Questrions about Yerma
Subject: Questions about Yerma
Yerma should be an interesting play to watch once Austin College produces it this weekend. I enjoyed the play but I have questions about it that I don’t exactly understand. One of those obviously is why is she barren? There were a few comments made in the play about her barrenness being Juan’s fault. The audience knows that they still sleep together because Yerma talks about when he “takes her,” he “feels cold.” So is the problem really with him and not her?
My next question has to be about the end. Why does Yerma kill Juan? This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I understand that she didn’t run off with another man because she has honor, but if she kills him then she has no more honor. Would it not have made more sense for her to have left with another man to have a family rather than to kill the one man that wouldn’t give her a family? It seems to me that the honor that she talks about all through the play would be more soiled by a murder than a ‘disappearance.’
Along with that last thought, what did Yerma mean at the very end of the play, after she kills him, when she says the following: “Don’t come near me, for I have killed my son! I myself have killed my son!” I don’t understand what she means by this.
I can also say that I have a question about the play itself and what happens in it. When Act III opens, and Yerma was in Delores’s house, where had they been? I understood something about a cemetery and something about praying – obviously to the pagan gods – but I never understood what went on.
I know that all I have really done is ask questions but I hope that this is okay. I feel that if I can get these answers then I will understand almost everything about the play.
--Michael B. Breeden
posted by Anonymous @ 10:26 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Good questions. If I'm reading your post correctly, you're asking:
(a) Who's at fault for Yerma's barrenness?
I would add - what does Yerma mean when she talks about being barren? Is it a metaphor as well as a reality?
(b) Why does Yerma kill Juan? Isn't this greater dishonor than leaving him?
(c) Why does Yerma say "I've killed my son" after she kills her husband?
(d) What happened before Act III began?
Emily makes a good point. Yerma has defined herself entirely - as John puts it in his post, above - in terms of her ability to pass along her genetic code: her motherhood. By the time that the Old Pagan Woman makes her offer in the third act, she's been so steeped in bitterness and frustration that to acknowledge defeat would be tantamount to self-annihilation.
But does she have to construct herself in this way? Or - perhaps the better question - is it necessary that our society conflate the roles of "Mother" and of "Woman" the way they are in this play?
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