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“It can be seen,” writes one of Lorca's latest critics, referring to the different approaches to the poet's work, “that these cover almost all of the methods which are fashionable today in literary criticism, with the exception of Freudian analysis….”1 My paper focuses on two minor plays of Lorca. Yet, the psychoanalytic problems discussed are central to his work as a whole.*
Don Perlimplín lives alone, with the maid Marcolfa as his only companion, to whom he clings as a mother figure, even though he is fifty years old.
Marcolfa: I can die any minute.
Perlimplín: Good Lord!
Marcolfa, weeping: And what will happen to you all alone in the world?
Perlimplín: What will happen? …
miserably … When I was a child a woman strangled her husband. He was a shoemaker. I can't forget it. I've always said I wouldn't marry. My books are enough for me. What good will marriage do me?.2 (pp. 107-108)
The traumatic childhood memory is thus accompanied by castration anxiety with the woman representing the castrator. Now that Perlimplín envisages the possibility of marriage, the threat of castration arises again. Belisa, the woman destined for Don Perlimplín, is associated by him to the terrible strangler. The association is fully conscious.