The House of Bernarda Alba Study Guide

Federico García Lorca was born to a wealthy landowning family in Andalusia (southern Spain). Raised between the city of Granada and the small towns of Fuente Vaqueros and Valderrubio/Asquerosa (where this play is set), Lorca took an interest in the piano and music composition as an adolescent. One of his university professors convinced him to study law and philosophy in Madrid, where he began writing and befriended a generation of prominent artists, including luminaries like the filmmaker Luis Buñuel and the painter Salvador Dalí. In fact, García Lorca was reportedly in love with Dalí; homosexuality and unfulfillable desire were constant themes in his work. The 1928 poetry collection Gypsy Ballads won García Lorca international recognition for his depiction of rural Andalusian life. He spent the following year at Columbia University in New York, which shaped his thinking about capitalism and modern life. He returned to Spain to write plays and direct a theater company called La Barraca, which traveled around the Spanish countryside, performing classic plays. But in July 1936, fascists in the Spanish military launched a coup against the democratically-elected government and took control of several of the country’s cities, including Granada, where García Lorca lived. The following month, at just 38 years old, he was arrested and executed as part of the nationalists’ social cleansing campaign. He is often seen as a martyr in Spain today, and his body still has never been found.

The House of Bernarda Alba was written in the days leading up to the breakout of the Spanish Civil War, as deep tensions rooted in the country’s longstanding political and social divisions exploded into armed conflict. In the years after World War I, Spain was still largely agricultural, with the Catholic church and a powerful landowning class dominating the poor, rural majority. Attempts to restrain the king’s power and democratize the country had long been popular but unsuccessful, until King Alfonso XIII agreed to call elections in 1931. Left-wing parties won, established the government known as the Second Spanish Republic, and instituted many pro-worker and anti-clerical policies. Right-wing opposition to the new government grew, supported by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Catholic church. Conservatives governed from 1933 to 1936, when left-wing parties again won the election, and the streets began erupting into violence. Conservatives in the military united to launch a coup against the government in July. They managed to take some cities, including Seville and Granada, García Lorca’s hometown, where they promptly murdered him. But most of the country remained under the government’s control. It would take three years of fighting, from 1936 to 1939, for the conservative nationalists to conquer the whole country and establish a fascist military dictatorship under the rule of General Francisco Franco. Not only did the nationalists kill hundreds of thousands of artists, dissidents, and other “enemies of the state” during and after the war—including García Lorca—but from 1939 to 1975, the Franco dictatorship also heavily censored artistic expression of all kinds and forcibly imposed the same conservative, patriarchal Catholic values that García Lorca critiques in this play on the whole Spanish population. The remarkable coincidence that The House of Bernarda Alba was perhaps the last major Spanish literary work published before the war, combined with the famous circumstances surrounding García Lorca’s death, help explain the play’s enduring popularity today.

García Lorca is best known today for this play, along with Blood Wedding and Yerma. These three works are often collectively labeled the “Rural Trilogy” due to their similar themes and settings. García Lorca’s other principal works are poetry collections: Gypsy Ballads, which first launched him to international fame; Poet in New York, which focused on his time at Columbia University in 1929 and 1930; and the Sonnets of Dark Love, which he wrote for the last man he loved before his death. García Lorca’s major contemporaries and influences in the Generation of ‘27 include Rafael Alberti, who also explored Spanish folkloric traditions through works like Marinero en tierra; Jorge Guillén, who experimented with the limits of language in his multivolume collection Cántico; and the surrealist-influenced Vicente Aleixandre, who won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Literature for works like La destrucción o el amor and Historia del corazón. The House of Bernarda Alba is still frequently performed today and has been extensively adapted for the stage and screen all around the world. Some of the most notable adaptations include the ballet Las Desenamoradas, the German opera Bernarda Albas Haus, and the off-Broadway musical Bernarda Alba.