Compare and Contrast Oedipus the King and A Darker Face of the Earth - Essay Example

Comparison and Contrast between “Oedipus the King” and “The Darker Face of the Earth” In the play “The Darker Face of theEarth”, Rita Dove has resurrected the Greek protagonist, Oedipus, with newer conflicts and crisis of the modern American society of the 19th century. Dove’s protagonist, Augustus, can be considered as the resurrected Oedipus who is fated to be deserted by his white mother and to marry her unwittingly. Like Sophocles’s Oedipus he also kills his father and her mother commits suicide in order to save him.

Also ignorant about his past, Augustus, like the King, vows to liberate the fellow people from the slavery. Thus the hero’s noble goal to fight for his people’s causes is bound to reveal the dark truth about his own existence. Yet though the cause-and-effect sequences in the both of plays are almost the same, the forces that makes the heroes Augustus and Oedipus powerless and drive them towards a tragic end are different. Whereas in “Oedipus the King” the compelling force is the King’s fate, in Dove’s play, the rigid and racially discriminating attitude to the African-American black is as compelling and powerful as fate is in Greek world.

Both the plot line and the central character of Dove’s play hermeneutically resemble Sophocles’s “Oedipus the King”. In this regard, Carlisle says, “The Darker Face of the Earth, both in its plot line and in the character of its hero, certainly serves this hermeneutic role, following Sophocles' rendition of the myth in broad strokes.” (4) Augustus, born to a white plantation mistress, Amelia is deserted and sent by his mother to another plantation. But when he returns to his mother’s plantation, no one in the plantation knows his identity.

Augustus also does not know his own identity. This lack of a past makes him a freewill agent who continually seeks for freedom from slavery. Upon his return, he finds Amelia’s plantation to be afflicted with a private curse that redoubles the scourge of slavery. The audience is hinted that it is Amelia’s frustration to give up the child. But the people in the plantation take Amelia’s ruthless tyranny for something mysterious, as Carlisle says, “The plantation to which he returns lies under a double affliction: The public scourge of slavery is reduplicated in a private curse whose cause lies shrouded in mystery.” (5) Also Augustus is characteristically similar to Sophocles’s protagonist, Oedipus.

Like Oedipus, Dove’s hero is a charming and charismatic leader who is accustomed to view himself as the rescuer of his people. Whereas Oedipus rescues his people from the tyranny of the Sphinx by providing an answer to the riddle, Augustus defies the tyranny of the white, depending on convincing logic. Like Oedipus, arrogance is a part of Augustus’s character. In the play he is found to be contemptuous to the Christian worshippers’ “Sunday Shout” in the following manner: "Listen / to them sing!

/ What kind of god preaches such misery?" (Dove 58). This arrogance essentially makes fallible and vulnerable to his destiny. Augustus lives in a world where he values freedom the most. Like the irrational tyrannical white master, he is arrogantly contemptuous to anything that threatens the freedom of black people. Therefore, his passion for freedom is boosted more by his hatred for the white domination than by a ration foundation of right and wrong. Yet his definition of right and wrong is color-blind, as it is evident in his speech: “All those who are not with us are against us, blacks as well as whites.

/ Gird your loins with vengeance, strap on the shining sword of freedom! (Dove 73). Indeed Dove attempts to show that the white’s racial attitude to the black and the black’s reaction to it, in return, pushes both of the two towards destruction. The racially segregating wall raised between the black and the white forces the mother Amelia to desert her child, and to adopt the ruthless stance against the black slaves in the plantation field. Partly driven by the mother in her and by the motive to take revenge on her unfaithful husband, she wants to keep the child with her.

But the black-white divide does not permit her; Even though she sends child Augustus to another plantation, the mother in her cannot forget him. Frustration with her unfaithful white husband and disappointment make her a ruthless and tyrant slave owner. This tyranny and brutality against the black essentially refer to the racial constructs of the white society. Dove attempts to show that whereas the Oedipus’s fate brings about the tragic end to him, the racial segregation pushes Augustus to his destruction.

But unlike the final scene, of Sophocles’ play, in which Oedipus blinds himself as a remark of greater insight into the nature of the world, Augustus does not blind himself, as Carlisle says, “he does not literally blind himself in response, no audience will miss the irony of that moment, reminiscent of the Greek original, in which spiritual insight dawns, just as more ordinary vision recedes” (5). Works Cited Carlisle, Theodora. "Reading the Scars: Rita Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth - Critical Essay".

African American Review. FindArticles.com. 02 May, 2011. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_1_34/ai_62258911/ Dove, Rita. The Darker Face of the Earth. New York: Picassa Publishers. 2008 Sophocles. “Oedipus the King”. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin,1984.