The House of Bernarda Alba begins with the tyrannical title character, Bernarda Alba, locking her five daughters in their small village house to mourn the passing of their father Don Antonio. Tradition dictates that they spend eight years inside, wearing only black—just as it states that their value as women depends on whom they marry. Fed up with their circumscribed lives and Bernarda’s rigid social codes, the daughters start dreaming of escape through the only socially acceptable option: love. Three of the daughters end up entangled with the same man, Pepe el Romano. Pepe proposes marriage to Bernarda’s eldest daughter, Angustias—who stands to inherit most of the family’s estate—even as he carries on a secret love affair with the youngest, Adela, who decides she will do anything to be with him, up to and including destroying her family. Meanwhile, the fourth daughter, Martirio, is desperately in love with Pepe, but he rejects her. Love is thus both Bernarda’s strategy for exerting control over her daughters, and the daughters’ strategy for forging their own paths in life. Their competing desires trigger the play’s tragic end, which depends on a twofold punch of dramatic irony: Adela hangs herself because she wrongly believes that Pepe is dead, while Bernarda announces that “my daughter has died a virgin”—still refusing to believe the clear evidence that Adela not only had sex with Pepe but is also pregnant with his child. Throughout the play, as though to underline the daughters’ predicament, Bernarda’s mother (Maria Josefa) and her servants (Poncia and the Maid) also dream of leaving her house and building better lives for themselves elsewhere.
The characters’ futile attempts to fulfill impossible desires drives the play’s action and leads to its inexorable, tragic conclusion, in which Bernarda tells her daughters and audience to “look death in the face.” When they reach the limit of their ability to achieve what they want, García Lorca’s characters stubbornly choose to live in denial and keep trying anyway, as their quest for freedom is the only thing that makes their lives worth living. Obsessed with the fantasy of a pure bloodline, Bernarda keeps believing that her daughters will find the right husbands, even as she locks them inside for years on end and refuses to either let them leave the village or marry a neighbor of a lower social class. (There is simply nobody left for them to marry.) Angustias refuses to believe that Pepe is marrying her for money, Adela refuses to believe that Pepe will ultimately choose money over love, and Martirio refuses to believe that Pepe loves Adela instead. All of them are wrong, all of them refuse to admit it, and thus all of them are responsible for Adela’s death at the end of the play. In this way, as throughout his work, García Lorca suggests that all humans are caught in a tragic paradox: the value in human life comes from pursuing freedom and desire beyond society’s constraints, and yet it’s perhaps impossible to fully achieve the freedom people seek or the fantasies they desire. But the play suggests that people must believe that they can in order to keep the pursuit of freedom and desire alive, and this false belief often leads people to ruin.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Freedom, Desire, and Tragedy ThemeTracker
Freedom, Desire, and Tragedy Quotes in The House of Bernarda Alba
VOICE: Bernarda!
PONCIA: (Calling out) She’s coming! (To the MAID) Scrub everything clean. If Bernarda doesn’t see things shine, she’ll tear out the little hair I have left!
MAID: What a woman!
PONCIA: She tyrannizes everyone around her. She could sit on your heart and watch you die for a whole year without taking that cold smile off her damn face! Scrub! Scrub those tiles!
(As the two hundred women mourners finish coming in, BERNARDA ALBA and her five daughters appear. BERNARDA is leaning on a cane)
BERNARDA: (To the MAID) Silence!
ADELA: Here you are. (She gives her a round fan decorated with red and green flowers)
BERNARDA: (Hurling the fan to the floor) Is this the fan you give to a widow? Give me a black one, and learn to respect your father’s memory!
MAGDALENA: Neither mine nor yours. I know I’m not going to get married. I'd rather carry sacks to the mill. Anything but sit in this dark room, day after day!
BERNARDA: That’s what it means to be a woman.
MAGDALENA: To hell with being a woman!
BERNARDA: Here you do what I tell you to do! You can't run to your father with your stories anymore. A needle and thread for females; a mule and a whip for males. That’s how it is for people born with means.
BERNARDA: Help her! All of you!
