Twenty-first-century audiences might consider The House of Bernarda Alba a feminist masterpiece, but not because its characters are empowered or independent. While it’s true that all of the characters who appear in this play are women, the whole work is also set within the four white walls (and interior patio) of Bernarda Alba’s house because these women are simply not allowed to leave. In the conservative, Catholic rural Spain of the 1930s, women were expected to stay in the home, gossiping and embroidering, and their identity, status, and rights derived entirely from that of their fathers and husbands. Bernarda desperately wants to marry Angustias off to Pepe because she recognizes the social risks of living in an all-woman household; she trains her daughters to accept mistreatment and misbehavior from men, and she beats them when they suggest that they should be allowed to make their own decisions. She and Poncia curse women who have consensual sex before marriage or who are assaulted in the olive groves, and they agree that men will behave however they please and it is women’s responsibility to resist them. Poncia even tells Bernarda’s daughters that it’s men’s nature to drink, cheat, and ignore their wives, and the most women can do is fight back just enough to win their husbands’ attention. The daughters adapt to these edicts in varying ways. Whereas Magdalena says, “to hell with being a woman!” and refuses to marry, for instance, Amelia recognizes that “to be born a woman is the worst punishment” but accepts that she will have to marry a man she does not love. And when Adela declares that “my body will be for anyone I please” (and acts accordingly), she is protesting not male domination itself, but merely the marriage codes that mean she cannot choose which man will dominate her.
The play’s subtitle, A Drama of Women in the Villages of Spain, makes it clear that García Lorca hoped to capture women’s predicament in his country more broadly. Bernarda’s tyranny shows not only how male domination harms women, but also how it leads some of them to internalize patriarchal beliefs and impose them on other women. And the male impropriety that García Lorca references throughout the play suggests that patriarchy enables men to act in more violent, irresponsible, and cruel ways than they would otherwise.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Patriarchy and Domination ThemeTracker
Patriarchy and Domination Quotes in The House of Bernarda Alba
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.
PONCIA: No one can talk to you. Can we or can we not be honest with each other?
BERNARDA: We cannot. You are my servant, and I pay you. Nothing more!
MARTIRIO: No. But things have a way of repeating themselves. And I see how it all follows a terrible pattern. And she’ll suffer the same fate as her mother and her grandmother—the two wives of the man who fathered her.
ADELA: I’m thinking that this period of mourning has caught me at the worst possible time.
MAGDALENA: You’ll soon get used to it.
ADELA: (Bursting into angry tears) I will not get used to it! I don't want to be locked up! I don't want my body to dry up like yours! I don't want to waste away and grow old in these rooms. Tomorrow, I’ll put on my green dress and go walking down the street. I want to get out!
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!
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PONCIA: Afterwards, he behaved himself. Instead of doing something else, he took up breeding finches—until he died. Anyway, it’s best for single women like you to know that fifteen days after the wedding a man leaves the bed for the table, then the table for the tavern. And any woman who doesn’t accept it rots away crying in a corner!
PONCIA: Besides, who says you can’t marry him? Your sister Angustias is sickly. She won't survive her first childbirth. She's narrow in the hips, old, and from what I know, I can tell she’ll die. Then Pepe will do what all widowers do in this country: he’ll marry the youngest, the most beautiful, and that will be you. Live on that hope or forget him, whatever you want: just don’t go against the law of God!
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.
(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!
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PRUDENCIA: It’s lovely. Three pearls! In my day, pearls meant tears.
ANGUSTIAS: But things have changed now.
ADELA: I don’t think so. Things always mean the same. Engagement rings are supposed to be diamonds.
PRUDENCIA: It’s more appropriate.
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.
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!
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!
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