70 pages • 2 hours read
Federico García LorcaLa Casa De Bernarda Alba
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1945A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Color (White and Green)
Color plays an important role in Bernarda’s house. White is the color of purity and virtue. It is the color of wedding dresses and the hope-chest linens that the daughters must spend their time of mourning sewing and embroidering. It is also the color of cleanliness. The house is never clean enough for Bernarda. She repeatedly orders the staff to scrub everything again, to whitewash the patio again, and to clean up the messy tracks left by outsiders in the house again. White is the color symbolizing everything Bernarda wants in her domain (purity, virtue, class, status, etc.); conversely, her obsession with maintaining its existence in the house makes the color white a symbolic reminder of every failure by herself and those under her daughters.
The color green appears in scant moments, mostly in Act I, and is very often associated with Adela. When Bernarda requests a fan in Act I, Adela unthinkingly passes her one with “green and red flowers” (164), which her mother then slaps away because it isn’t the appropriate black. The dress Adela makes for her birthday, which she has to forsake in favor of black mourning clothes, is a beautiful green. After the men have left the patio in Act I, she puts it on and sneaks out into the yard under the guise of calling in the hens. Martirio suggests Adela dye the dress black, and Magdalena suggests she gift it to Angustias for her marriage to Pepe. At this, Adela falls into despair and goes so far as to tearfully exclaim, “Tomorrow I’m going to put on my green dress and go walking in the streets. I want to go out!” (173).
The green dress signifies everything desirable about life outside the house—vitality, vibrance, freedom, beauty—of which the new strictures of mourning will surely deprive the girls. In this way, green also comes to symbolize rebellion, for this first outburst of rebellious spirit from Adela foreshadows her greater break from the family by the end of Act III.
Green also makes a brief appearance in Act II in La Poncia’s recounting of the arrival of the reapers and a woman—presumably a prostitute—who came to entertain them. She tells the daughters, “[F]ifteen of [the men] made a deal with her […] The one who talked with her was a boy with green eyes—tight knit as a sheaf of wheat” (185). Here, the green eyes of the boy are a small, yet vivid continuation of the motif Lorca establishes in Act I to illustrate the vibrancy of the natural outside world that continues to intrigue the daughters’ imagination.
Heat
The oppressive summer heat is a motif Lorca weaves throughout, and the characters often mention it in moments when tensions in the house have reached a breaking point. The mourners in Act I exclaim, “The sun comes down like lead” and, “I haven’t known heat like this for years” (162). Bernarda silences them and announces the stifling period of mourning that she has decided to enforce on her family. In Act II, as each daughter’s longing for the outside world leads to secrets stacking upon secrets, Martirio declares “the heat makes me feel ill” (186). When Amelia presses her to explain further, she adds, “I was wishing it was November, the rainy days, the frost—anything except this unending summertime” (186). Lorca never lets the audience forget the mounting severity of repressed passions as the play unfolds, and the stifling heat is one motif he employs to build an atmosphere of restlessness and discomfort.
The Stallion
Act III opens with Bernarda and her daughters entertaining Prudencia, a friend and neighbor, in the late afternoon heat. The stage directions indicate the sounds of “a heavy blow […] heard against the walls” (197) interrupt the conversation. Bernarda explains, “The stallion. He’s locked in the stall and he kicks against the wall of the house” (197). Bernarda plans to breed him with her mares at daybreak, but in the meantime, he seems intent on defying imprisonment. She issues orders to a stableman offstage: “Well then, lock the mares in the corral, but let him run free or he may kick down the walls” (197).
At this point in the play, tensions are rising. Although Bernarda feels like she has regained control (Angustias is safely engaged, and shows off her ring to Prudencia), the violent pounding of the imprisoned, lusty stallion symbolizes the violence of repressed passions simmering just under the surface, waiting to break free. Later in the Act, when Adela, Martirio, and Amelia return from a walk in the night air, Adela says, “The stallion was in the middle of the corral. White. Twice as large. Filling all the darkness” (201). For her, the stallion signifies her all-consuming desire for Pepe el Romano and her certainty that nothing can keep them from consummating that desire. Later, after their liaison in the corral, Adela gloats to Martirio about the power she feels now after having won Pepe’s love over all others. She describes this new feeling of power by describing him to Martirio as “a wild horse I could force to his knees with just the strength of my little finger” (209).
Water, Thirst, and Drowning
The most vivid invocation of water made in Act I comes from Bernarda. When the funeral guests finally take their leave, Bernarda curses them, grumbling about their insincerity. La Poncia and Amelia try to placate her, but Bernarda only replies, “What other way is there to talk about this cursėd village with no river—this village full of wells where you drink water always fearful it’s been poisoned?” (164). She uses the fact that this village has no river as proof of some perceived taint of ill will pervading its people.
Water does not appear as a major motif until Act III, when suddenly it dominates the imagery. La Poncia tries in vain one last time to get Bernarda see the danger of what’s happening to her daughters as the night draws to a close. When she refuses to hear reason and goes off to bed, the housekeeper tells the Servant, “You feel this silence?—in each room there’s a thunderstorm—and the day it breaks, it’ll sweep all of us along with it.” (203). Here, La Poncia vividly describes how, in ignoring these forces of nature at work under her roof, Bernarda unwittingly imbues them with all the explosive, inundating force of a thunderstorm. She invokes yet another water image from nature when explaining Bernarda’s reaction to the Servant: “When you’re powerless against the sea it’s easier to turn your back on it and not look at it” (203). The sea—at once an irrepressible and destructive force of nature—signifies the powerful desires Pepe’s intrusion has ignited among the daughters of Bernarda’s house, desires too catastrophic for Bernarda to face, as doing so would require reckoning with her own misguided mistakes.
In Act III, Adela twice tries to use the excuse of thirst and of fetching a glass of water to justify sneaking away to be with Pepe in the stable yard. The first instance occurs during Prudencia’s visit, but Bernarda makes her sit and calls for “a pitcher of cool water” (198), preventing her escape. The second time, when she is caught by La Poncia trying to sneak out, Adela claims, “I want a drink of water[…] I got thirsty and woke up” (204), at which point, she goes to the dinner table and drinks from a discarded glass. The irony of the excuse is that Adela’s lie about being thirsty has a layer of truth, in that her desire for Pepe has taken on the inexorability of a bodily thirst. She acknowledges this when Martirio confronts her directly after her liaison with Pepe in the corral. She says to her, “There’s no way out here. Whoever has to drown—let her drown” (204). Consumed with jealousy at the knowledge that Adela and Pepe have already consummated their love, Martirio cries, “I have a heart full of a force so evil that, without my wanting to be, I’m drowned by it” (209). The storm La Poncia predicted has broken open; the flood has already begun.
Related Titles
By Federico García Lorca
