Blood Wedding

“I looked hard at your father: nobody else. And when the Felixes murdered him I just went on staring at the wall. One woman, one man and that’s it.”

The Mother illustrates the hard reality of the social order, one which causes suffering to all the major female characters by the end of the play. Her regular recitation of the wrong done by the Felixes turns her pronouncement into a prophecy of how things will end for the Bride and for Leonardo’s wife.

“The horse is weeping,

Its hooves are hurt,

Its mane is frozen.

And in its eye

A dagger of silver.

Down by the river,

Down by the river,

Blood is pouring

Stronger than the water.”

The Mother-in-law’s addition to her grandson’s lullaby quickly becomes prophetic as it twists away from its traditional Andalusian roots. Symbols of tragedy are presented here: the knife, the river, the tortured horse, blood, and water. The repetition of “Down by the river” foreshadows the dual deaths by the river. The assertion that blood is stronger than water suggests that violence will eclipse peace in the end.

“What can I say about mine? She’s up at three, with the morning star, baking bread. Never chatters. Gentle as fleece. Does all kinds of embroidery, and she can cut a rope with her teeth.”

The proud Father of the Bride describes his daughter’s appealing traits to the Bridegroom and the Mother, and in doing so provides a portrait of the ideal woman in a male-dominated society. The Father of the Bride is essentially describing domestic help. He brags, as he might about his livestock, about the strength of his daughter’s teeth.

“MOTHER. You know what marriage means, my child?

BRIDE. I do.

MOTHER. A man, children, and for everybody else a wall two feet thick.”

The Mother describes the isolation and insularity women face with marriage. The notion of women staying behind walls is echoed often through the play, a common cultural fact. There is nothing in the Mother’s definition of marriage that pertains to emotion or relationship, simply loneliness.

“SON. Whenever I leave you I feel a great emptiness and a kind of lump in my throat.

BRIDE. Once you’re my husband that will go.

SON. So I tell myself.”

This is the height of the Bridegroom’s romantic declarations for the Bride. He won’t make another pronouncement like it, and this, along with pride in the waxen orange blossom, contrast with Leonardo’s passion. The Bride’s lengthy, passionate response to Leonardo also contrasts with her brief factual statement here.

“SERVANT. Child! Flinging you wedding wreath away! Are you trying to tempt Fate? Here—look into my eyes. Do you want to get married or not? Say it. There is still time.

BRIDE. Black clouds. An icy wind blowing, here, deep inside. Does everybody feel this?”

The Bride’s act of flinging away the orange blossoms would have shocked Spanish audiences, given the act’s deep cultural and symbolic meaning. The Servant’s question about Fate would also have carried deeper weight for the audience, evoking the chthonic entities of pre-Christian culture. Hughes’ capitalization of Fate in the translation emphasizes its status as a literal, personified figure rather than a philosophical concept.

“We cannot punish ourselves worse than to burn and stay silent. […] You think time heals and that walls shut away but it’s not true, it’s not true. When things have pierced to the centre nobody can pull them out.”

Leonardo’s admission to the Bride echoes the final lines spoken by the Mother, who locates her grief at her center. Both Leonardo and the Mother equate the depth of their feelings to the core of themselves, evoking Lorca’s notions of duende. Suffering and stifled desire allow access to this central place. Leonardo introduces the poetic image of desire burning him inside; the Bride will use this image later to explain why she could never resist Leonardo.

“Now the wedding

Starts to move

Like a huge bull.”

The Servant closes the opening celebrations sung by the arriving guests. Before this, the song, sung in linked verses by various people, celebrated the Bride and the Bridegroom separately. The Servant likens the wedding to a huge bull, a symbol of virulent masculinity in Spain. This alludes to the unstoppable power of Spanish society and convention. The marriage ceremony is a ritual, a performative exercise for the community, and it is this wider group who authorize its legitimacy.

“I want to see no eyes but yours. And I want you to hold me so hard and strong that even if my mother called to me, my dead mother, I couldn’t pull free.”

The Bride’s most emotional statement to the Bridegroom, coming on the heels of her passionate conversation with Leonardo where she confessed to being helpless against his voice. Here the Bride confirms her hope that marriage will be a refuge from her overwhelming desire. She essentially asks the Bridegroom to suppress the outside world completely; his response, a tacit acceptance, reveals he doesn’t find this unordinary.

“But I’m certain of one thing. You have already thrown me away. I have a child. And another is coming. That’s how it is. It happened to my mother, and now it is happening to me.”

Leonardo’s Wife explores the fate that afflicts the women in rural Andalusia. As the blood feuds dictate a certain future for some of the men, infidelity will have a similar effect on women.

“In every face in that family I see nothing but the face that murdered mine. Look at me. Do I seem crazy? I am crazy with everything I’ve had to hold down and hold in, everything that my heart wants to scream out. There’s a great scream always fighting its way up. I have to smother it and shove it back down.”

The Mother details the long-term psychological consequences of the honor code’s violence, and the collapsing of individuality that follows. She is unable to view the Felix family as individuals, only as perpetrators. 

