80 pages • 2 hours read
Blood Wedding
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Symbols & Motifs
Blood
Blood reflects the violent outpouring of the human spirit in Blood Wedding, as well as passions which unsettle the human heart. Blood stands for family and becomes a torment: The Mother’s fear for her own blood, her son, is constantly on her mind. Blood stands for unification: The Bridegroom and the Bride, through their marriage, unite their blood. Instead of representing passion, blood symbolizes death, the violence that sweeps across the Andalusian countryside.
Leonardo is characterized by blood. His familial identity precludes the Mother from sympathizing with him. The Bride’s Father agrees that his “blood’s no good” (38). The Woodcutters recognize that Leonardo and the Bride, ruled by their passion, have little control over their fates: “When the blood chooses a path it must be followed” (49). The way Leonardo wears down his horse and destroys the wedding is attributed to his hot-bloodedness and inability to practice self-control. Blood stands for repressed desire, its power and ability to upend carefully cultivated human society.
The original title of Blood Wedding in Spanish is Bodas de sangre. Wedding is pluralized, suggesting the work depicts Weddings of Blood. It is possible that the weddings include the Bride and Bridegroom, who are wedded in the conventional manner, or the Bride and Leonardo, who are wedded in desire—or possibly Leonardo and the Bridegroom, who are coupled at the play’s conclusion, wedded in their act of consummating the blood feud.
Knives
The knife is a significant symbol, particularly to the Mother, to whom it represents the ever-looming threat of violent death. Lorca begins and ends his play by tying a knife and the Bridegroom together; it is in its capacity as life-taker that the knife appears most prominently.
By continually asserting the danger of knives, yet also pointing to how small and petty they are, the Mother strips knives of overt danger; the true threat exists in the human spirit’s latent violence. A knife never actually appears in a scene; their presence infuse the narrative with an anticipatory threat. The mother focuses on the latency of danger. Knives signify the human capacity for inflicting violence, the consequences of using them violently, and the ever-present fear such violence inspires in the community.
Water
Water is the life-giving liquid that sustains the agricultural community. It represents the conventional life that comes with successful crops: a wife, a home, children, and the fecundity of the land. The river is mentioned often in the prothalamia preceding the wedding. Its invocation is a plea to the universe to perpetuate the agricultural way of living.
In the context of the Bride and Leonardo, whose lives are crushed by conventional culture, water takes on darker and myriad meaning. After Leonardo and the Bride elope, the Father upends water’s life-giving connotations: He suggests that the Bride has drowned herself. Water symbolizes unattainable happiness: The Moon and the Beggar Woman resolve to stop the Bride and Leonardo from reaching the river, from achieving joy. Water represents depth of character. The Bride compares both the Bridegroom and Leonardo to water. While the Bridegroom is “a little boy of cold water,” Leonardo is “a dark big river” (69).
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By Federico García Lorca
