By Amechi N. Akwanya
Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding is considered by some to be one of the representative dramas of modernism. Reading it, however, with an eye on the real event that is said to have inspired it or the features of the cultural world it arises from, as some of the readers have tried to do leaves it hanging and unexplained in some of its phases. The work is read in what follows as a drama of consciousness in which we are looking at a specific dimension of the functioning of consciousness, namely the making of symbols. This is a need related to the creation of a centre of orientation. This need is ever present, but especially in the face of traumatic and inchoate experiences. Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms provides the tools applied here for the purpose of tracking the adjustments occurring in the consciousness of the Mother who is the chief sufferer of the traumas of this play, and who survives them in more than a physical way.