Blood Wedding

The first scene casts the feverish desire of the Bride and Leonardo against the laborious rituals and songs of ceremony preparation. The walls of traditions are being placed around the lovers, and their brief conversation before the wedding is charged with desire. They are helpless in the face of their want, which speaks to larger forces at work in Lorca’s primordial cosmology, his theme of Fate and the Tragic Cost of Honor. Fate is not just an overarching force, like the gods or nature, but an internal force that one is powerless against, like desire.

Lorca also evokes fatalism, the idea that the characters are beholden to preordained forces. In the moments before Leonardo and the Bride speak, when the Bride flings her crown of orange blossoms to the ground, her Servant, aghast, asks if she is “trying to tempt Fate” (24). The capitalization of Fate moves it from being an abstract concept to a personified force, and illuminates the primal universe in which Lorca’s play takes place, one which will burst onto stage in the third act. It is a pre-Christian cosmology, composed of chthonic forces. In Greek mythology, chthonic pertains to the underworld. In Lorca’s play, chthonic forces compel humans with indifference, bringing the play into the cultural traditions of the ancient World. The Bride and Leonardo’s helplessness illustrates the depth of their desire for one another, but also the inexorable pull of Fate, leading them helplessly toward their ruinous ends. This adheres to the dictates of Attic tragedy and the tradition in which Lorca was working. Greek tragedies were often derived from mythology and explored how humans were at the whim of indifferent gods.

Orange trees are very prominent in Spain, and the orange blossom is the traditional Spanish wedding flower. In Spanish culture, the orange blossoms represent joy and happiness for the newly married couple, and they are also symbolic of fertility. These connotations would be very familiar to the Bride. Her relationship with and treatment of the orange blossoms illustrate her interior feelings to a Spanish audience. The orange blossom the Bridegroom gives the Bride is wax, a facsimile which is supposed to symbolize happiness and fertility but indicates inauthenticity and falseness; a significant fact given Leonardo’s questioning of the orange blossom brought by the Bridegroom. Lorca intimates at the bleak future the Bride would have with the pragmatic and conservative Bridegroom, who believes that imitating devotion and passion is acceptable.

The two conversations the Bride has before her wedding illuminate her passionate nature. She and Leonardo are both subject to their rushing desire, given to long speeches about emotions and personal grievances. In these exchanges, the Bride’s true character emerges from behind her sullen facade. Her inflamed conversations with Leonardo stand in contrast to those with the Bridegroom, which are banal and perfunctory. When the Bride does express a passion for the Bridegroom, it is in front of Leonardo and their parents, and seems to be a performance rather than a revelation of feeling.

Verse separates the prothalamia, which are traditional songs celebrating an upcoming wedding—from the prose, which evokes the sense of ritual and tradition tied to such a ruled manner of speech. Lorca’s imagery and musicality imbue these sections with a surreal directness, casting the Bride and the Bridegroom into folkloric figures. Lorca evokes the rhythmic traditions of his local Granada. He also inserts his own imagery and verse, recasting rituals and conventions as social forces which strip away individuality.

In a similar sense, the Servant’s song at the beginning of the second scene foreshadows the tragedy to come. This sets the stage for the twist later in the scene, the decision by Leonardo and the Bride that will seal their fates and the that of the Bridegroom’s. The Servant’s function is similar to the Greek chorus in Attic tragedies: like the chorus, the Servant comments on the play’s events and plants the seeds for pivotal developments.

After the wedding ceremony, the Mother of the Bridegroom instructs her son on how to maintain dominance in his household before lamenting that she must teach such things in his father’s absence. This notion of interrupted traditions infuses the second scene. It arises early with the Mother’s extended meditation on her grief—the “great scream always fighting its way up” (38), a location she will return to in her final speech, the final words of the play. Even her longing for female grandchildren is a hope for a tradition interrupted, the only tradition her family can manage to maintain: the death of the males through blood feud.

With the Mother’s announcement that “the bloody days are back” (48), the cycle of violence resumes. The timing of the Bride and Leonardo’s escape is crucial to Lorca’s portrait of perpetual violence; it only occurs after the two families are bound, thus spreading vengeance across more shoulders. The Mother emphasizes the way dozens are implicated in the honor code, subject to its demands.