda explains, “not a breath of air will get in this house from the street. We’ll act as if we’d sealed up the doors and windows with bricks.” The heat in the house thus serves as a symbol for the sexual frustration of the daughters. The men of the town, meanwhile, are of course free to move about outside. They are cooler on the patio and in the fields, suggesting symbolically that they do not suffer from sexual repression.

The heat inside may be what causes Angustias to describe Bernarda’s house as hell, and the ongoing torment of all the characters within it suggests the accuracy of her metaphoric description. (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. Hell is perhaps the strongest lingering image of the house, but other locations of confinement are suggested throughout the play. In his study of the religious imagery in Lorca’s trilogy, John Gilmour in Religion in the Rural Tragedies refers to Bernarda’s house as “convent-like,” observing that Lorca uses the funeral in the first act to establish an important theme for the remainder of the play. “A theatre audience,” Gilmour wrote, “could not fail to be struck by the sheer number of women, all in mourning, filling the stage, and by their slow, processional entry in a hundred pairs. It is as though they were members of a religious house filing into chapel for their communal worship.” If the house does function as a convent, it is only in the sense of deprivation and without, it seems, any genuine religious devotion. 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!”

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. 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. Bernarda also imprisons her daughters, saying to them at one point, “I have five chains for you, and this house my father built.” The house, the audience knows, has extremely thick walls and bars on the windows through which, for example, Angustias watches Pepe depart. 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. Although she commands power over others, she is so confined by her own sense of honor and proper appearance that she cannot act any more freely than the rest.

In the settings of each of the three acts of The House of Bernarda Alba, there is a symbolic penetration deeper and deeper into the house, which reflects the gradual exposing of the family’s secrets. 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. In the second act, the setting moves to a more intimate room near the bedrooms, bringing the audience deeper into the hearts and motives of the various characters. The final act moves to a room adjacent to the corral, which is the site of sexual liaison and the symbolic source of conflict in the play. Bernarda’s desire to keep the secrets of the family deep within the house may prove impossible now that the neighbors have awakened. With her desperate cry of “Silence!” Bernarda can merely, as the old saying has it, close the barn door after the horse is out.

Lorca described the structure of the play as a “photographic document,” and the imagery of the house supports this theme. Photographs in Lorca’s day were of course in black and white, and the stark whiteness of the house’s walls is contrasted perfectly with the black mourning clothes of the women in the first act. The uniform whiteness of the walls suggests a sense of purity which Bernarda would like to maintain. The color also suggests a whitewash of hypocrisy, which dominates the household, as well as the sterility and monotony of life for Bernarda’s daughters in the house. The stark black and white patterns of the play are modified later when the walls appear tinged with blue, suggesting evening. (Ironically, it is in the dark cover of night rather than in stark light of day that the secrets of the family are “brought to light.”) The blue tones suggest the doubt that now tinges the purity and decency which had previously prevailed. 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.

Bernarda’s house thus functions as a central symbol in Lorca’s final play, in the use of color and other elements of scenic design, in metaphoric references to prisons and convents, and in providing a physical structure to the layers of secrecy within which Bernarda wraps her family life. Since theater is an art form based on the physicality of performance, it is fitting that a great modern work of drama like The House of Bernarda Alba should make use of a setting that is both visually striking and serves so well to develop the images and themes contained in the play.

Source: Christopher G. Busiel, for Drama for Students, Gale, 1998.

What Do I Read Next?

• Blood Wedding (1932) is the first play of Lorca’s tragic trilogy about life in rural Spain. It concerns a man and a woman who are passionately attracted to each other but enter loveless marriages out of a sense of duty to their relatives. At the woman’s wedding feast, the lovers elope. The play uses many more poetic and allegorical devices than The House of Bernarda Alba.
• Yerma (1934) is the second play of the trilogy. Yerma is a woman who dutifully allows relatives to arrange her wedding. When she discovers her husband does not want children, she is torn between her desire for a baby and her belief in the sanctity of marriage. Her frustration grows uncontrollable, with tragic results.
• The Poetical Works of Federico Garcia Lorca (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1991). Students may be interested in reading some of Lorca’s more lyrical works about rural Spain, such as the poems originally included in the collections Gypsy Ballads and Poem of the Deep Song.
• Life Is a Dream. The most famous play by Pedro Calderon de la Barca, a seventeenth-century playwright whose works, together with those of the older Lope de Vega, dominated Spain’s Golden Age. Like Lorca, Calderon saw life in terms of a symbolic formula, and he was concerned with the traditional Spanish respect for honor. This play examines the conflict between free will and predestination.
• The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Civil War by Gerald Brenan. (Cambridge UP, 1974) is a rigorous study of Spanish history from 1874 to 1936. Ian Gibson’s The Assassination of Federico Garcia Lorca (W.H. Allen, 1979) provides a comprehensive examination of the political and other circumstances surrounding Lorca’s death.

ADVERTISEMENT