“When I got to my son he was lying in the middle of the street. I put my hands in his blood and licked them. Because it was me, mine. You don’t understand that. I would have kept that blood-soaked dirt in a chalice of glass and topaz.”

The Mother’s grief has stricken her to the core of her being. She turns the symbol of spilled blood on its head. Rather than indicating death and nothingness, it becomes regenerative; the blood in the chalice suggests Christ’s in the communion cup.

“It’s made of wax. It will last forever. I would have liked to see your dress covered with it.”

The Bridegroom reveals that he doesn’t understand the Bride and lack of imagination. He gives her a wax orange blossom, believing it a more practical option, and therefore better, without realizing that it is muted and false. This symbol meant to suggest happiness and fertility has been drained of vitality. His suggestion of a wax-covered dress, while ostensibly romantic to him, is simply another example of how a marriage to him would be conventional and oppressive.

“A rough embrace and a bite—frighten her just a little. Then a soft kiss. She’ll understand. It will teach her that you are the man, the boss, the one who gives commands. I learned that from your father. You don’t have him to show you how to be strong, so you must listen to me.”

The Mother’s version of domesticity reinforces the male power system while verging on the physically abusive. It is not viewed as anything out of the ordinary culturally. It also exemplifies the lasting consequences of the blood feud’s violence.

“The bloody days are back.”

The Mother signals the regression back into a primeval time, explored in the forest in the third act. Though “bloody days” stripped her of her son and husband, she is eager to arrange a vengeful posse and initiate the very action that left her a widow.

“FIRST. They were deceiving themselves, but the blood couldn’t be denied.

THIRD. The blood!

FIRST. When the blood chooses a path it has to be followed.

SECOND. But blood that sees the light is swallowed by dust.”

The three Woodcutters introduce the audience to the primeval atmosphere of the forest and voice the central theme of the work: the terrible consequences of repressed desire, the inability to deny one’s true self, and the The Incompatibility of Desire and the Social Order. They act as a Greek chorus, commenting on the play’s action while framing the scene to come.

“Tonight there’ll be blood

To warm my cheeks.

[…]

I want to slide

Into a bosom

Where I can be warm.

A heart for me!”

The Moon, in joyous verse, announces its excitement for the deaths to come, casting them as a regenerative act for nature. The blood spilled, while fatal for the human, is vital to the natural order and therefore craved.

“Listen. In the whole world there is only one horse, and this is it.”

The Bridegroom emphasizes the primeval status of the unfolding drama, locating it in a moment outside of linear time and space. This fact of society crushing hope, of perpetual blood-feud violence, operate at an eternal level, becoming the thrum of the planet, centered around a surreal Spanish forest.

“Look at this arm. It isn’t my arm. This is my brother’s arm, my father’s arm, the arm of my whole dead family. […] I feel the teeth of my whole family clenched in me so I can hardly breathe.”

The Bridegroom, in the forest’s primeval landscape, embodies his role as one fated to die in a blood feud. He is in the process of joining the line of men in his family who were struck down. He assumes their spiritual mantle as he approaches his doom, raising questions of fate and predetermination.

“Then those wedding pins,

Those two wedding pins,

They turned my blood black.

[…]

But none of its my fault.

It’s the fault of the earth

And of that perfume

That comes off your breasts and your hair.”

Leonardo’s lines begin with the poetic symbol of silver, which Lorca equates to death. Leonardo realizes that neither he, nor the Bride, are responsible for desire that burns so strongly inside them. It is the fault of all-natural powers, the pull of fate. Leonardo was never in control, but at the mercy of something larger and more mysterious than he can understand.

“I’ve left a faithful man

And all his family

In the middle of my wedding.

Still wearing my bride’s wreath.

But it’s you that will have to pay for it.”

The Bride tells Leonardo that they can never return to society; its ancient laws have been activated against them. She is clear about the gendered notions of retribution, evoking the theme of Women as Casualties; men police the behaviors and bodies of women, but primarily do so by policing other men.

“Your tears are just tears, they come from your eyes. My tears will be different. When I’m alone my tears will come from the soles of my feet. From my very roots. And they’ll burn hotter than blood.”

In a speech, Lorca quoted a local master of the flamenco guitar as stating that the duende comes not from the throat, but climbs up from the bottom of the feet. In stating that her tears will come from the soles of her feet, the Mother is declaring the depth of her sorrow, caused when society stifles desire and demands blood for its transgressions. She echoes the spirit of the duende, Lorca’s guiding star.

“I was a woman on fire. Inside and outside ablaze with agonies. Your son was a single drop of water that I hoped would give me children and health: the other was a dark big river, carrying torn-up trees, that brought me the sound of its reeds and its song. […] the other’s arm dragged me like a wave from the sea. And it would always have dragged me, always, even if I’d been an old woman and all of your son’s sons had tried to hold me down by my hair.”

The Bride outlines the essential tragedy behind her situation using metaphor: the force of water. This infuses the Bride’s admission with the sense of forces larger than herself, compelling her against her will. It echoes Attic tragedy, tying the dictates of fate to the mysterious motivations of the Olympian gods and goddesses, reaching even further beyond them, to the primordial natural forces that shape the universe.