This dissertation examines the conflictive poetics of Federico Garcia Lorca’s drama Doña Rosita la soltera o El lenguaje de las flores. Poema granadino del novecientos, dividido en varios jardines, con escenas de canto y baile (Doña Rosita the Spinster or The Language of Flowers. A Poem of Turn-of-the-Century Granada, Divided into Various Gardens with Scenes of Song and Dance), which premiered in 1935, less than a year before his early death. The play brings into confrontation different, essential, even contradictory poetic and theatrical elements present in his work from his very first writings. Closely examining primary and secondary sources, including a variety of Lorca’s manuscript versions and the staging of Doña Rosita in Spain in 1935 and thereafter, my dissertation proposes a new approach to Lorca’s theater.
Doña Rosita reveals one of the main characteristics of all of Lorca’s work: his innate tendency to deal with the unity of contraries. The complexity of Lorca’s play is revealed in comments by the playwright and by reviewers of its earliest performances. While some (Doménec Guansé, Andreu Artis, Antonio Espina) applauded Doña Rosita as a well-structured work that reflected Lorca’s maturity
as a writer, others (for example, the literary critic Ignasi Agustí) panned the bewildering and “impossible” transition from Acts I and II, with their placid fin de siècle romance and their song, dance, and dialogue about the “Language of Flowers,” to Act III, which takes place in an empty, disturbing, and morgue-like space.
What has been unnoticed in previous scholarship, is that Doña Rosita enacts the theatrical project and poetics that Lorca sketched out in El público (The Audience). Although most critics and, to some extent, Lorca himself, placed these plays in two different theatrical worlds, Doña Rosita and El público show that Lorca’s theater is not constrained by irreconcilable dualities but instead demonstrates a radical synthesis of contraries. My dissertation proposes a new theoretical framework: the “dialectics of abscission,” a metatheatrical approach based on dichotomies relevant to Lorca’s vision of theater. In conclusion, I show that Lorca’s play, one of his least studied, offers essential epistemological and aesthetic clues to a better understanding of his theater in general.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/47989 |
| Date | 01 February 2024 |
| Creators | Gelardo-Rodríguez, Teresa |
| Contributors | Maurer, Christopher |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | Spanish, en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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