The play, Blood Wedding, by Federico Garcia Lorca is a tale of passion. However, there is a darker theme that is even more prevalent - violence. As with many tragedies, this story is plagued by loss and destruction. Characters die and hearts are broken. One might ask, To what end? Violence is a device that grips the audience’s hearts and emotionally connects them to the text. To implement the theme throughout the text, Lorca uses symbolism, sub-themes such as honor and death, as well as indirect descriptions of explicit violence taking place.
In the first scene of Act One, a man is on his way to work in the vineyard when he states, Give me the knife to his mother (3). This statement then causes the mother to become hysterical to the point where she says, The knife, the knife Damn all of them and the scoundrel who invented them (3). The knife is the main symbol of violence in the play. By using an expletive and the word scoundrel,” Lorca emphasizes how the mother feels about violence as well as how important the symbol is. The reason as to why the mother dislikes the knife is the fact that she lost her husband and son to a knife in the hands of a Felix. By giving the background information of a family beset by violence, Lorca foreshadows the sorrow to come.
In the second scene of Act Two, the wedding is occurring. It is at this point that the internal conflict of the bride is shown. The bride is revealed as being distraught when the first girl asks, Who did you give the first pin to? Me or her? and the bride responds, (uneasy, with a great sense of inner conflict) I don't know (39). The second example of the bride’s emotional stress comes when the bridegroom embraces her from behind and she is uncharacteristically startled. The bride is obviously in a state of unrest in this scene as she cannot decide for herself if she wants to marry the bridegroom or run away with Leonardo. Eventually, she chooses the latter. This choice is ve...