Blood Wedding #1

To what extent would you agree that plot should be valued more highly than style in the work. In you answer you should refer to two or three works you have studied.

I am not sure that I agree entirely with this statement. For the play Oedipus the King, I would agree more fully, but with the Wild Duck, I feel that the metaphors, symbols, foreshadowing, and imagery add so much that they could not be withdrawn and still have the play remain nearly as good.The final play, Blood Wedding, uses both techniques to truly achieve its purpose. Without the symbols and metaphors embedded into the story of Blood Wedding, I feel that the main idea would be lost, and the feel of the play would be very different.

In Oedipus, the focus is mainly plot driven. We see Oedipus as he searches for the truth about his fate and about his birth, but many of the intricacies of literary elements are lost because the story has so much going on. There are some clues, aided by foreshadowing, which enable the audience to predict the outcome of the play and some of the effects of the ending. When Tiresias says “You mock my blindness? Let me tell you this. You with your precious eyes, you’re blind to the corruption of your life” he is trying to both foreshadow Oedipus blinding himself, and also of Oedipus finding out about his true relationship to his wife and mother, and also that he killed his father. This foreshadowing is helpful and intriguing, but in my opinion, it would not devastate the play if it were to be left out.  (Sophocles 183). Also, the symbolism, metaphors, and imagery are present, but do not “make or break” the play.

In The Wild Duck, however, the style is much more important, and without it the play would surely have lost much of its importance and significance. Simply the foreshadowing and clues that Ibsen leave throughout the play makes the reader feel like he has gained insight into the different characters. When Hedvig is talking to Gregers about the books she reads and how she looks at the pictures, she mentions a book with “a picture of Death with an hourglass and a girl. I think that’s horrible” (Ibsen 163). This excellent use of foreshadowing, with death capitalized and the hourglass signifying a short amount of time remaining (Hedvig later goes on to shoot herself with her father’s pistol) Ibsen is allowing the audience to get a sense of impending doom, which would surely have been lost without it. I personally felt like this was one of the most interesting things about reading the play, simply catching the foreshadowing and other literary elements that Ibsen used when writing.
Blood Wedding is another example of a weaving of the two elements. In Act two, the literary element that stands out most in my mind is the repetition of phrases, and how they are used to portray a greater message in the story. Various characters, sometimes designated as a young man, other times simply called "voices" repeat the line that "The bride is awakening!" (Lorca 50). This use of repetition shows how the people are anxious to see the bride come out into the real world, to stop living in her fantasy world of dreams, and become someone's wife. It is possible that Lorca is intending this to be a critique of marriage, or perhaps he is just using it to show that everyone grows up eventually, and must stop living in the fantasy world of their childhood.