Subverted gender, destabilised identity : how Love transcends desire in the queer tragedies of Federico García Lorca

Abstract

This thesis attempts to demonstrate the centrality of the dialectical tension between physical desire and metaphysical Love in the theatre works of Federico García Lorca. The study is informed by contemporary queer theory’s critique of gender and identity. It is structured around the consideration of six of the poet’s theatre texts in the light of the proposition of the key Love/desire opposition, while examining the construction of gender as the basis of subjective identity in these dramas. It begins with a review of the most substantial of García Lorca’s early attempts at writing theatre, the ‘religious tragedy’ Cristo, and finds therein an explicit proposal of the poet’s principal theme of the supremacy of Love over desire. García Lorca’s first commercial success, Mariana Pineda, is interpreted as a development of the Love/desire tension, with an emphasis on transcendence of physical and historicised existence. The following chapter on Amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín explores the curious figure of the emasculated Perlimplín and his effort to give the object of his love, Belisa, a soul. A meditation on the fragmentary and challenging El público yields a vivid panorama of identity in crisis at the level of gender, and a paradigmatic Lorcan sacrifice of self for Love. The ostensibly conventional tragedy of Yerma is then reassessed as a masculinising quest for an inner dimension to existence.