What Is Blood Wedding About?

Blood Wedding is a Spanish tragedy by Federico García Lorca, published in 1933 as Bodas de sangre. The play revolves around a young man named the Bridegroom, who enters his home and tells his mother about going to their vineyard to cut grapes. His mother is anxious, as she curses the invention of knives and anything that can cut a man’s heart. Blood Wedding is the first play in Lorca’s dramatic trilogy, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba. The protagonists of Blood Wedding are ordinary women confronting their passionate natures.

The play was first performed in Madrid in 1933 and later in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The play is set in rural Spain and is inspired by real-life events in Almeria. The Bridegroom’s mother expresses her unwillingness to forget the past, as she has been overprotective after the deaths of her older son and husband at the hands of the Felix family.

Blood Wedding was adapted into a film in 1981, directed by Carlos Saura, and tells the story through a stylized form of flamenco dance. The play explores themes of love, gender roles, and isolation, with the Bridegroom in love with her first boyfriend, Leonardo. The tragedy is set in a tribal community joined together by violence and blood, and the story revolves around the protagonists’ journey to find love and revenge.

Why is Leonardo the only name in Blood Wedding?

The bride and groom don’t care about their parents’ tribal interests. On their wedding day, Leonardo, a member of the murdering family, sweeps the bride out of the village ritual and rides off with her. The groom chases after them and the two men fight and kill each other. The bride goes back to the village. She says she followed the custom of staying in her caste. She leaves Leonardo to be the tragic hero. He is the only character with a name.

This is rural tragedy. Lorca wanted to make his stage feel constricting and unreal. Characters talk to each other in indirect but simple metaphors. Death is even represented by a beggar woman. Even the moon makes a speech. The problem is that actors don’t want to put in much effort in rural tragedies like Blood Wedding. This makes the plays seem embarrassing. Lorca had a solution for this. He liked to talk about it and call it the duende, an energetic Andalusian spirit that adds energy to art, especially Spanish art. The arrival of the Duende… gives a sense of refreshment and wonder. In Blood Wedding, I think the daemon should appear in the performance.

What is the story of bloody wedding?

What is Blood Wedding about? The play Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca is a Spanish tragedy about love, death, and sexual repression. A bride in a Spanish town is caught between her betrothed and an old lover who has a blood feud with her family.

What is the story of the Blood Wedding?

Blood Wedding is a tragedy about a woman and two men fighting for her love. The Bride loves Leonardo, but their families don’t get along, so Leonardo marries another woman. The Bride is also going to marry another man, even though she doesn’t love him.

What is the moral lesson of the Blood Wedding?

The play is about love and its dangers. Blood Wedding shows that love can be dangerous. The story shows how love can cause heartbreak, bloodshed, and death. Love is a beautiful thing. It can make you happy, help you achieve great things, and make you feel better. Love can also be very dark. Love can make people do bad things. It makes them sick and causes conflict, leading to violence, bloodshed, and death. When love takes hold, it can overwhelm our reasoning. The Bride is an example of this in the story. She decides to tell Leonardo, the man she loves, to stay away from her wedding to the Bridegroom. She also tries to hurry things up to make her feelings for Leonardo go away.

What do flowers symbolize in Blood Wedding?

The orange blossom wreath the Bridegroom gives the Bride on their wedding day symbolizes their community’s beliefs about marriage. Leonardo gets up. Will the bride wear a big flower wreath? It shouldn’t be so big. Something smaller would be better. Did the groom bring the orange blossom for her to wear on her heart?

BRIDE (still in petticoats and with the wreath of flowers on). He brought it. BRIDE. What’s wrong? Why do you want to know if they brought the orange blossom? What do you mean?

What is the play Blood Wedding about?

Plot. Blood Wedding concerns the relationship of the Bride, who is not allowed to marry the man she is in love with (Leonardo) as their families do not get along. Subsequently, Leonardo marries another woman and the Bride is also arranged to be married to another man who her family approve of but whom she doesnt love. Although Leonardo is married already, he confesses to the Bride that he is still in love with her. At first, she rejects him and tells him to be quiet, but then confesses that she still loves him, too. Despite these revelations, she feels pressured to go on with her marriage to the other man (Bridegroom), but on the night of her wedding reception, she elopes with Leonardo. When their disappearance is revealed, the Mother commands that everybody search for them. In the forest that the Bride and Leonardo have fled into, the play begins to become more poetical, dark and surreal. The Moon and Death (the beggar) work together to encourage the Bridegroom and Leonardo to kill one another; Leonardo and the Bridegroom meet and kill each other in a duel. At the end of the play, the Bride returns to the church hoping the Bridegrooms Mother will kill her. There are two versions of the play, one in which the two women reflect upon the deaths of the men and another where the Bride is killed as a sacrifice to restore order and balance. *Themes. Love and passion are at the heart of this play and these universal themes allow students to understand the relationships within the text. The earthy passion present in the voices of Lorcas characters mean that this particular piece is perhaps more suited to an older age group. The themes of honour, religion and familial control are also pertinent, and parallels can be drawn with modern day stories of revenge killings and coercion. *Nature is also an important aspect of this play, not least because of the rural setting and Lorcas own Andalusian village upbringing. The moon, the forest, the earth, orange blossoms and the river all feature heavily in the settings, dialogue and characters. Lastly, one cannot escape the themes of violence and revenge which rear their ugly heads, particularly towards the end of the story.

What inspired Lorca to write Blood Wedding?

