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- The House of Bernarda Alba continues to be revived and read all over the world. Its setting is specific to the values and customs of a rural Spanish people, but the play’s appeal is universal rather than national. In the United States, the play has been enjoyed in both English and Spanish productions.
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The remarkable coincidence that The House of Bernarda Alba was perhaps the last major Spanish literary work published before the war, combined with the famous circumstances surrounding García Lorca’s death, help explain the play’s enduring popularity today.
Jun 5, 2018 · The House of Bernarda Alba is a shocking play filled with symbolically loaded poetry. As a queer man, Lorca knew the torture of imposed silence too well.
The House of Bernarda Alba was Garcia Lorca's last play, completed on 19 June 1936, two months before his assassination during the Spanish Civil War. The play was first performed on 8 March 1945 at the Avenida Theatre in Buenos Aires .
- Federico García Lorca
- 1947
Aug 17, 2024 · The House of Bernarda Alba had its stage debut nearly a decade after Lorca's death. It was first produced in Buenos Aires in 1945, near the end of World War II, during which Argentina maintained...
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
- Further Reading
Federico Garcia Lorca was born June 5, 1898 in a village near Granada, Spain, the son of Federico Garcia Rodriguez, a liberal landowner, and Vicenta Lorca, a schoolteacher. (Although by Spanish custom his surname is properly Garcia Lorca, he is more commonly known by his mother’s surname.) Lorca produced a body of work that is considered among the ...
Act I
The action opens in a “very white room in Bernarda Alba’s house.” Bells toll for the funeral of Bernarda’s second husband. The housekeeper La Poncia speaks with a maid about Bernarda and her family. La Poncia reports that one of the daughters, Magdalena, fainted during the funeral service. Magdalena is the only one who loved her father, La Poncia explains. Maria Josefa, Bernarda’s mother, calls from within, where apparently she has been locked up against her will. La Poncia laments Bernarda’s...
Act II
The daughters are seated with La Poncia, sewing. The betrothal of Angustias has brought out bitter jealousy between them. Angustias expresses a hope that she’ll “soon be out of this hell.” She explains to her sisters how Pepe asked her to marry him. La Poncia contributes stories about her courtship, and the mood grows lighter. Magdalena goes to fetch Adela, and when they return, everyone questions the youngest daughter about what she did the night before. Adela resents this curiosity, and whe...
Act III
The act opens at night, in a room in Bernarda’s house adjacent to the corral. The family and a guest, Prudencia, are eating. Prudencia tells Bernarda that her family is feuding, that her husband has never forgiven their daughter for an indiscretion. “A daughter who’s disobedient,” Bernarda says, “stops being a daughter and becomes an enemy.” Everyone discusses Angustias’s impending betrothal, and Prudencia admires the pearl engagement ring, though she comments that in her day, “pearls signifi...
Adela
Adela, age 20, is the youngest, most attractive, spirited, and rebellious of Bernarda’s daughters. As Magdalena says of her, Adela “still has her illusions,” and thus has difficulty submitting to the strong will of her mother, who keeps all the daughters under tight reign. As a form of rebellion, Adela puts on a green birthday dress and goes out in the yard shouting “Chickens, look at me!” She craves social interaction and cannot bear to be locked away from the world. She has a deep connectio...
Bernarda Alba
At age 60, she feels out of place in the village, sure that everyone in the town despises her. She feels superior to her neighbors in social station, and will not allow her daughters to be courted by the men of the area, whom she generally finds inferior. She curses “this village full of wells where you drink water always fearful it’s been poisoned.” Bernarda runs her house with an iron hand; La Poncia calls her a “domineering old tyrant.” Her husband, Antonio Maria Benavides, has recently di...
Amelia
Of all the characters, Amelia, Bernarda’s third youngest daughter at age 27, perhaps stands out the least as an individual. She is kindhearted and hates to hear her mother speak unkindly. She is concerned about Martirio’s health even if Martirio is not. Like Martirio, she feels uncomfortable and embarrassed around men. Like Magdalena, she feels that being born a woman is life’s worst punishment. Amelia seems to be afraid of almost everything; unlike Adela who seeks the truth, Amelia would rat...
Beauty
Beauty—specifically the beauty of Adela, Bernarda’s youngest daughter—is a source of conflict in the play. Beauty becomes corrupted, Lorca suggests, in an environment where people are not permitted to pursue their desires and passions. Pepe el Romano is passionate for Adela, but is bound by economic necessity to court Angustias instead. “If he were coming because of Angustias’ looks, for Angustias as a woman, I’d be glad too,” Magdalena comments, “but he’s coming for her money. Even though An...
