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Essay / The relationship between the setting and the Blood Wedding theme
Many modern playwrights seek to connect contemporary issues with ancient themes by updating the mythical stories in a completely modern setting. With Blood Wedding, Federico Garcia Lorca seeks to explore this idea of connectivity through an alternative route in which the lush Andalusian wine region he knew so well is transformed into a more austere landscape more suited to the symbolic interpretation of mythical themes exhibited through the incorporation of stylized dramatic scenes. devices that include singing and chanting, poetry recitation, and non-realistic set design. Blood Wedding makes manifest the definition of setting as being more than just a geographical location and a finite time by revealing it as a broader term in which political, sociological and economic dimensions are also at play. Andalusia thus becomes a setting of Blood Wedding invested with the literal reality of its women's physical and emotional isolation within the historical context of contemporary life in the 1930s, while situating a setting as a conceptual idea in which symbols become essential to understanding the themes the most important. contributing to the play's mythic sense of timeless tragedy. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayThe setting may be a symbolic synthesis of social relationships that took place over long periods of time, where the cause and the This effect creates generational conflicts and disagreements that break out. in the climax as the centerpiece of a narrative thrust and this sense of setting in Blood Wedding becomes personified in the figure of the groom's mother. The cemetery thus becomes a symbol of these generational conflicts, beyond simply the final resting place of one's diminishing loved ones. When the mother states early on that she “can't leave her father and brother here alone,” it is more than just a melancholy memory of a personal loss. The mother's inability to let go of the deaths of her husband and son becomes an inability to let go of the impact of a family feud rooted in the very history of the soil. The enormity of the impact of time and place is summed up in a simple but intense response to complaints about his obsessive mourning: "If I lived to be a hundred years old, I couldn't talk about anything else." » Here is a concrete example of how the context can become more figurative than literal as the mother herself assumes the aspect of a generational seed of conflict. As long as she doesn't talk about anything, the long history of feudal conflicts between families promises to spread like a virus to anyone who speaks to her. Even – perhaps especially – his own son. It is this son who complains about his obsession with loss and the inherent meaning of this loss which points out those responsible. The mother has created for her son a portrait of the small Andalusian region where he lives, full of death, regret, violence, revenge and blood. This portrait is one he must either embrace or rebel against. The symbolism that this aspect of the setting had on him is twofold: the embrace against which he ultimately rebels. A literal awareness of how the setting facilitates an understanding of the play's themes is provided by the event on which the plot turns: a traditional Andalusian arranged marriage. where the expectations of society enjoy greater status than the desires of the individual. To the mother's complaints concerning "the distance at which these people live", comes the son's almost mechanical reply: "but their land is good". Literally, the bride is an agentappropriate through geographic isolation, but symbolically it represents generational expectations and conventions dating back to an unknown period of time. This isolation of the bride allows us to define her as a symbol. Her purity is represented by language as "a four-hour journey" to arrive at "the dry plains" where she waits. When the father of the bride joins this conversation, the topic remains firmly on the table; rather than talking about the individual desire of his daughter or her fiancé, the subject sticks to the value of the land. The context here directly translates the upcoming nuptials of a union of two individuals in love into an economic transaction undertaken for the benefit of the collective entity of those who have an interest in the land. The depiction of the bride as both physically and emotionally distant carries the implicit assumption of intact virginity, which sets the stage for the play's thematic concerns with fertility, but also reinforces its importance as a unit transactional in the ritual continuity of societal conventions. The conservatism of decidedly Catholic Spanish life is illustrated by descriptive images in which the "hard white material covers the walls" of "the interior of the cave where the Bride lives." Such imagery situates the symbolic expectation of women in this culture to be chaste until marriage, and then to reproduce machines thereafter. The individual reproduction of fertile wives plays a determining role in the reproduction of generational conflicts that pit families against each other. The setting is intensely linked to the play's highly symbolic treatment of its thematic connection between human fertility and more mythical conceptualizations of fertility. While the bride has clearly been set in the context of a dry, walled-up cave waiting to be explored, the groom is sexually energized by the symbolism of providing the irrigation necessary to birth new life from this undiscovered earth. sown. The economic subsistence of the Andalusians depends on the fertility of the vines and this is why the father's observation that "Each bunch of grapes is like a heap of silver" has both a literal and symbolic meaning that cannot be fully explained. understood only by understanding the historical context of the setting of the piece. These grapes worth their weight in silver are rich with connotations of abundance and the vital importance of maintaining the fertility of the land on which they have grown for centuries. Furthermore, the comparison can also be extended to emphasize the vital importance of one's daughter's fertility in maintaining the balance of economic power with her marriage to the groom. Once again, the primordial and essential quality of generational conflict manifests itself through symbolic association with the literal qualities of status offered by the land. This meaning is underlined by the bride's assertion that her mother came from a "fertile country." Full of water” which also refers to the symbolism of the groom being the vessel that will water the dry plains of his bride. With the move away from the strictly realistic setting of the first two acts into the forest, the full mythical dimension and potential inherent in a play's setting comes to fruition as the woods take on the traditional dramatic role of a place where rules and conventions of society collapse and are called into question. Once the action of the play moves into the forest, the traditional narrative structures of narrative dialogue are replaced by more figurative means of storytelling. The introduction of the woodcutters connects the modernist sensibility of the political dimension of The Bloody Wedding to the Greek chorus of ancient tragedy..