The Darker Face of the Earth

Her first full-length play, originally conceived in 1979, it was published in 1994,[1] while Dove was serving as United States Poet Laureate.

The play opens on the Jennings plantation, where several slaves wait below the bedroom window of their mistress Amalia, who is giving birth.

The baby is spirited away in Amalia's knitting basket, into which Louis has placed a pair of spurs in hopes of killing the child.

She points to Hector – a slave who went mad and now lives in the swamp – as a black man possibly affected by the curse.

Amalia has purchased a new slave named Augustus Newcastle, notorious for being educated and escaping many times.

In the swamp near the plantation, a group of conspirators enlist Augustus to assist them in whose stated goal is to kill their oppressors: slave masters and those who support the institution of slavery.

Augustus mistakenly thinks that Louis is his father and rips open his shirt to reveal the damage done by the spurs left in the basket.

Theodora Carlisle's article concerns itself with the act of reading: how it's a central thematic element and how it responds to Sophocles’ original.

She posits that in Dove's adaptation, reading is equated with power as a way to resist the notion of slaves being intellectually inferior to their white masters.

Carlisle acknowledges that Darker Face of the Earth is an artistic rendering of Sophocles’ original, but maintains that it can stand on its own due to the undercurrents of difference within the play that speak to the black experience.

She cites the character of Scylla as a prime example of Dove's ability to take the broad details of the original play and reinterpret them to suit her own thematic concerns.

[10] In an interview playwright Rita Dove discussed her decision to rewrite the Oedipus story on a southern plantation, saying she had a wonderful epiphany.

Rita looks into W.E.B DuBois' idea of double consciousness and adapts it into her second revision to expand on the characters of Amalia and Augustus that possesses “two souls, two thoughts, two reconciled; [and] two warring ideals inside one dark body.” According to DuBois double consciousness is seeing yourself based on the perception of different people and a person's own opinion of themselves.

Her creation of Amalia goes against DuBois' idea on double consciousness “Amalia belongs to that group of women who dominate so much of Western literature, women who are at once strong and fiercely independent yet at the same time enslaved by the rules of their society which has forced a feminine script upon them.” [14] Theodora Carlisle approaches the “Africanist Vision” with the themes of prophecy and knowledge, which are two of the major themes in the play.