Bernarda's house serves as the central image in Lorca's play "The house of bernarda alba". Discuss.

The opening also establishes that this is a house rife with suffering. In some ways, the suffering is explicitly related, particularly by La Poncia in her many tirades about Bernarda. Magdalena is crying throughout the entire scene in which the mourners fill the house. This is an element easily lost on the page but which in performance creates an eerie sense of dread. Considering that the play is named not for a character but for the house, we leave this first section of the play with the sense that the house itself stands as metaphor for a worldview that sees suffering as the human condition.