Lorca's Blood Wedding

The purpose of this research is to examine the play Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca. The plan of the research will be to set forth the thematic pattern of ideas and meanings contained in the work and then to discuss the means by which these ideas are elaborated, with a view toward evaluating why the full effect of the presentation is one of high tragedy and the existence of a major work of world literature.

The themes of Blood Wedding emerge out of a structure of human consciousness that carries the burden of remembered conflict, remembered injury, remembered grief. Grief and loss, indeed, so dominate the Mother's consciousness that there is a tension in her anticipation of her son's wedding. So simple a gesture as giving him his vineyard knife calls to her mind the murders of her husband, long ago, and her other son, more recently, apparently at the hands of a rival clan--the same clan to which the Bridegroom's intended belongs: "I know the girl is good . . . but even so when I say her name I feel as though someone had hit me on the forehead with a rock" (Lorca 36). Despite the prospect of happy union, despite the Mother's pledge to love her new daughter-in-law, there is an implication that a family trust is being violated. It is present in the nature of the irony of the marriage of her remaining son to a girl whose family is aligned with the dreaded Felix family. Village gossip surrounds the girl: She was formerly engaged to Leonardo Felix, who has married her cousi

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inant force and what is palpably real becomes (or anyway seems meant to become) of secondary importance. This theatrical convention appears to have been a source of difficulty for critics who find the poetic reality unconvincing. Molarsky cites the mixed reception that Blood Wedding had in the U.S. commercial theatre when it first was performed in the 1930s, the same year as Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty, an agit-prop modern-day message play: What could Americans make of a play that included among its characters the Moon, personified as a woodcutter, and Death as a beggar? Plain-talking actors from the land of Jimmy Stewart found themselves speaking lines like "with a knife / with a tiny knife / that barely fits the hand / but that slides in clean / through the astonished flesh" (Molarsky 52). This comment really says more about the failure of the American commercial theatre's failure of imagination--whether among impresarios or the audience is irrelevant--than about the failure of poetic reality in Blood Wedding. All that is required of the text is that it remain true to the logic of the metaphorical reality within the scope of the dramatic design. In that regard, the introductory matter to the Graham-Lujan-O'Connell edition

Category: Literature - L