Lorca's CASA
Below is a selection from John Corbin's Essay "Lorca's Casa," in which he analyzes the anthropological precision of the play's setting. As a disclaimer, I disagree with his overall interpretation of the play. In my opinion, he, like many, devalues the antifascist politics of the play, although he admirably doesn't fall into the trap of reducing it to a parable about the need for sexual liberation. Because the play is so grounded in realism, he does not see Bernarda's repressive attitude as indicative of a larger systematic failure, but merely the particular shortcomings of a particular woman. While his analysis of the play's realism is insightful, it does ignore Lorca's symbolist tendencies which, will muted compared to his previous works, are still present in Bernarda Alba. However, the essay does spark a valuable discussion about the historical accuracy of the play. I have included selections from his essay that are most valuable for this production. If you would like to read the full essay, you can download it as a PDF below.
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As an anthropologist of Andalusia, I am struck by the social and cultural accuracy of Lorca's La casa de Bernarda Alba, its almost ethnographic quality. Lorca, noted for being expressly and incurably Andalusian, resisted the intellectual current that tried
to 'Europeanize' Spain. For him, 'los toros', 'el baile espaniol', and his own writings were expressions of a Spanish, not to say Andalusian, 'duende'. The root meaning of 'duende', an abbreviation of 'duenio de la casa', is the spirit of an abandoned
house and, by extension, of a place. Lorca elaborates the term as a kind of ancient 'spirit of a place' which can possess the singer, the dancer, and the poet in a creative passion.
La casa de Bernarda Alba is recognized as the most realistic of Lorca's plays. Although Bernarda's 'casa' is hardly a typical Andalusian village household, most of her values were typical of her society. It was entirely proper for a respectable
woman in her position to manage her household strictly and insist that the servants keep it clean, to defend its reputation, ensure the sexual purity of her daughters, and promote advantageous marriages for them. The question, then, is: what is wrong
with Bernarda's 'casa'? The usual answer is that Bernarda is wrong, that she is a monster who in effect executes her own daughter. The most facile version of this argument treats Bernarda as the product and instrument of a repressive traditional society, one that should give way to more enlightened practices. It regards the message of the play as follows: 'If Bernarda had had a more enlightened attitude to sex, if she had treated it as a simple physical pleasure, if she had accepted that her daughters had rights to their personal space, then everything would have been all right. As a mother she should make sure that they understood the facts of life and knew how to avoid pregnancy, but she needed to accept that they were owners of their own bodies, that what they did with them was their own business, and she should have limited herself to helping them to come to terms with their own feelings. If that meant that Angustias, Martirio, and Adela [three of Bernarda's daughters] each had Pepe [Adela's love and Angustias' fiancée] spend the night with them in their rooms, so be it.' This is simply incorrect. The play is not about a clash between traditional and modern attitudes to sex. It is true that Adela expresses some rather modern views,... but she also makes unmodern statements.
Most literary criticism of the play understands it as a conflict between repression and freedom. To take two eminent examples: for Gwynne Edwards the play is about society as imprisonment against which nature, and particularly human passion,
struggles, for Morris, too, the house and its village society are prisons from which some of the characters struggle to escape. Both see gender oppression as an element in this, though Morris develops this argument more explicitly and adds class oppression to the picture. Repression and the struggle against it are certainly the main theme of the play, but from an ethnographic perspective there are problems with some aspects of these two critical appraisals. Both sometimes treat the particular as the general: because some things go wrong, everything is wrong; because some people are repressed; the society is repressive. It then becomes
tempting to regard any convention or moral stricture as repressive and bad, and any defiance of same as liberating and good. In my opinion, this is not what Lorca is saying about his culture and society.
...
