Color (White and Green)
Color plays an important role in Bernarda’s house. White is the color of purity and virtue. It is the color of wedding dresses and the hope-chest linens that the daughters must spend their time of mourning sewing and embroidering. It is also the color of cleanliness. The house is never clean enough for Bernarda. She repeatedly orders the staff to scrub everything again, to whitewash the patio again, and to clean up the messy tracks left by outsiders in the house again. White is the color symbolizing everything Bernarda wants in her domain (purity, virtue, class, status, etc.); conversely, her obsession with maintaining its existence in the house makes the color white a symbolic reminder of every failure by herself and those under her daughters.
The color green appears in scant moments, mostly in Act I, and is very often associated with Adela. When Bernarda requests a fan in Act I, Adela unthinkingly passes her one with “green and red flowers” (164), which her mother then slaps away because it isn’t the appropriate black. The dress Adela makes for her birthday, which she has to forsake in favor of black mourning clothes, is a beautiful green. After the men have left the patio in Act I, she puts it on and sneaks out into the yard under the guise of calling in the hens.
