García Lorca/Almodóvar Gender, Nationality, and the Limits of the Visible (Inaugural lecture delivered 28th January 1993)

The questions of gender, nationality, and sexuality are all inextricably intertwined not only in foreign depictions of Spain as a place of blood and passion, of implicitly presocial and unconscious drives, but also in Hispanic accounts of the nation as motherland. In this lecture, Professor Smith focuses on two texts, La casa de Bernarda Alba by Spain's greatest twentieth-century dramatist, García Lorca, and Entre tinieblas by Pedro Almodóvar, its best-known contemporary filmmaker. Three questions are asked of these texts. How do they represent the relations between women on the stage/screen and men outside the diegetic space? How do the all-female communities they depict serve as allegories of the nation at a particular historical moment? Finally, how do the texts represent relations between women?