Bernarda Alba example essay topic
404 words
Short Essay on the play 'The house of Bernarda Alba' Federico Garcia Lorca's last play, completed in 1936 just weeks before his brutal murder, depicts a reclusive household of eight women sequestered by Andalusian codes of honour. This short play is set in rural Spain at the turn of this century. The characters, all women, exist in a cloistered household managed by a newly widowed mother of five daughters. Under the shadow of the church and the tyranny bred from a need to protect the reputation of the family, the matron (Bernarda Alba) represses her daughters by enforcing an eight year mourning period. The tensions build rapidly among the imprisoned women, with a demented grandmother playing a role resembling that of a Greek chorus. Eventually, the natural spirits of the daughters circumvent Bernarda, but the result is violence and a suicide. The powerful features of this work include its terse dialogue, rapidly built tensions which are relentlessly sustained until the dramatic climax, and the hint of madness and impending chaos which informs the behavior of the characters in conflict. This is a study in family relationships under the strain of culturally and socially imposed taboos regarding sexuality and the self-determination of women. Federico Garcia Lorca finished his great play about the widowed matriarch and her five downtrodden daughters just two months before his murder by Franco's fascists. It is impossible not to see in the story of Bernarda Alba, who rules her daughters and her servants with an iron rod, as a metaphor for Spanish society locked in outdated codes of honour - easy prey for the dictator. You imagine that Lynn Farleigh's seriously scary Bernarda Alba, who barks at her bereaved children: "Less wailing, more work", could easily conquer Europe in an afternoon and still be home in time for tea Auriol Smith's production, with a new translation by Rebecca Monahan, not only suggests this but shows how the downtrodden collude in their own oppression.
There is no sisterhood among sisters here, only envy fuelled by despair as they realise that only the oldest, Angus tias, now wealthy through their father's will, has any chance of marriage and escape. "You will behave as if the walls and windows had been sealed with bricks", says Bernarda Alba, announcing eight years of mourning. In fact, these women have already walled themselves up..
