A Study Guide for Rita Dove's "Darker Face of the Earth, The"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Rita Dove's "Darker Face of the Earth, The", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781410393760

Book preview

16

The Darker Face of the Earth

Rita Dove

1996

Introduction

Literature must constantly renew itself at the source of tradition. In her play, The Darker Face of the Earth (published in 1994, first produced in 1996), the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet laureate Rita Dove revisits Sophocles's ancient Greek Drama Oedipus Tyrannus. The original story of a man who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother and is destroyed when he discovers the truth has a deep psychological resonance. It is echoed again and again in Western literature, not least in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Dove retells the story at an antebellum plantation on the verge of a slave revolt led by a mulatto (mixed race) slave who is the unknown son of the plantation's owner. In her appropriation of the myth, Dove links the original sin of incest with miscegenation, the mixing of the races, and creates a symbolic drama exposing slavery and racism as the fatal flaws inherent in the founding of the United States.

Author Biography

Dove Was Born In Akron, Ohio, On August 28, 1952. She Was Raised In A Middle-Class Household In Akron, Where Her Father Worked As An Industrial Chemist. Dove Studied At The University Of Miami Of Ohio And At The University Of TüBingen, Germany, On A Fulbright Scholarship, Before Attending The Iowa Writers' Workshop, Where She Earned A Master Of Fine Arts Degree. In Iowa, She Met Her German-Born Husband, The Writer Fred Viebahn. She Taught Creative Writing At The University Of Arizona Beginning In 1981. She Won The Pulitzer Prize In 1987 For Her Poetry Collection Thomas And Beulah, sonnets based on the lives of her maternal grandparents. Since 1989, Dove has held an endowed chair at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

Dove originally published her play, The Darker Face of The Earth, in 1994 and, after working with several theater companies to prepare it for performance, brought out a heavily revised second edition in 1996. The world premiere performance of the play was at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1996. The Broadway premiere later that same year was not successful. The European premiere was at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1999. Since then, the play has been performed regularly by both university and professional theater groups.

Dove has published collections of lyric poems, including Mother Love (1995), inspired by The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, and On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999). Dove published another substantial book of poetry, Sonata Mulattica in 2009. This work is a large narrative poem based on the true story of a mixed-race violinist, George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, who played for Beethoven and who was the original dedicatee of the Kreutzer Sonata before the two men fell out upon becoming romantic rivals.

In 2011, Dove edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, which involved her in a public controversy with the prominent critic Helen Vendler, who suggested that race seemed