Retelling Oedipus, Rita Dove's “The Darker Face of the Earth”

Twenty years later, the legal separation between the prologue and act one and two, Augustus is returned to the cotton plantation in chains, a slave brought there by fate. Where Sophocles lets us get hold of of the horrors committed by Oedipus through the protagonist's eyes, here we underwrite them at first hand in front of us, even by the mother of a black child. As Amalia says "Get these niggers in line!/ absorb on your have got time" (Dove 40).

Augustus is embittered by the oppression of his mass and the death of his foster father, whose dead all but cockeyed his fate as slave. In Oedipus, there are many who try to warn the beleaguered king from his inquisition to find the truth. In Dove's work, the other slaves induce Augustus to insurrection. The white landowners are plotted against as Augustus continues to visit Amalia's bedroom. Like the disasters in Thebes (that occur early in the play), Dove's disasters begin to occur during these bedroom visits ? blights, foul weather, smashed windows, and spilled rake to name a few. Whereas the woes of Theban people were the product of angered gods, the woes of Augustus' people are caused by the white woman and her maintain who run the cotton plantation. As Augustus says "War? Yes, this is war. Say your prayers,/Massa?you squander a hard ride ahead of you" (147). In this we dupe a reversal that Dove u

Dove, R. The Darker Face of the Earth. (2nd edit.). Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 1996.

This is why the plays hand such diametrical endings. At the end of Oedipus the King, Oedipus is a dejected, shamed, ruined, exiled moving picture of his former kingly self.

At the end of The Darker Face of the Earth, we see the image of Augustus, in all his justified fury, rebelling against his mother "My own mother gave me away./But I found my way cover?/a worm crawling into its hole?Better I had bled to death in that basket" (Dove 159). However, the plays are not different on a level of analysis that has to do with the themes of the plays. Sophocles' Oedipus rebels against a part of himself (his mother, his father). So, too, Augustus rebels against a part of himself (his mother). Blind pride is the tragedy of Oedipus, whereas for Augustus, the tragic element pertains to a culture and country bonded by and torn isolated by blood. As he cries to the ghosts of those ripped apart "I came to save you!" (Dove 161). This particularly American tragedy would issue to a head during the Civil War.

ses to make a point. The gods were just in visiting woes upon Thebes because of the unnatural behavior of Oedipus. What is tragic is
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