‘Blood Wedding’: A Tragedy of Honour and Desire
A review of ‘Blood Wedding’, by Federico García Lorca; 1933.
In many ways, it is a story has been told before. A young woman due to be married loves another, whom she cannot marry. Here, the bride (called The Bride) is to be married to the groom (called The Groom). His mother (called The Mother) has lost her husband and elder son to violence. So her family is scarred by history. But they persist in attempting to build a future.
The trouble is, The Bride wants to be with Leonardo. And Leonardo is already married. And he has a child. They used to be in love, and there is something unfinished about their bond. There is a wound that refuses to close. Leonardo belongs to the family that killed The Groom’s father and brother. His very presence is a warning, a dark omen that looms large throughout the play. It can only end in tears.
The trouble is, The Bride wants to be with Leonardo. And Leonardo is already married. And he has a child.
So this is not a love story. It is more a story about the forces that too great for us to resist. The characters speak of passion, duty and blood, as though they were laws of nature. Lorca is not interested in psychology. He does not ask why, for instance, Leonardo and The Bride act as they do. Nor does he give them excuses. Instead, he presents their fates as set down long before their birth, driving towards their fulfilment with the same certainty as the sun’s daily rising over the hills of southern Spain.
There is also the question of honour: of the law that rules the world of the play. A man’s duty is to defend his name, his family and his land. A woman’s is to marry, bear children, and be faithful. To betray one’s spouse or spouse-to-be is also to outrage the order of things. The wedding is not just a ceremony, not a contract, but a covenant: an agreement with something divine. The moment it is broken, death is the only possible end.
There is also the question of honour: of the law that rules the world of the play.
Lorca fills the play with images of nature — horse hooves pounding the earth, knives gleaming like stars, the scent of orange blossoms on the wind. These are not mere decorative flourishes. They are the language of fate. The world of Blood Wedding is both violent and beautiful, for death comes before renewal, just as winter comes before spring.
If there is a villain, for Lorca, it is the system of values that created such a mess. No one—not Leonardo, not The Bride, not The Groom—are to blame for what unfolds. Even those who perpetuate the violence between their families are not to blame. They are bound by forces larger than themselves — honour, passion, social expectation — just as Oedipus or Antigone are.
If there is a villain, for Lorca, it is the system of values that created such a mess.
And this points to the role of myth in Lorca’s play, which has the fatalism of Greek tragedy. A wedding is a ritual, and thus myth embodied: it is a public, formalised, repeated enactment of the myth (in the sense that Leszek Kołakowski uses it, as a meaning-making structure) that love is more than mere desire and companionship. Marriage transforms love into something binding, sacrificial and sanctified. (Do not think, by the way, that this is to dismiss love, or marriage or myth.) The Bride takes on archetypal form, as a captive of her social role and a wild woman who will be tamed. Like Helen of Troy, she breaks the rules of the social order and violence issues as a result.
Thus Lorca shows how the myths that sustain a society and give meaning to individuals entail the sacrifice of those who breach them. Here and elsewhere, he depicts characters who collide with the myths of their world — love, honour, fate, duty — and are destroyed for it. The refusal to participate in the ritual, which is the means by which myths are upheld, sets off the sacrificial mechanism, and death becomes inevitable. The disquieting suggestion Lorca makes is that in order for myths to provide meaning, order and identity they must be merciless to those who do not—or cannot—accept them.
Thus Lorca shows how the myths that sustain a society and give meaning to individuals entail the sacrifice of the people who breach them.
This was René Girard’s great insight: that societies are intrinsically violent and project their violence onto a scapegoat—someone who transgresses social norms. This has historically been dressed up in sacred terms. Girard argued that Christ revealed and dismantled this mechanism by allowing himself to be killed despite his innocence, thus undermining the logic of sacred violence. But in Lorca’s Spain, Christ is absent in this Girardian sense. His plays unfold in a world where the scapegoat mechanism is still intact and there is no redemptive figure to expose or stop it.
This short play, simply told, says something profound about the lives that are crushed beneath the weight of the myths that society requires. That might not be to your taste, reader, but for Lorca, it is true.