Bernarda thinks she is better than the other people in the village and the surrounding area, but were she to move to a larger place with more wealthy people, then her family would be comparatively poor, so she stays put. Bernarda is a snob in the literal sense, a good example of what is known deprecatingly in Andalusia as a 'sefiorito de pueblo', someone with social pretensions that sustainable only in a relatively small, poor place. There are other clues to this status. In the play
Bernarda, of course, addresses everyone as 'tú' ' [in Spanish, "tú" is the informal pronoun for you, versus "usted," which is the formal pronoun]. But then everyone except her daughters calls her 'tú'. As far as the villagers and servants are concerned, she is not a superior. Another clue is in the architecture. Martirio, Angustias, and Adela wait for men at their bedroom windows. This means that they sleep on the ground floor; the house does not have a second story, or at least one that is lived in. This is typical of village houses and of modest houses in cities, but not of the imposing houses of the wealthy. A third clue is the concern for what the servants might see or say. The wealthy and well born do not worry overmuch what the servants think or what tales they carry to ordinary townsmen. They regard their social superiority as given, not something that depends on their reputation among townspeople. If they are concerned about what other people think, these will be people like themselves, a few of whom might live locally but most of whom are scattered far and wide. I have heard such people conduct family arguments in loud voices in very public places without the slightest trace of embarrassment.
Bernarda's basic problem is that she is both too wealthy and not wealthy enough. She is too wealthy to be an ordinary villager. Her farms are not family farms worked by those who own them, with perhaps a hired hand or two; her home is not a family home cleaned and kept by herself and her daughters. She employs others to do the work and she and her family do nothing but sit and sew. This makes her superior; it also makes her feel superior to villagers who are neither employers nor employees, who run independent family businesses. Yet to the extent that she criticizes them and fears their criticism, they form her social universe and define her social standing, they are the 'calle' of her 'casa' in the institutional as well as physical sense. Paradoxically, her wealth makes her more vulnerable to the 'calle' than her neighbours are in their family homes without servants or employees. If need be, they can live on bread and water but pretend otherwise; they can sell the furniture without telling anybody and can pass off a daughter's illegitimate child as an unexpected late pregnancy of her mother. People with servants and other employees coming and going are unlikely to pull off such deceptions. Bernarda's final claim that Adela died a virgin has little chance of being believed [Adela commits suicide after having an affair with her sister's fiancée]. Bernarda insists the family tell that village that she did a virgin]. Poncia might keep the secret, but what about the other servant, who like Poncia knows that Adela and Martirio both want Pepe, and may have heard the final quarrel? What about the stableman whom Bernarda orders to tether the stallion and enclose the mares [referring to a scene in the play where Bernarda's horses break out of their stables], who presumably will put the mare to the stallion at daybreak, and whose quarters are likely to be close to the meeting-place of Pepe and Adela?
Bernarda is not wealthy enough to extend her social horizons beyond the village. She cannot join the wider circle of people with farms, businesses, and homes in several places, who can shift residence as family circumstances dictate: children needing better schools, daughters a wider range of acceptable suitors. Such people have the means to maintain social relations over great distances, to travel far and wide to attend baptisms, marriages, and funerals, to celebrate Christmas and Easter, to go to fairs, bullfights, and the theatre, where they and their family can see and be seen. People, that is, like Garcia Lorca's own family. Bernarda feels herself too good for the 'calle' she lives in but cannot attach her 'casa' to a wider 'calle' of the relatively wealthy. Instead of settling for being a high-standing villager, putting great effort into cultivating good relations with neighbours and employees, and
accepting Enrique Humanas and others of his kind as suitors for her daughters, she opts for separation, for exaggerating her difference from those she resembles closely. She reminds me in this respect of the bosses of labouring men, risen from the ranks but now concerned with contracts and paper work, who let the fingernail of their little finger grow as long as possible as a sign that they do no manual work. Men from wealthy landed families who had not worked so much as an hour with their hands disdained this as an affectation that would interfere with the hunting, fishing, and riding lifestyle many of them pursued.
This separation is a major cause of the tragedy. Of all the available men, only Pepe el Romano is good enough, and this condemns four of the five daughters to spinsterhood, to a futile existence of sewing and embroidering linens for marriages
that will not take place. It also sets in motion the sexual danger of one male with several females, the figurative conversion of Pepe and the sisters into stallion and mares.
It is worth noting that Bernarda's marriage strategy would raise the status of her grandchildren. At the time of the play Bernarda is about sixty. She married at the age of twenty or so, and had all her five children by the time she was forty. Had her daughters done the same, she would be well on the way to having twenty-five grandchildren. In contrast, Angustias is nearly forty and unlikely to have many children. Bernarda could have restricted the number of children the other daughters had simply by insisting that they marry in order of age. She goes further, denying marriage to four of the five daughters. Had she got her way, Angustias would have
married Pepe and had few children, who would therefore have been as wealthy as their parents when they inherited; the other daughters would never have married and had no heirs, which meant that any wealth they left on their death would probably have gone eventually to Angustia's children, making them even wealthier. Those grandchildren might then have had the means to join the wider social circles of the truly wealthy. But a rise in status bought by denying maternal fulfilment to four daughters, life itself to their children, is culturally wrong.
