Two symbols that I saw emerge in Act 1 Scene 1were flowers and knives and how they represent life and death. I saw Lorca using this almost exclusively with the Bridegroom's Mother. The first reference to flowers comes as she is ranting on about knives, and says that her husband was a beautiful man, with life like a flower in his mouth (pg 6). I thought this was an interesting phrasing of words, so I looked up the phrase 'like a flower in his mouth'. Turns out this comes from a play from an Italian writer called The Man with a Flower in His Mouth, and in this play, a man is reminiscing about his life as he is about to die. This can extend easily back to Blood Wedding because of the Mother's belief that her husband lived this great life worth of reminiscing about and then it was ended by a knife, aka relating to death. I also found Lorca's use of having flowers describe males fascinating. Mother is constantly describing her late husband and son as various kinds of flowers, but then again she wishes that the Bridegroom was female. Females are more generally linked to flowers because of fertility. So by this, I see that the Mother is struggling with female identity in a sense that she wants her world to become more feminine even though she longs for the lost men in her life. As far as knives go, I find this to be interesting as well. The knife represents death obviously, but I also find that after this conversation about the knife in the first lines of the play, Mother resorts to talking about how she wishes that her son was female and she gets excited when talking about lace stockings for her soon to be daughter in law. I find this to suit well with this previous observation about how the mother deals with gender. She seeks talking about the comforts of femininity and overall wishing things in her life to be more female. I even see this relating to the end of the novel when she makes up an argument for letting the Bride not have to die. It is as if Lorca is suggesting something about the female connection to life and death that makes women seek out other women even in lamenting men.
What you looked up about the man with a flower is interesting how it relates to the play. I agree, the mother wishes she had a daughter because men are like the wind and take up weapons.
ReplyDeleteI'm still trying to figure out what representing males as flowers is doing, but I do believe that Lorca is placing some sort of struggle here by making that choice. I myself wrote that this strange symbol may represent his own struggles on gender roles in his life.
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