(They all drag the old woman off the stage)
MARIA JOSEFA: I want to get away from here! Bernarda! To get married at the edge of the sea, at the edge of the sea!
FAST CURTAIN
ADELA: She follows me everywhere. Sometimes she peeks into my room to see if I’m asleep. She won’t let me breathe! And it’s always, “What a shame about that face!” “What a shame about that body, which will never belong to anyone!” No! My body will be for anyone I please.
ADELA: (Sitting down) Oh, if only I could go out to the fields, too!
MAGDALENA: (Sitting down) Each class does what it must.
MARTIRIO: (Sitting down) That’s how it is.
(AMELIA sits down with a sigh)
PONCIA: There’s no greater joy than being in the fields at this time of year! Yesterday morning the harvesters arrived. Forty or fifty good-looking young men.
AMELIA: To be born a woman is the worst punishment.
PONCIA: (With unrelenting cruelty) Bernarda, something monstrous is happening here. I don’t want to blame you, but you haven’t allowed your daughters any freedom. Martirio is romantic, no matter what you say. Why didn't you let her marry Enrique Humanas? Why did you send him a message not to come to her window, the very day he was coming?
BERNARDA: (Loud) And I would do it a thousand times again! My blood will never mix with that of the Humanas family—not as long as I live! His father was a field hand.
PONCIA: This is what comes of putting on airs!
BERNARDA: I do because I can afford to! And you don’t because you know very well what you come from.
(Outside, a woman screams, and there is a great uproar)
ADELA: They should let her go! Don’t go out there!
MARTIRIO: (Looking at ADELA) Let her pay for what she did.
BERNARDA: (In the archway) Finish her off before the Civil Guard gets here! Burning coals in the place where she sinned!
ADELA: (Clutching her womb) No! No!
BERNARDA: Kill her! Kill her!
CURTAIN
BERNARDA: You shouldn’t ask him. Especially after you’re married. Speak if he speaks, and look at him when he looks at you. That way, you won’t quarrel.
ANGUSTIAS: Mother, I think he hides many things from me.
BERNARDA: Don’t try to find out about them. Don’t ask him. And, above all, don’t ever let him see you cry.
ANGUSTIAS: I should be happy, and I’m not.
ADELA: Mother, when there’s a shooting star or a flash of lightning, why do we say:
Blessed Santa Barbara, why
Are you writing, up so high,
With holy water in the sky?
BERNARDA: In the old days they knew many things that we have forgotten.
AMELIA: I close my eyes so I won’t see them!
ADELA: Not me. I like to see things blazing through the sky, after being motionless year after year.
PONCIA: There’s nothing I can do. I tried to put a stop to all this, but now it frightens me too much. Do you hear this silence? Well, there’s a storm brewing in every room. The day it bursts, we’ll all be swept away! I’ve said what I had to say.
MARIA JOSEFA: It’s true. Everything is very dark. Just because I have white hair you think I can’t have babies. And—yes! Babies and babies and babies! This child will have white hair, and have another child, and that one, another, and all of us with hair of snow will be like the waves, one after another after another. Then we’ll all settle down, and we’ll all have white hair, and we’ll be foam on the sea. Why isn’t there any white foam here? Here there’s nothing but black mourning shawls.
MARTIRIO: (Pointing at ADELA) She was with him! Look at her petticoats, covered with straw!
BERNARDA: That is the bed of sinful women! (She moves toward ADELA, furious)
ADELA: (Confronting her) The shouting in this prison is over! (She seizes her mother’s cane and breaks it in two) This is what I do with the tyrant’s rod! Don’t take one step more. No one gives me orders but Pepe!
(A shot is heard)
BERNARDA: (Entering) I dare you to find him now!
MARTIRIO: (Entering) That’s the end of Pepe el Romano!
ADELA: Pepe! My God! Pepe! (She runs out of the room)
BERNARDA: I want no weeping. We must look death in the face. Silence! (To another daughter) Be quiet, I said! (To another daughter) Tears, when you’re alone. We will all drown ourselves in a sea of mourning. The youngest daughter of Bernarda Alba has died a virgin. Did you hear me? Silence! Silence, I said! Silence!
CURTAIN
