History and Fate Theme Analysis

Blood Wedding is a play about the ways in which history repeats itself. As early as the first scene, the Bridegroom’s mother expresses her unwillingness to forget the past, saying that she will never stop talking about how the Felix family murdered her husband and firstborn son. These travesties happened many years ago, but she refuses to move on, evidently worried that the bad blood between her family and their enemies will resurface. Throughout the play, then, she is presented as an anxious old women who can’t overcome her personal history, which ultimately affects her ability to enjoy life in the present. However, her fear of the past—and its tendency to repeat itself—is eventually justified when her son dies at the hands of Leonardo Felix, thus succumbing to the same miserable fate as his father and brother. Strangely enough, this fulfillment of destiny actually releases the old woman from her fears, as she realizes she can finally live her life without having to worry about what will happen to her loved ones. In this sense, fear and anticipation themselves trouble the mother more than the actual reality of losing her son. In fact, with nothing else to lose, she stops obsessing about the cyclical nature of history. In turn, Lorca implies that although tragedy may indeed repeat itself, people ought to live in the moment, since worrying about fate won’t change what happens but will ruin a person’s ability to enjoy the present.

In the play’s opening scene, the Bridegroom finds himself forced to listen to his mother’s longwinded rant about the past, which consequently reveals her deep-rooted anxiety about the future. Even though he’s only told her that he’s going out to the vineyard to cut grapes off the branches for lunch, she subjects him to a wistful speech about his father and brother’s respective deaths, refusing to let him go about his day without stopping to remember that they were killed by the Felix family. “Is that it?” he asks, tired of her unending obsession with the past. “If I lived to be a hundred, I wouldn’t speak of anything else,” she says. Of course, it’s understandable that she’s upset about having lost two of her family members, but her inability to move on has clearly become a burden on her son, who can’t even leave the house without her worrying that he too will be killed. “I don’t like you carrying a knife,” she says. “It’s just that…I wish you wouldn’t go out to the fields.” When she says this, the audience sees that her fixation on the past actually brings itself to bear on the present, as she fears what will happen to her only remaining family member. Unfortunately, this means the Bridegroom can’t even “go out to the fields” without setting her on edge, which illustrates just how much the old woman’s fraught relationship with the past impedes upon both her and her son’s ability to lead normal lives in the present.

Rather ironically, the same obsession with the past that fuels the old woman’s fear is what later emboldens the Bridegroom to put himself in a fatally dangerous situation, showing how dwelling on the past can be harmful in the present. After learning that the Bride has run off with Leonardo Felix, the Bridegroom charges into the woods, surely aware that he’s speeding toward a conflict with one of his family’s enemies and, as such, is brazenly tempting fate. Rather than fearing that history will repeat itself, though, he appears oddly encouraged by the complicated legacy he has inherited from his father and brother. While trying to find the Bride and Leonardo in the dark woods, he turns to a young man helping him and says, “You see this arm? Well it’s not my arm. It’s my brother’s arm and my father’s arm and my whole dead family’s arm.” By saying this, the Bridegroom suggests that his father and brother’s deaths are literally part of him—they are, after all, part of his history, and since his mother refuses to let the past slip away, he has absorbed this history and incorporated it into his identity. In turn, he is especially motivated to track down Leonardo, choosing to let the embattled past between their two families steer him toward danger rather than away from it. As a result, the audience sees that his mother has good reason to fear the repetition of history, though it is, of course, tragically comedic that her obsession with their violent family legacy has contributed to the Bridegroom’s own investment in the feud—an investment that costs him his life and fulfills the destiny his mother has feared all along.

What’s most interesting about the old woman’s relationship with history and fate is that she seems to experience a sense of relief after her worst fear comes true. Having spent the majority of her adult life fretting that history will repeat itself, she is suddenly released from such worries when the Bridegroom dies. While she’s mourning, she tells her neighbor that she will now have no problem being “at peace” in her own home. “All of them are dead now,” she says. “At midnight I’ll sleep, I’ll sleep and not be afraid of a gun or a knife.” Of course, she could be referring to the Felix family when she says, “All of them are dead now,” since Leonardo has also died. But her lack of fear most likely stems from the fact that she no longer has any sons to be killed. “Other mothers will go to their windows, lashed by the rain, to see the face of their sons. Not me,” she says, sounding strangely liberated by her loss. Needless to say, this doesn’t mean she isn’t devastated that her son has been killed, but she’s quite aware that now her life can proceed peacefully. As such, Lorca subtly intimates that the mere possibility of history repeating itself was more torturous to the old woman than the actual reality of her son’s death. Furthermore, considering that her obsession with the past ultimately contributed to her son’s embrace of his own destruction, Lorca conveys that it’s both futile and potentially harmful to fixate on what can’t be changed. Instead of focusing on the merciless regenerations of history, he upholds, people should focus their efforts on conducting happier lives in the present.