La Casa De Bernarda Alba Gender

Geography of Gender: Space and Power in La Casa De Bernarda Alba In Frederico García Lorca’s La Casa de Bernarda Alba, the tragedy of a single family in provincial Spain acts as a microcosm for larger anxieties regarding identity and repression that dominated the country’s socio-political climate during Lorca’s lifetime. Written in 1936, the first year of the Spanish Civil War, the work reflects the playwright’s convictions that, in order to truly be called theater, a play must consider the rhythm of its surrounding society and engage itself with the questions of its people (Nissler, 127). Throughout La Casa de Bernarda Alba, Lorca constructs a domestic locale in which contemporary concerns dictate the personal relationships between Bernarda

At the heart of the play lies the central conflict between women’s sexual agency and the traditional policing of women’s bodies, a manifestation of a congruently patriarchal and authoritarian culture. The particular unraveling of the family speaks to the fatal consequences of such repression as a whole upon the “wider body politic” (Bercovici, 9). The play – read not only as a theatrical performance, but as a performance of political struggle – uses the navigation of space to commentate on the loss of the self at the hands of a totalitarian social system. By portraying the simultaneous separation and interaction between the domains of women and men, Lorca examines the interconnected relationship between societal morals and institutions of power, as they become embedded in the staging and setting. The play’s commentary on the historical confinement of women serves doubly as a feminist critique and a “documentation of social protest” against the rising fear of subjugation through domination (Johnson, 56). Throughout La Casa de Bernard Alba, systems of power, mediated through discourses of gender, map themselves upon the construction and contestation of space, both on-stage and off, and