The play is dark and deals with loss, death, and transience. It is said that Bodas de Sangre was inspired by a newspaper article about a bride who ran away with her lover on her wedding night. The story is simple. At the beginning of the play, a neighbor tells the mother of a bridegroom that the girl to be married was once in love with a man called Leonardo Felix. The mother is upset because the Felix family killed her son and husband. On the wedding morning, Leonardo tells the bride he still loves her. It’s clear she loves him too. Later that day, it’s revealed that the two have eloped. The groom is driven out into the forest to follow them. The groom’s mother says the wedding party should look for the bride and Leonardo. Meanwhile, three woodcutters appear and tell Leonardo he’ll be caught if the moon shines. The play takes a symbolic turn with the moon foretelling blood will be shed. A beggar appears and says the moon must shine brightly. Death leads the groom to Leonardo, despite warnings from the wedding party. After two screams, the beggar and the moon return. The Groom and Leonardo have killed each other. Some critics think the Mother spares the Bride‘s death so that she must live to experience the pain of her loss. The play explores themes related to the human condition, time, life, and choice and inevitability. These themes are still relevant today. The play could also be seen as a criticism of Spanish society at the time. The gossiping neighbors who discuss the events at the end of the play show how important it was to look good in 20th-century Spain. The characters in Bodas de Sangre aren’t named, except for Leonardo. The characters are called “mother,” “fiance,” “fiancee,” and “neighbor.”

What does the Blood Wedding symbolize?

Blood symbolizes fate and death in this text. It shows that some characters will die. Hush. He wouldn’t drink the water. The water ran black under the trees.

What is the story of Blood Wedding?

A bride in a Spanish town is caught between her betrothed and an old lover who has a blood feud with her family. In a society that values marriage for profit more than love, it explores love, sexuality, and violence through the lens of marriage.

Who is the main character in Blood Wedding?

Blood Wedding is a three-act folk tragedy by Federico García Lorca, published and produced in 1933. Blood Wedding is the first play in Lorca’s trilogy. The other two plays are Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba. The main characters in Blood Wedding are women who face their desires and challenge Spanish society. The bride in Blood Wedding runs away from her wedding with Leonardo, her former suitor. Death leads the frustrated bridegroom to the guilty couple. The men kill each other, and the women are left to mourn.

Kathleen Kuiper revised and updated this article.

What is the overall theme of Blood Wedding?

THEME AND FORM: LORCAS BLOOD WEDDING The alertness of Lorcas dramatic imagination and the decisiveness of his rejection of the theatre of middle-class manners are apparent at least as early as 1930 in the brilliant little Love of Don Perlimplin. His finest work, however, is in the three rural tragedies, and of these Blood Wedding, if less deeply unified than Yerma, less compact than The House of Bernarda Alba, is at once the most original and the most impressive. In summary the play could sound as banal as the newspaper account on which it was based. A girl elopes on her wedding day with a former lover; the husband pursues them, and the two men kill each other. The story has the picturesque sensationalism of a ballad, of the Romancero Gitano. But the strength of Blood Wedding springs less from the treatment of this story in terms of character and plot than from forces which the characters unconsciously embody. Lorcas achievement is to have invented a form, a pattern of speech and ac­ tion, which reveals these forces. In part the form is found in the restrictive code of Spanish village life. In the first scene of the play the suspicion that the Bride had a lover some years before is felt as ominous, and the intensity of the passion of the lovers in the forest springs from the Brides recognition that she is in the grip of a force more savage than her own chastity. In the scene with the Mother at the end, again, it is this virgin pride that gives the speeches of the girl their vehemence. In keeping with this fierce insistence on virginity, and indeed an important reason for it, is the conception of marriage as an alliance between two families. This point is established firmly in the first act: implicitly by the subordination of the Bridegroom to his Mother and of the Bride to her Father—the economy of characters is typical of Lorca—ex­ plicitly by the formality of the scene in which the marriage is ar­ ranged. Such a marriage, it is taken for granted, can never be broken, since infidelity would outrage not only honour but the institution of property which society has succeeded in consecrating. The strength of this convention of sexual ethics, and hence the strength of the pas­ sions needed to disrupt it, is brought sharply into focus before the wedding by the girls retort to Leonardo: 431 432 Modern Drama February I have my pride. And thats why Im getting married. Ill lock myself in with my husband and then Ill have to love him above everyone else. Leonardo, significantly, is the one character named in the play: the interloper, the apparently free individual whose abduction of the Bride challenges the law by which society has striven to tame the sexual energy that threatens its stability. In Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba this energy beats against a rigid obstacle: the indifference of Yermas husband (but­ tressed by the moral code that binds her to him), the social conven­ tions embodied in Bernardas tyranny over her daughters. Honour and destiny, the two concepts basic to Spanish drama, are in conflict. So also in Blood Wedding-, but here the convention of honour goes into action through the vendetta between the Bridegrooms family and Leonardos which the elopement instantly reopens. The essential theme of the play, in short, is the opposition between death and life. For it is more than personal desire that flings the Bride and Leonardo together. There is no affection; and Leonardos freedom to leave the wife and child who check, and so intensify, his passion is only apparent. In reality he, no less than the Bride, is carried by a force beyond his control: the force that rides in the blood of the stallion smashing at the wall of Bernardas house, the force that drives the mountain spring where the washerwomen of Yerma sing of genera­ tion. In its impersonal strength no less than in its forward thrust, the thrust that gives the plays their momentum, sexual energy…

Why is Blood Wedding a tragedy?

Blood Wedding is a tragedy about a woman and two men fighting for her love. The Bride loves Leonardo, but their families don’t get along, so Leonardo marries another woman. The Bride is also going to marry another man, even though she doesn’t love him.