VI - Beyond the Outer Walls: Transvestite Masquerade and Transcendent Escape in La casa de Bernarda Alba

Summary

Subversive acts

The case of Yerma demonstrates that in a superficially conventional drama we can identify profoundly dissident disturbances in the dominant social, cultural and moral order. Even looking at the more orthodox of Yerma's concerns, to have a ‘child’ (or rather to stabilise and locate her Self psychically and spiritually), we are confronted by a radical solution that leaves Juan dead. Similar to the conventional views of Yerma's plight, La casa de Bernarda Alba appears to address some grittily real social issues by staging the tragic results of denied physical passions. But, in practice, the work shakes with the tremors of subversive practices unsettling the edifice of subjective identity and simmers with the tension of metaphysical longing.

In 1935, referring to an unknown ‘acto completamente subversivo’ on which he had just finished working, García Lorca declares that this new work has ‘un tema social, mezclado de religioso, en el que irrumpe mi angustia constante del más allá’ (OC VI: 720). We do not know the work García Lorca is referring to in this description, but given the date, we could speculate that he was speaking about the Comedia sin título. This experimental piece could easily be considered subversive. But we also know that in the same year, García Lorca was working on several other projects, among which we find a tentative venture titled Las hijas de Loth or alternatively La destrucción de Sodoma. Many have seen this planned work as a forerunner of La casa de Bernarda Alba. I don't believe we can identify with any certainty the drama the poet was referring to as ‘subversivo’. The description of a play with a ‘social theme’, religious element and preoccupation with ‘el más allá’ is broad enough, and appropriate enough, to assign to almost any of García Lorca's theatre pieces. Who could not detect a social theme in any number of the poet's dramas?