...
However, there is in this society a very conscious focus on grandchildren. Children take their class from the economic standing of their parents and it does not change during their lifetime. If the parents better themselves, however, their children will be better off and their grandchildren will have a higher standing. The local wisdom is that it takes three generations for a family to change its class. Enrique Humanas farmed his own land but was unacceptable to Bernarda because he was the son of a 'ganan' (p. 615). Had he been the grandson of a farmhand but the son of a prosperous landowner, the situation might have been different. To put it another way, his own children might fare better than he did.
The only direct reference in the text to a redistributive device is to a pre-modern one: charity, or rather, the lack of it. Poncia talks about Bernarda's setting her on beggars, but the beggar woman who appears in Act I says that she is always given leftovers. She is refused by the maid, who wants the food for herself, which shows both that the maid was poor enough to want leftovers and that the problem of charity is not just Bernarda's. Where Bernarda really shows herself to be uncharitable, however, is in her refusal to give away any of her dead husband's clothing. Given that there are no men left in the family and that she does not expect her daughters to marry, the point of the denial seems much more refusal to help others than retain use for herself. These refusals, then, illustrate the problem of charity as a device for redistribution. It is voluntary, therefore it can be blocked by greed and contrariness.
...
Sex and marriage are only foreground issues; the background issue is social class... Lorca is not attacking the 'sefiorito' class to which he himself belonged and whose wealth sustained him in his intellectual and artistic pursuits. He is attacking the 'sefioritos de pueblo' who aspire to that status but do not have the means to sustain it. He attacks them not because they have pretensions but because their pretensions tragically distort their 'casas' and their lives. His target is the village equivalent of the city middle class he had previously criticized in Dona Rosita la Soltera. La casa de Berarda Alba is not a sweeping condemnation of pre-modern society; what it does is far more subtle. The play probes pre-modern cultural inconsistency and ambiguity, and sounds an alarm to a danger in pre-modern society. It does this so acutely that it transcends the particularity of time and place and tells us something more general about the human condition, provided, always, that we understand the specific terms with which it starts. This acuteness was possible only, in my view, because Lorca loved the culture he was criticizing and enjoyed its pleasures to the full, because he knew and accepted the powers, and the dangers, of its passions.
As an anthropologist of Andalusia, I am struck by the social and cultural accuracy of Lorca's La casa de Bernarda Alba, its almost ethnographic quality. Lorca, noted for being expressly and incurably Andalusian, resisted the intellectual current that tried
to 'Europeanize' Spain. For him, 'los toros', 'el baile espaniol', and his own writings were expressions of a Spanish, not to say Andalusian, 'duende'. The root meaning of 'duende', an abbreviation of 'duenio de la casa', is the spirit of an abandoned
house and, by extension, of a place. Lorca elaborates the term as a kind of ancient 'spirit of a place' which can possess the singer, the dancer, and the poet in a creative passion.
La casa de Bernarda Alba is recognized as the most realistic of Lorca's plays. Although Bernarda's 'casa' is hardly a typical Andalusian village household, most of her values were typical of her society. It was entirely proper for a respectable
woman in her position to manage her household strictly and insist that the servants keep it clean, to defend its reputation, ensure the sexual purity of her daughters, and promote advantageous marriages for them. The question, then, is: what is wrong
with Bernarda's 'casa'? The usual answer is that Bernarda is wrong, that she is a monster who in effect executes her own daughter. The most facile version of this argument treats Bernarda as the product and instrument of a repressive traditional society, one that should give way to more enlightened practices. It regards the message of the play as follows: 'If Bernarda had had a more enlightened attitude to sex, if she had treated it as a simple physical pleasure, if she had accepted that her daughters had rights to their personal space, then everything would have been all right. As a mother she should make sure that they understood the facts of life and knew how to avoid pregnancy, but she needed to accept that they were owners of their own bodies, that what they did with them was their own business, and she should have limited herself to helping them to come to terms with their own feelings. If that meant that Angustias, Martirio, and Adela [three of Bernarda's daughters] each had Pepe [Adela's love and Angustias' fiancée] spend the night with them in their rooms, so be it.' This is simply incorrect. The play is not about a clash between traditional and modern attitudes to sex. It is true that Adela expresses some rather modern views,... but she also makes unmodern statements.
