Characters and Themes in The House of Bernarda Alba
Characters in *The House of Bernarda Alba*
Lorca presents characters in *The House of Bernarda Alba* mainly through their interactions. These include main, secondary, and even unseen or alluded-to characters. The names of the characters are symbolic; for example, Bernarda means “hard,” signifying anxiety and sadness; Angustias means “anguish”; and Alba means “dawn-white” (purity). The characters are also taken from reality and the terms of commonality, which Lorca uses in the play.
Main Characters
- Bernarda: (60 years old) She is the main cause of the drama, adopting a male role (she knows what she says and how she says it, what others say, and more of what they say). She is authoritarian, dominant, aggressive, classist, hypocritical, hated, timid, and obsessed with cleanliness. She represents tyranny and the repression of liberty. She holds traditional values (bereavement, sexist and macho education). She has a classist attitude. She is cold and cutting with everyone, not maintaining any friendly relationship. She exercises a frozen dictatorship from the beginning, blind and proud, and fears what others will say.
- Poncia: (60 years old) She shares traditional morals with Bernarda and her preoccupation with what others will say and honor. She is a servant and is spiteful and hypocritical with Bernarda; she hates her but identifies with her.
- Adela: The protagonist of the drama, she symbolizes rebellion against Bernarda’s dictatorship because she does not resign herself to unhappiness. She represents amorous passion, the desire for freedom, and instinct. She is not subject to the oppressive tyranny of her mother and defends her right to be sexually free. She puts love before honor and decency. She is willing to assume the consequences of the affair. Her rebellion leads to her suicide when she believes that Bernarda killed Pepe, thus achieving her freedom.
Secondary Characters
- Angustias: The oldest, ugliest, and richest; with her money, she has the possibility of marrying Pepe.
- Amelia: Her submission is characterized by fear of Bernarda.
- Magdalena: She has the best feelings, she sees well and is inclined to resignation, that’s why she defends Adela.
- Martirio: She embodies resentment and envy, tortured by a childhood trauma and repressed sexual desire.
- María Josefa: (80 years old) She is both crazy and lucid at the same time, locked up by Bernarda for fear of what she will say. She wants to be happy and get married.
- Pepe el Romano: (25 years old) He is the boyfriend of Angustias, maintains relations with Adela, and is pursued by Martirio.
Major and Secondary Themes
The central theme of the play is the opposition between tyranny and freedom, repression by authoritarian morality, and the yearning for freedom. Repression is represented by Bernarda, who is tyrannical, a castrator of illusions, and who denies her daughters and her mother the freedom to decide what to do with their lives. The maids, grandmother, and daughters are enslaved persons. Adela and Maria Josefa try to rebel and confront her domain. The others accept it with resignation.
Lorca also denounced the differences between men and women and the marginalization of women. The woman is subjected to the male. Women are always alone, sexually repressed, and unhappy, looking for a male, with the need to love, as it is prohibited by Bernarda; therefore, it appears only as allusions to stories occurring offstage or own experiences also occurred offstage.
Honor, one of the themes, is very important to Bernarda, who acts guided by conventional principles which lead her to want to have a clean and spotless social image, and concern for others’ opinions, gossip, and wanting to pretend it is not. These three characteristics of Bernarda condemn her to be hypocritical, to have the need to pretend. Although it is the only other characters since the show also.
The book also contains a critique of social injustice. It poses a social hierarchy in which each group accepted her condition without resigning. For example, poverty: Bernarda -> Poncia -> Maid -> Beggar. The relationships of the characters are dominated by hatred and envy, and that is another issue in *The House of Bernarda Alba*; it is represented among classes and between the characters of the same: Maids (hatred) -> Bernarda’s daughters (hatred) -> Bernarda.