Analysis of "Blood Wedding"

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Federico Garcia Lorca's three plays, "Blood Wedding," "Yerma," and "The House of Bernarda Alba" share many symbolisms. Lorca (Short Biography) wrote about many subjects and objects that often have an unconscious double meaning. These unconscious symbols are known as archetypes, developed by the psychologist, Carl G. Jung. This paper will analyze these symbols using Jung's theory of the archetype. By doing so, the analysis will better explain some of the unconscious meaning and original thoughts behind Lorca's symbols. This is important because a detailed reading will allow the reader to clearly understand each symbol and why it is important to the society in the play, and to Lorca's society.

To begin, Jung explains that an archetype is an inherited idea or thought derived from the experiences of the society and present in the unconscious of the individual. The archetype depends heavily on the collective unconscious. The unconscious is merely a place of thought that retains all forgotten and suppressed information. The collective thinking is important because this part of the unconscious does not focus on the individual. It is universal and has elements that are basically the same everywhere and in every person. Jung suggests, "The collective unconscious, so far as we know, is self-identical in all Western men and thus constitutes a psychic foundation, superpersonal its nature, that is present in every one of us" (53).

Therefore, when dealing with the archetype, we are dealing with ancient images impressed upon the mind. The archetype expresses the primitive view of the world spoken in myths and fables. In these situations, we are dealing with the molded form of the unconscious, images about the world that have been handed ...

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...for each other. Even Yerma realized that her desire to have a child was so strong that it was eating away at her soul. These people refused to live inside their Personas, embraced their dark side and developed a personality outside of society.

As we have seen, the archetypes within all of the plays can dramatically change any basic analysis. By understanding the nature of a symbol and how a person's conscious can reflect his unconscious thinking, it is therefore possible to understand the actions of that person. The basic symbolic analysis does not do justice to the complex characters of Lorca's plays. It is necessary to dig deeper and analyze not only the symbols but also the original, prehistoric concepts behind each symbols. Man had to have had a foundation for identifying these symbols, and the archetypal analysis explains this foundation.

By:Akbar Mirzaee

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