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, appar ently 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 cousin; the girl's mother did not love her husband; in any case, the girl is isolated, 15 miles away from the village circle, hence alien to custom and familiarity. In isolation, these pieces of village gossip are harmless. Together, especially because they are complicated by an indirect alliance with the Felixes, they lend weight to dread of a marriage that is, for the Mother, a situation more to be faced and endured than embraced.
Although Leonardo was a child w...