Lorca: Yerma

One of Lorca’s best known plays tells the story of a young peasant wife in rural Spain whose sole conscious desire is to embody what she regards as the natural, moral and social laws governing her life as a woman in motherhood. The tragedy of Yerma, which literally means ‘barren’, in this powerful and emotive drama, is that she remains childless and so is denied the dignity and the emotional fulfilment which traditionally only the role of mother could bring. The frustration of Yerma’s maternal instinct, the only acceptable channel for her sexuality in her repressive society, leads her through humiliation and despair to an erosion of her whole personality which culminates at the end of the play in violence and death.It is not only the strong feminist theme that accounts for the play’s great popular appeal today. With the highly charged emotion are blended poetic imagery and lyricism which haunt the imagination of modern audiences as much as those of fifty years ago when Lorca was murdered.