Most literary criticism of the play understands it as a conflict between repression and freedom. To take two eminent examples: for Gwynne Edwards the play is about society as imprisonment against which nature, and particularly human passion,
struggles, for Morris, too, the house and its village society are prisons from which some of the characters struggle to escape. Both see gender oppression as an element in this, though Morris develops this argument more explicitly and adds class oppression to the picture. Repression and the struggle against it are certainly the main theme of the play, but from an ethnographic perspective there are problems with some aspects of these two critical appraisals. Both sometimes treat the particular as the general: because some things go wrong, everything is wrong; because some people are repressed; the society is repressive. It then becomes
tempting to regard any convention or moral stricture as repressive and bad, and any defiance of same as liberating and good. In my opinion, this is not what Lorca is saying about his culture and society.
...
Bernarda thinks she is better than the other people in the village and the surrounding area, but were she to move to a larger place with more wealthy people, then her family would be comparatively poor, so she stays put. Bernarda is a snob in the literal sense, a good example of what is known deprecatingly in Andalusia as a 'sefiorito de pueblo', someone with social pretensions that sustainable only in a relatively small, poor place. There are other clues to this status. In the play
Bernarda, of course, addresses everyone as 'tú' ' [in Spanish, "tú" is the informal pronoun for you, versus "usted," which is the formal pronoun]. But then everyone except her daughters calls her 'tú'. As far as the villagers and servants are concerned, she is not a superior. Another clue is in the architecture. Martirio, Angustias, and Adela wait for men at their bedroom windows. This means that they sleep on the ground floor; the house does not have a second story, or at least one that is lived in. This is typical of village houses and of modest houses in cities, but not of the imposing houses of the wealthy. A third clue is the concern for what the servants might see or say. The wealthy and well born do not worry overmuch what the servants think or what tales they carry to ordinary townsmen. They regard their social superiority as given, not something that depends on their reputation among townspeople. If they are concerned about what other people think, these will be people like themselves, a few of whom might live locally but most of whom are scattered far and wide. I have heard such people conduct family arguments in loud voices in very public places without the slightest trace of embarrassment.
Bernarda's basic problem is that she is both too wealthy and not wealthy enough. She is too wealthy to be an ordinary villager. Her farms are not family farms worked by those who own them, with perhaps a hired hand or two; her home is not a family home cleaned and kept by herself and her daughters. She employs others to do the work and she and her family do nothing but sit and sew. This makes her superior; it also makes her feel superior to villagers who are neither employers nor employees, who run independent family businesses. Yet to the extent that she criticizes them and fears their criticism, they form her social universe and define her social standing, they are the 'calle' of her 'casa' in the institutional as well as physical sense. Paradoxically, her wealth makes her more vulnerable to the 'calle' than her neighbours are in their family homes without servants or employees. If need be, they can live on bread and water but pretend otherwise; they can sell the furniture without telling anybody and can pass off a daughter's illegitimate child as an unexpected late pregnancy of her mother. People with servants and other employees coming and going are unlikely to pull off such deceptions. Bernarda's final claim that Adela died a virgin has little chance of being believed [Adela commits suicide after having an affair with her sister's fiancée]. Bernarda insists the family tell that village that she did a virgin]. Poncia might keep the secret, but what about the other servant, who like Poncia knows that Adela and Martirio both want Pepe, and may have heard the final quarrel? What about the stableman whom Bernarda orders to tether the stallion and enclose the mares [referring to a scene in the play where Bernarda's horses break out of their stables], who presumably will put the mare to the stallion at daybreak, and whose quarters are likely to be close to the meeting-place of Pepe and Adela?
