Bodas de sangre Analysis

Act 1 sc 3

In this scene, Lorca repeatedly emphasizes how remote the Brides farm is from the rest of the town. Indeed, this sense of isolation does as much to characterize the Bride as anything she says in the scene. There are several odd contradictions: Although the Brides Father says that the Bridegrooms family is much wealthier than they are, he adds that his daughter is well set up like her fianc. Furthermore, they can afford at least two servants although the soil on the Brides farm is notoriously bad and her father seems to run the farm by himself.

This sense of mystery and isolation sets the Bride apart from the rest of the characters. Her geographical remoteness symbolizes and enforces her famous purity. Unlike the Bridegroom, Mother, and Leonardos family, the Bride is entirely outside of the family feud that has embroiled the town. Nevertheless, the poisonous rivalry threatens to draw her in despite this isolation.

However, her extraordinary remoteness isnt the only mysterious thing about the Bride. Although her interaction with Mother seems normal, she becomes violent and aggressive as soon as Mother and her fianc leave. The Mother advocates for an old-fashioned type of femininityaccording to her, a good wife bears children and keeps house behind a wall two feet thick to hide her from the outside world. The Bride, though, has been isolated long enough and lashes out against this received ideal of femininity, using physical force to protect her wedding gifts from the nosy Servant.

It is useful to contrast the views of femininity espoused by Mother and by the Bride. Mother wishes that her son, the Bridegroom, were a girl so that he could be safe from the dangers of the outside world and keep her company. The Bride, however, wishes she were a man so that she could have more agency and protect herself from danger. Although they have opposite views, both women choose their preferred sex based on physical safety. This reveals the deep entrenchment of violence in the towns culture, as well as the gendered nature of this violence: Women are the true victims because they cannot defend themselves, and the only way to avoid this is to stay cloistered, whether it is in a farm in the countryside or behind a two-foot wall.

The Brides quick recourse to violence and cursing with the apparently well-intended Servant raises questions about the characters judgment. The Bride is widely considered very feminine and pure, and indeed, she seems to represent an impossible ideal of femininity to many people in the town, including Leonardos Wife and the Bridegrooms Mother. Nevertheless, she is hot headed and quick to attack her Servant over a seemingly minor offense. This discrepancy between her actions and her reputation suggests that the towns methods of evaluating a persons reputation are faulty, and that perhaps there is less of a correlation between purity and virtue than people think.

Act 2 sc 1

The Brides ambivalence toward marriage in this scene further complicates Lorcas portrayal of women in the Spanish countryside. She may love the Bridegroom but she rejects the institution of marriage, lamenting that it may start out well but always results in endless bitterness. Significantly, she is more concerned about disappointing her guests than her fianc, and this is, ultimately, what leads her to go through with the wedding despite her misgivings. Despite the tragic qualities of the story, Lorcas women are hardly romantic or swooningthey pursue marriage out of duty, not passion.

The lengthy song that the guests sing merits scrutiny. The repeated refrain of Let the bride awaken downplays the Brides individual agency; according to the song, at least, the Bride can only ready herself for her wedding after receiving permission and encouragement from her guests. However, this expected passivity is belied by the Brides furious and futile attempts to control her wedding. Not only does she awake by herself, but she also nags at the Servant and matches Leonardos anger and venom when he comes to ask about the orange blossom.

Lorca also undercuts the notions of feminine purity that his characters embrace. When theNeighbourfirst reveals the Brides relationship with Leonardo, he implies that Leonardos love for the Bride was unreciprocated. However, the exchange between the Bride and Leonardo suggests a rather more substantial history between the two young people.

It is useful to compareBlood Weddingto similar stories. InRomeo and Juliet,Tristan and Isolde, and other theatrical depictions of forbidden love, the main female character is often young, pure, and innocent. InBlood Wedding, the Bride is neither pure nor innocent, and by the standards of rural Spain in the early twentieth century, she is relatively old to be getting married. By adding these dimensions to the character, Lorca renders his tragedy all the more significant, because the victim is a quirky, realistic character rather than an ideal.

Such a decision also precludes any interpretation ofBlood Weddingas a straightforward allegory. The characters do not represent ideals or segments of society. Despite its vague setting and anonymous characters, the tragedy in Lorcas play is not didactic, but rather reflective of real life, in which violence often erupts for no reason, and events do not result in a pat moral or lesson.

Act 2 sc 2

Unlike the previous scenes, which follow one lengthy conversation, Act II, Scene 2 is structured as a collage of conversation fragments. This allows the illusion of a large, crowded party when in fact there are only a few people on stage. Besides its practical uses, though, the device also reflects the Brides increasingly fractured resolve to go through with the wedding, and it foreshadows the social fragmentation that will result from the deaths at the end of the play.

