Feminism in Federico Garcia Lorca’s Stage Dramas

Abstract

This study explores feminism in Federico Garcia Lorca’s Stage dramas. Federico Garcia Lorca dramatizes the stultifying and sexually repressive life of women in provincial Spain in a rural trilogy formed by his three most famous plays, Blood Wedding (1933), Yerma (1934), and The House of Bernada Alba (1936). The purpose of this research is to place Lorca’s major plays with female protagonists Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernada Alba within the context of the feminist discourse of these works. Some critics have suggested that Lorca’s standpoint as a homosexual man in a strong masculine-biased society positioned him to understand women’s condition and to empathize with it, especially his female characters. My interest here to show how certain discourses of his day and how some of his women characters reflect the problems of real Spanish women confronted depicted by a writer who drew inspiration consciously and unconsciously from his surroundings, his vast reading, his musical knowledge and talent, and his myriad friends and acquaintances.