Synopsis: Bernarda Alba has decreed that reputation must be defended at any cost, even at the expense of the happiness of all eight women confined within the walls. The barred windows offer only the illusion of freedom, while money underlies the planned marriage between the most coveted young man in the village and the eldest sister. And if love has been born in other hearts, it is merely a symptom of freedom, one that must be killed at birth within the concentration-like space created over centuries by the patriarchal oppression of women through tradition.
The House of Bernarda Alba is the last of the tragedies that critics include in what they call Federico García Lorca’s “rural trilogy,” alongside Blood Wedding and Yerma.
The author’s general subtitle is “Drama of the Women of the Villages of Spain.” To tell this drama, he places on stage a house in Andalusia where the strictest mourning has been established, no men remain, and the matriarch Bernarda Alba wields dictatorial power over her five daughters, the elderly mother, and the servant. However, conformism, obedience, fundamentalism, and repression of feelings cannot endure forever when confronted with the forceful and versatile nature of femininity, with love, passion, courage, revolt, and self-sacrifice. Yet, the aspiration toward love and freedom fatally clashes with the unyielding walls of the House of Bernarda Alba.
