The language in Federico Garcia Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba carries a criticism of Christianity alluding that the merits of Christianity have decreased to a stage where they no longer serve humankind at all.
Federico García Lorca is the most commonly recognized writer of the 20th century. In his poetry and plays, Lorca combined lyric and dramatic elements with a sense of tragedy and ritual. He mixed a feeling of popular rhythms and songs, especially those of Andalusian gypsy or flamenco origin, with childhood memories, the mysterious, the absurd, and the irrational. His poetry and drama address the tensions in themes of hate and desire, sex and motherhood, and death and revenge. The power and richness of Lorca’s works place him among the most outstanding figures of world literature. Lorca was considered to be great in experimenting with poetic and dramatic forms. He was influenced by the diversity of new creative forms that started to appear rapidly when he lived. The surrealism term is usually related to various works of Lorca which refer to a particular period of literary history. But it is also often used to illustrate a variety of techniques that seek to express the human subconscious. Lorca’s masterpiece “The House of Bernarda Alba” contains a large number of symbols due to surrealism. Lorca mentioned many aspects and objects that refer to the double meaning of their definition in both conscious and unconscious manner. The unconscious double meaning of the language words is represented by archetypes. The term was introduced by a psychologist, Carl G. Jung. The analysis of language structure and some examples will provide the understanding and reasons which will attempt to explain some of the unconscious meanings and original considerations of Federico Lorca.
The research will put efforts to carry out the analysis of Lorca’s language and archetypes used in “The House of Bernarda Alba” and will find out the impact of language used on Christianity. The results of the work should also be considered important as it will try to explain the society in “The House of Bernarda Alba”, and also Lorca’s point of view.
Jung stated that an archetype represents an inherited point of view about the surrounding world which originates from the experiences of the community and is a part of a person’s personality. The archetype extremely relates to the community’s subconsciousness. The play includes a lot of archetypes. For instance, some of them are represented by the meaning of different colors and the message that these colors deliver to the reader. White color is usually applied to express the absence of any color at all or can express innocence and aspiration for purification. Considering this it could be stated that on the contrary black color expresses a deficiency of any color and emptiness. Accordingly to Christian customs black color symbolizes sorrow, grief and also may express death. The Christian tradition of wearing black to funerals can also mean sorrow or mourning. In this respect it also symbolizes death. The play scenes represent the contradiction in color symbols and are related to the purpose of hiding sin behind first of all the color and only then the walls of the house. The symbols that in their meaning represent the church can be met during the whole of the play. But the meaning that the author put in these symbols represents Christian religion in a bad light. The household itself indicates the contradiction of the church. The feelings of Bernarda and her piety resulted in a tragedy. The language of Lorca symbols makes a reader feel that Christianity was one of the main causes of the tragedy. With the help of language techniques, Lorca delivers a message that Christianity does not consist only of certain traditions and customs like the church did. The meaning of Christianity according to Lorca’s language is that it should bring liberty to a person instead of bringing restrictions and for sure should bring a person a certain joy of perfecting his life. The impact caused by the play on the Christian religion can be reasoned by the society Lorca lived in and that social consciousness made him deliver a message even with the help of language techniques that refer to the person’s inner world.