Yerma

Yerma ('Barren') is a tragic play by the Spanish playwright and poet Federico García Lorca. It was written in 1934, and first performed the same year.

Summary

The play tells the story of a childless woman living in rural Spain. Her desperate desire for motherhood becomes an obsession that eventually drives her to commit a horrific crime. This desperation is produced by the social norms of her culture, and the work functions as a critique of those norms.

Yerma is one of the three tragic plays which form Lorca's famous 'Rural trilogy'. The others being Bodas de sangre ('Blood Wedding') and La casa de Bernarda Alba ('The House of Bernarda Alba'). The trilogy similarly emphasise the submissive position of women who desire freedom in a traditional society which denies them social or sexual equality.

Yerma deals with the themes of isolation, passion and frustration, but also the underlying theme of nature, marriage, jealousy and friendship. Social conventions of the period also play a large part in the play's plot. It is an allegory of the Spanish Civil War of the time, and as a Republican Lorca would have identified with oppression, another theme.

Yerma kills her husband in the end because he is a frugal, economically driven man who has no desire to have children. For him, children are a costly transaction. The ending where she kills him is ironic however because she kills him at "ermita" which is a religious place with the possibility of fertility.