description Yerma Overview
Yerma is a tragedy by Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca, first performed in 1934 and set in a restrictive rural community. The title character's unfulfilled desire for a child becomes inseparable from social expectations, marital alienation, honor, and her constrained position as a woman. Her conflict with her husband, Juan, ends in violence, making the play a study of infertility, repression, and destructive obsession.
help Yerma FAQ
Why is the protagonist of Yerma so desperate to have a child?
Yerma's longing is personal, but Lorca also shows a rural society that defines a married woman's value through motherhood and sexual honor. Her childless marriage to Juan therefore becomes both an intimate anguish and a socially enforced identity crisis.
What does the name Yerma mean in Spanish?
Yerma can mean barren, sterile, or uncultivated, making the heroine's name inseparable from the play's central image. Federico García Lorca uses that wordplay to connect her body with dry land and frustrated fertility.
Why does Yerma kill Juan at the end of the play?
Juan finally makes clear that he does not want children, destroying Yerma's remaining hope of becoming a mother within her marriage. She strangles him and then declares that she has killed her own son, recognizing that her socially permitted path to motherhood is gone.
Is Yerma part of Lorca's rural trilogy?
It is commonly grouped with Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba as Lorca's rural tragedies. Yerma was first performed in 1934, between Blood Wedding and the completion of The House of Bernarda Alba.
explore Explore More
Similar to Yerma
See all arrow_forward
Reviews & Comments
Write a Review
Be the first to review
Share your thoughts with the community and help others make better decisions.
