The House of Bernarda Alba

Bernarda Alba is a stern woman who seems never to have had a youth. The final dramatic work of the Spanish golden playwright Garcia Lorca is the embodiment of the evil demon that reigns over the Spanish peasant woman of that era (1936).

Bernarda is a product of the demonic patriarchal order—one that produced yet another rigid, unnaturally moral woman whose purity and height of morals transformed her into an apathetic, unfeeling monster.

The House of Bernarda Alba is a play classified as one of the twenty best plays in the world.

Its action is spatially confined to a single setting (it takes place exclusively inside Bernarda Alba's house), and this prison-like allusion is reinforced by a series of symbols: the mourning and black crepe imposed by Bernarda on her five daughters, her unnatural cult of chastity and virginity (her daughters are between 20 and 39 years old, and not one of them is married), as well as the sinister dominance of Poncia (the housekeeper, the true ruler of the house). Bernarda herself had two marriages, but her polygamy is mentioned almost casually, serving only to further highlight the grotesque monstrosity of what transpires behind the walls of her home.

Not a single man appears on stage in the play, yet the presence of men in these women's lives is acutely felt. The spirits of Bernarda's two husbands (represented by the inheritances they leave behind after their deaths) hover and weigh heavily on the atmosphere, while the catalyst for discord in the family—the handsome youth Pepe el Romano—manifests through the thoughts and romantic desires of the girls and Bernarda. He participates in the play solely through his nocturnal visits beneath their windows, always viewed from inside the rooms looking out.

"When you want to scream and you mustn't—you easily go mad!"

— F. G. Lorca