Bernarda is not wealthy enough to extend her social horizons beyond the village. She cannot join the wider circle of people with farms, businesses, and homes in several places, who can shift residence as family circumstances dictate: children needing better schools, daughters a wider range of acceptable suitors. Such people have the means to maintain social relations over great distances, to travel far and wide to attend baptisms, marriages, and funerals, to celebrate Christmas and Easter, to go to fairs, bullfights, and the theatre, where they and their family can see and be seen. People, that is, like Garcia Lorca's own family. Bernarda feels herself too good for the 'calle' she lives in but cannot attach her 'casa' to a wider 'calle' of the relatively wealthy. Instead of settling for being a high-standing villager, putting great effort into cultivating good relations with neighbours and employees, and
accepting Enrique Humanas and others of his kind as suitors for her daughters, she opts for separation, for exaggerating her difference from those she resembles closely. She reminds me in this respect of the bosses of labouring men, risen from the ranks but now concerned with contracts and paper work, who let the fingernail of their little finger grow as long as possible as a sign that they do no manual work. Men from wealthy landed families who had not worked so much as an hour with their hands disdained this as an affectation that would interfere with the hunting, fishing, and riding lifestyle many of them pursued.
This separation is a major cause of the tragedy. Of all the available men, only Pepe el Romano is good enough, and this condemns four of the five daughters to spinsterhood, to a futile existence of sewing and embroidering linens for marriages
that will not take place. It also sets in motion the sexual danger of one male with several females, the figurative conversion of Pepe and the sisters into stallion and mares.
It is worth noting that Bernarda's marriage strategy would raise the status of her grandchildren. At the time of the play Bernarda is about sixty. She married at the age of twenty or so, and had all her five children by the time she was forty. Had her daughters done the same, she would be well on the way to having twenty-five grandchildren. In contrast, Angustias is nearly forty and unlikely to have many children. Bernarda could have restricted the number of children the other daughters had simply by insisting that they marry in order of age. She goes further, denying marriage to four of the five daughters. Had she got her way, Angustias would have
married Pepe and had few children, who would therefore have been as wealthy as their parents when they inherited; the other daughters would never have married and had no heirs, which meant that any wealth they left on their death would probably have gone eventually to Angustia's children, making them even wealthier. Those grandchildren might then have had the means to join the wider social circles of the truly wealthy. But a rise in status bought by denying maternal fulfilment to four daughters, life itself to their children, is culturally wrong.
...
However, there is in this society a very conscious focus on grandchildren. Children take their class from the economic standing of their parents and it does not change during their lifetime. If the parents better themselves, however, their children will be better off and their grandchildren will have a higher standing. The local wisdom is that it takes three generations for a family to change its class. Enrique Humanas farmed his own land but was unacceptable to Bernarda because he was the son of a 'ganan' (p. 615). Had he been the grandson of a farmhand but the son of a prosperous landowner, the situation might have been different. To put it another way, his own children might fare better than he did.
The only direct reference in the text to a redistributive device is to a pre-modern one: charity, or rather, the lack of it. Poncia talks about Bernarda's setting her on beggars, but the beggar woman who appears in Act I says that she is always given leftovers. She is refused by the maid, who wants the food for herself, which shows both that the maid was poor enough to want leftovers and that the problem of charity is not just Bernarda's. Where Bernarda really shows herself to be uncharitable, however, is in her refusal to give away any of her dead husband's clothing. Given that there are no men left in the family and that she does not expect her daughters to marry, the point of the denial seems much more refusal to help others than retain use for herself. These refusals, then, illustrate the problem of charity as a device for redistribution. It is voluntary, therefore it can be blocked by greed and contrariness.
...
Sex and marriage are only foreground issues; the background issue is social class... Lorca is not attacking the 'sefiorito' class to which he himself belonged and whose wealth sustained him in his intellectual and artistic pursuits. He is attacking the 'sefioritos de pueblo' who aspire to that status but do not have the means to sustain it. He attacks them not because they have pretensions but because their pretensions tragically distort their 'casas' and their lives. His target is the village equivalent of the city middle class he had previously criticized in Dona Rosita la Soltera. La casa de Berarda Alba is not a sweeping condemnation of pre-modern society; what it does is far more subtle. The play probes pre-modern cultural inconsistency and ambiguity, and sounds an alarm to a danger in pre-modern society. It does this so acutely that it transcends the particularity of time and place and tells us something more general about the human condition, provided, always, that we understand the specific terms with which it starts. This acuteness was possible only, in my view, because Lorca loved the culture he was criticizing and enjoyed its pleasures to the full, because he knew and accepted the powers, and the dangers, of its passions.
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