Ausencia, prohibición y carencia : estudio de los personajes masculinos y el deseo frustrado en tres obras de García Lorca

Sammanfattning: In this thesis, the main male characters in three of the plays written by Federico García Lorca are analysed with the aim of seeing the role they play in the frustration of desire. After two chapters dedicated to a review of published critical studies on Lorca and to certain theoretical considerations, Chapter Three examines desire drawing on Ubersfeld's actancial model and observes that these male characters can be divided into two groups: those who are desired and those who are undesired. In Chapter Four this classification is linked to an analysis of absence, prohibition and lack. Absence is here defined not as related to their non-appearance on stage but rather to their non-presence in the lives of the desiring female protagonists. It is observed that a number of male characters are absent in the plays mainly due to death or a journey. As far as prohibition is concerned, in two of the works, there is a moral code associated with concepts such as "honour" and "decency", which blocks the female characters' access to the males they desire. Chapter Four also shows how several characters can be considered as lacking in the sense that they do not possess the ideal male qualities contained in the plays. This chapter reaches the conclusion that desired male characters are either absent or forbidden in the world of the desiring female, whereas undesired male characters are lacking in the sense that they fail to live up to the ideal highlighted in the plays. Chapter Five analyses the female characters' perception of the male figures, making use of René Girard's notion of "transfiguration", which alludes to a process of idealisation of the object of desire. Our analysis reveals a connection between desire, denied access to the object of desire and transfiguration in the main subjects of desire. The phenomenon of "transfiguration" has several functions in the play: firstly, the creation of hyperbolical male characters; secondly, that of transmitting the intensity of the desire experienced and, finally, the highlighting of the lack of certain qualities in several male characters. We thus observe that, in these three plays written by García Lorca, Girard's pessimistic view of desire is confirmed, since desire needs a series of obstacles, such as absence or prohibition, to survive. However, this is not the only explanation for the frustration of desire: other factors, like the actions of certain male characters or destiny, also play a decisive role.