Oedipus the King and Augustus (The Darker face of the earth)

In Rita Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth, the hero of the tragedy is Augustus in Oedipus' stead. So, too, instead of ancient Thebes we are in the pre-Civil War south on a cotton plantation. Oedipus is a play where the title hero unwittingly kills his father and sleeps with his mother. As a result, in outrage and anger the gods visit all manner of plague and drought upon Thebes, a prophet warns Oedipus he does not want to know the answer when he asks why the gods treat Thebes thus (cas.umkc.edu). The tragedy becomes, Oedipus does want to know and when he discovers himself to be the murderer of his father, the bed partner of his mother, and the cause of woe in Thebes, he exiles himself.

However, unlike Augustus, who is carried away at the end of Dove's work in triumph as a liberator of his oppressed people, Oedipus is filled with shame, horror, and dread over his deeds: Surely the gods hate me, Drive me out of Thebes in exile, [to his children] Such disgrace and you must bear it all (249, 249, 248).

Augustus, on the other hand, sleeps with his mother, but is not the cause of his people's woes on Carolina plantations as Oedipus is the cause of the people of Thebes' woes. Dove makes use of many transformations which foreshadow the transformation at the ending of the play Augustus triumph. Unlike Oedipus, Augustus is just being born when Dove's drama opens. He is a mixed-raced bastard son of the plantation (cas.umkc.edu).

Rita Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth is a recounting of the Oedipus drama, framed in terms of the African-American experience of slavery. It is a poet's reading of Oedipus the King, resonating with ...