Psychological Effects from Blood Wedding

Life can sometimes be a convoluted experience; life sometimes gets tricky. Since the cycle of life is a universal experience, everyone must encounter these convolutions, or trouble spots, every now and then. Literature, since it addresses the cycle of life, must therefore touch upon these difficult experiences. In Federico García Lorca’s play, Blood Wedding, there is an innumerable amount of evidence of rough times; the entire play centers around a feud between two families. At the end of the play, the mother must come to terms with the death of the Bridegroom, her son, on top of the death of her other son, as well as her husband. The bride must also cope with the fact that it is her fault that the Bridegroom and Leonardo, her husband and lover, respectively, have both passed away. Thus, by analyzing Lorca’s Blood Wedding one can observe the psychological disturbances faced by the Mother and the Bride at the end of the play. First, one can observe the psychological turmoil in Blood Wedding through the character of the mother. The mother in this play is an extremely eccentric woman. Right from the beginning, the reader is struck with a troubling quote from the mother. She states, “Knives, knives. Cursed be all knives, and the scoundrel who invented them” (Lorca 34). Thus, immediately the mother is expressing her anxiety and phobia directed towards knives. The reader discovers that this fear stems from the death of the Mother’s son, and her husband. She then states If I lived to be a hundred I’d talk of nothing else. First your father; to me he smelled like a carnation and I had him for barely three years. Then your brother. Oh, is it right - how can it be - that a small thing like a knife or a pistol can finish off a man - a bull of a man? No, I’ll never be quiet. The months pass and the hopelessness of it stings in my eyes and even to the roots of my hair (Lorca 35).
Thus, the mother is undoubtedly severely damaged by the death of her son and her husband,