Blood Wedding

Though Blood Wedding deviates in key ways from Attic tragedy, Lorca understood the Greek corpus and tailored his play to honor the traditions of the form while illuminating the social practices of his time. Traditional Attic tragedy focused on a figure who finds their life undone by a character trait or decision they have no control over. The plays didn’t depict the shameful actions themselves, but focused on the psychological and social consequences suffered by victims as they performed fruitless actions incapable of changing their fates. The plays were thought to warn against hubris, the idea that no one is above the indifference of the gods, and to provide catharsis, assuring fellow sufferers that they are not the only victims of an apathetic universe. Virtually every play concluded with the death or psychological dissolution of the primary character, an outcome attributed to fate, which was adjacent to the will of the gods.

The play’s subject matter drew from common myths, which most of the audience was familiar with. Mythology reinforces the Greek concept of human destiny as decided by gods and goddesses, who are equivalent to natural forces. Lorca seizes on this same sense of fate and potent natural forces, infusing his play with communal fatalism. Lorca uses the blood feud as the engine of his play’s fatalism. As every member of the original Andalusian audience would understand, there is only one end to a blood feud—violence and death.

While the presence of Fate isn’t announced until Act II, its pull permeates the play from the start. The Bride, when trying to explain to the Mother why she fled with Leonardo, describes something very much like fate: She says that Leonardo’s love “would always have dragged me, always” (69). This quells the Mother’s rage. The Mother speaks to a force outside human agency: “She is not to blame” (69). Several characters are consumed with who to blame for their predicaments, but can’t find human sources. The Mother blames the knife, or “the devil” who created it. Leonardo asks himself day and night who he should blame for the dissolution of his relationship with the Bride, but he can’t locate a definitive source. He finally announces that “[i]t’s the fault of the earth” (59). Similarly, after her son’s death, the Mother speaks of being alone with her grief and “the earth” (68). In her final speech, she says her son and Leonardo were “appointed” (71). The tragic vision is characterized by the idea that suffering is unpreventable and tied to the indifferent, unstoppable universe.

At the time of Blood Wedding’s composition, dramatic criticism believed that tragedy could no longer be written because audiences no longer believed in the ancient Greek cosmological order where an indifferent universe crushes weakness and hubris. Lorca solves this by presenting a landscape in which the Moon and the Beggar woman are fate’s agents, a position supported by the Beggar Woman’s later appearance before the three girls who stand in for the Greek Fates.

Blood Wedding portrays a cosmology that predates Christianity, one in which primal natural forces enact destruction to perpetuate the life cycle. This is a different moral universe than that of the ancient Greeks. It is closer to the folk world he fashioned out of his native rural Andalusia, in which nature itself plays a part in the tragic outcome. Duende, the native spirit of the soul, rises up and whispers through art the secret convictions of the universe.

Lorca used tragedy to highlight an issue plaguing the countryside at the time: the endemic violence of generational blood feuds. Lorca relied on his culture’s familiarity with blood feud violence to evoke tragedy’s fatalism. He highlighted how blood feuds continually end in violence.