“Tyrant of everyone around her. She’s perfectly capable of sitting on your heart and watching you die for a whole year without turning off that cold little smile she wears on her wicked face.”

La Poncia says this in the first scene to describe Bernarda before she has made her first appearance onstage. It is the first characterization the audience receives of the gentlewoman, and it clues them in to how to receive Bernarda’s immediately apparent values of piety, frugality, and discipline. There is a wicked hypocrisy to Bernarda’s outward shows of adherence to societal norms. Beneath the surface, Bernarda cares very little for the pain or suffering of others.

“I’ve got blood on my hands from so much polishing of everything.”

The Servant delivers this line two pages into Act I, bemoaning the severity of the cleaning and scrubbing that Bernarda has demanded from the household staff to prepare the house for the wake. This comment, though delivered innocently enough, foreshadows the tragic end of the play. Bernarda’s ruthless insistence on “polishing” everything—the house, the family’s reputation, the bare truth of her daughters’ various secrets and transgressions—leaves her with Adela’s blood on her hands by the final moments of the play.

“What other way is there to talk about this cursėd village with no river—this village full of wells where you drink water always fearful it’s been poisoned?”

Bernarda uses the fact that this village has no river as proof of some perceived taint of ill will pervading its people. A town with only wells for water is a town to remain suspicious of.