Fate and Chance
The characters’ attempts to control their own lives bring them into contact with the inevitable and result in the tragedies that conclude not just The House of Bernarda Alba, but each of the plays in Lorca’s trilogy. Destiny is intermingled with the repetition of the life cycle; what occurred in the past is often fated to occur again. For example, all the women in Adelaida’s family suffered before her, and she is destined to suffer, too. (Martirio observes elsewhere in the play, “History repe...
Death
Each of the three plays in Lorca’s trilogy ends with a significant death. Death is a mounting inevitability as the frustration of the characters grows more intense. Death comes to characters in situations with no hope, who are helpless victims of their destiny. Ultimately, Adela chooses death as a means of escape from an intolerable life when the only alternative she can envision—Pepe—is no longer available. Adela seems bound by fate not to survive, but Bernarda brings about tragedy through a...
Realism and Surrealism
Lorca was a great experimenter with poetic and dramatic form, and was certainly influenced by the variety of new artistic forms developed in his day. Although the term surrealism is specific to the work of a handful of artists at a particular time, it is often used to describe a variety of techniques that seek to express the human subconscious directly, rather than revealing it through external actions, as is the case in realist drama. In writing his last play, Lorca worked against such a tec...
Classical Tragedy
As Dennis Klein noted, Lorca wanted his theater to “capture the drama of contemporary life and inspire passion as classical drama did,” Lorca stated that his purpose in writing his tragic trilogy was to follow the Aristotelian canon for tragedy. He departed widely from this goal, however. The House of Bernarda Alba moves closer to the structure of classical tragedy than the other two plays, but still differs significantly. Lorca is true to the spirit of classical tragedy without rigorously ap...
Dramatic Structure
Eliminating most of the details of telling a story, Lorca designed his plays to be skeletal so he could concentrate on other theatrical elements. The House of Bernarda Albais episodic in structure, and almost perfectly circular. The play starts with Bernarda returning from one funeral and ends with her arranging another. She appears to have learned nothing from the experience of losing her youngest daughter, for she exerts the same repressive control against which Adela rebelled with such tra...
Spain at the time of Lorca’s youth was experiencing a lengthy crisis of confidence spurred by the country’s defeat by the United States in the War of 1898, during which Spain lost its remaining colonies. Political life was torn between a desire on one hand to strengthen traditional values and revive past glory, and the need on the other to move pro...
By the time of his death, Lorca was widely considered one of the greatest poets of the modern era, perhaps of all time. Since The House of Bernarda. Albadiffers from Lorca’s other works in his attempt to employ a more realistic style, critics have differed in their assessment of the play’s value in Lorca’s canon. Most have found it a work of real t...
Christopher G. Busiel
Intertwined with other complex images and themes, Bernarda’s house serves on a number of levels as the central image inThe 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 cl...
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. 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. 2. Yerma(1934) is the second play of the trilogy. Yerma is a woman who dutifully allows relatives to arrange her weddin...
Morris Freedman
Freedman elaborates on the theme of passion in Lorca’s dramatic work, examining the conflict between individual character’s emotions and the morals of the society portrayed. With Lorca we enter an altogether different landscape in the modern drama, the landscape of passion. His three great tragedies—Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba—are stripped nearly bare of the details of setting and time, that sense of locale we need for Ibsen, Wilde, Shaw, or O’Casey. Yet we do not leave t...
Bentley, Eric. “The Poet in Dublin” in In Search of Theatre, Knopf (New York City), 1953. Benet, William Rose. “Singing Spain” in the Saturday Review, October 2, 1937, p. 18. Blanco-Gonzalez, Manuel, “Lorca: The Tragic Trilogy” in Drama Critique, September 2, 1966, pp. 91-97. Burton, Julianne. “The Greatest Punishment: Female and Male in Lorca’s Tr...
Colecchia, Francesca, Editor. Garcia Lorca: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Garland (New York City), 1979; Garcia Lorca: An Annotated Primary BibliographyGarland, 1982. Klein, Dennis A. Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba: Garcia Lorca’s Tragic Trilogy, G.K. Hall & Co. (Boston), 1991. Lima, Robert. The Theater of...
The House of Bernarda Alba, three-act tragedy by Federico García Lorca, published in 1936 as La casa de Bernarda Alba: drama de mujeres en los pueblos de España (subtitled “Drama of Women in the Villages of Spain”). It constitutes the third play of Lorca’s dramatic trilogy that also includes Blood.
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,...