The conversation between Leonardos Wife and the Bridegroom sets the two characters up as foils for the troubled Bride and the vengeful, haunted Leonardo. By emphasizing the Bridegrooms innocence through his suggestion that Leonardo move to a farm closer to him and his Bride, Lorca focuses on the innocent victims in this scene rather than on the Bride and Leonardo, who are responsible for their deception. The repercussions of the Brides bad decisions extend far beyond her own relationship, and Lorca asserts that this tragedy deserves just as much attention as the fates of the Bridegroom and Leonardo.

Numerous minor characters play roles in this scene, but they are primarily pretexts for the main characters to discuss their thoughts and feelings. In the third act, a group of anonymous woodcutters (as well as the Moon and Death himself) also have speaking roles, but their role is similar to that of a Greek chorus, commenting on the plays events but remaining aloof from them.

The wedding night song continues to incorporate ominous imagery. Rather than directly foreshadowing events, the lyrics continue to set the mood of the scene. This suggests the human fallibility of the townspeople who are singingunlike the Moon, which can comment directly on events, they only have the vaguest presentiment of what will happen and can only foreshadow it indirectly.

The Bridegrooms Mother remains an ambiguous figure in this scene. She vacillates between whether or not the Bridegroom should pursue Leonardo and the Bride. For all of her earlier talk about weapons and the importance of physical safety, it becomes clear that vengeance is just as important to her as her sons livelihood. Her latent bloodthirstiness colors her previous actions unfavorably, and suggests that she might have urged the Bridegrooms father and brother into similar confrontations before they died.

Act 3 sc 1

Act III ofBlood Weddingconsists of a significant change in register from earlier scenes. While Acts I and II consist predominantly of prose, the dialogue in Act III is highly stylized. The characters speak almost entirely in lyric or song, a shift that signifies the ultimate primacy of mans animal nature over the rules of society. The role of minor characters has also changed. Unlike in Acts I and II, in which the minor characters served as mood setters or even comic relief, in Act III, the Woodcutters, the Beggar Woman, and the Moon all seem to know exactly what will happen to Leonardo and the Bridegroom.

The Moons role is unusual in the context of the play as a whole. In classical mythology, the moon is traditionally associated with Artemis or Diana, the Greek and Roman goddesses of the hunt, and European art and drama tends to reinforce this association of the moon with women. Not so in Lorcas play, which portrays the Moon as a young male woodcutter. This is perhaps fitting with the celestial bodys bloodlustit resents humanity for shutting it out of their homes, and longs for blood to warm [his] cheeks.

The bloodthirstiness of the Moon speaks to one of the broader themes ofBlood Weddingnamely, the inability of individuals to choose their own destiny in a society that is ruled by heredity and the rhythms of nature. The sinister depiction of the Moon also calls into question the morality of the characters.

The townspeople, and indeed, many audiences, might reasonably blame the Bride and Leonardo for ruining the wedding and her happy marriage with the Bridegroom. However, their portrayal as helpless victims at the mercy of a powerful and malevolent Moon arouses sympathy, suggesting that no character is fully good or evil.

The three woodcutters serve as important foils to the Moon. Living even closer to nature than the Bride in her remote farmhouse, the men are powerless to stop the impending tragedy, but they nevertheless hope for the best. They are the only characters that suggest that the Bride should be allowed to run away, since being married does not take away her freedom to move and love as she wishes. This complicates the question of whether living in a state of nature would be better than living in the conservative agricultural town in which the play is set. Although the merciless Moon implies that the woods are as dangerous as any blood vendetta, the fact remains that the Bride would not have been pressured into marriage at all if the town were more liberal and accepting of womens rights.

Act 3 sc 2

Lorca employs a sophisticated framing device in this scene to prolong the suspense about what happened to the Bride, the Bridegroom, and Leonardo. By focusing on the weaving girls and gradually providing information through the townspeople that pass through the white room, he wrenches the audience out of their previously privileged position as witnesses to private conversations and dramatic moments.

Rather than portraying the double murder firsthand, Lorca distances readers and audiences from the violent spectacle, and instead focuses on the repercussions that the deaths have on people in the community. The striking lack of privacy in the Bride and Mothers confrontation is one effect of the public nature of the murders. It evokes the role that society, as represented by the constant stream of anonymous mourners, had in causing or exacerbating the tensions that led to the conflict.

The Mothers final, poetic lamentation for her son is different from the other poetry and songs that are used in the play. Featuring visceral, violent imagery and muscular, concise verbs, it has more in common with a Modernist elegy than it does with a traditional village rhyme. This shift in style suggests that the character has discarded the social norms that she embraced earlier in the play, and is only consumed with deep, atavistic grief.

At the beginning of the scene, the two village girls (who may or may not be the sameGirlsfrom earlier acts) appear to have a supernatural vision of the deaths in the woods. This suggests the culmination of the shift in tone in Act III, Scene 1, in which domestic conversations were replaced by the Moons song.

Now, supernatural events are occurring not only in the woods, but also in the town during the day, and are affecting even people who have nothing to do with the vendetta. This suggests that the horror of the nights violent events will even affect strangers, because they add to the towns already-significant culture of conflict.