Term Paper on "Oedipus the King and the Darker"

Term Paper 4 pages (1507 words) Sources: 2

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Oedipus the King and the Darker Face of the Earth are two plays which explore the theme of pain and suffering as inherent to the human condition, and at the same time, pose questions regarding the relationship between fate and free will, consciousness and self-control. These questions are illustrated using the two protagonists - Oedipus and Augustus - but the answers are ambivalent and unclear as they rely on the heterogeneous nature of interpretations and points-of-view.

Due to of a prophecy that said King Laios of Thebes would be killed by his own son who would then marry his own mother, the king and queen decide to give their son to a shepherd who was to kill him. However, the shepherd takes him to Corinth where he is adopted by King Polybus and his childless queen. Upon learning about the prophecy, Oedipus decides not to return to Corinth. He comes upon a man at a crossroads with four attendants who try to force him from his path. The man prodded him with his stick and Oedipus slew him and three of the attendants. The gods demand vengeance for the death of Laios as the price of lifting the city's punishment. Oedipus is determined to seek justice. Through his efforts, he discovers that he is the murderer of Laios. Jocasta discovers the secret and kills herself.

The Darker Face of the Earth rewrites the tragedy of Oedipus, a son who kills his father and marries his mother, and combines this tragedy with more contemporary questions regarding freedom, integration, civil rights, and prejudice. Amalia is a white owner of a plantation in pre-civil war South. She gives birth to a slave's child but must give it up for adoption with the help of her white doctor due to threats from her legitimate husband. Years later, a slave called Augustus is brought to the plantation in chains, and seduced by Amalia who turns out to be his biological mother. When he realizes he has made love to his own mother, he murders his father, Louis and would kill his mother as well but she kills herself to save him. The two protagonists have no ethical or moral defense for their actions; moreover, in both cases, the killers are incriminated by both earthly and moral law. Just as uncontrollable rage and anger provokes Augustus to murder everyone in the household, Oedipus' killing spree was due to manic rage and injured pride, and his actions can neither be accepted nor justified by the morality of ancient Greece. If more citizens of Thebes witnessed the slaughter at the crossroads they would surely not support of defend Oedipus' actions. The only remaining survivor from the slaughter could not bear to face Oedipus and asked to be allowed to offer his service far away from the palace. Even Oedipus himself acknowledges the cruelty and lack of rational thought in his actions: In rage / I struck the driver who had turned me back. / and when the old man saw it, watching me / as by the chariot side I stood, he struck / My forehead with a double-pointed goad./...in a trice, / With this right hand I struck him with my staff/...And then I flew them all (Sophocles lines 834-842). Likewise, in the Darker Face of the Earth, many of the slaves do not support or believe in reckless unjustifiable killing. This natural and inherent reference for life is even considered towards the abusive white slave owners. Henry expresses his moral position taking a stance against the plan to revolt with the reasoning words "I'm against the white man/...but...murder? / Killing all, without difference,/women and children? / 'Thou shalt not kill,' saith the Commandments" (Dove: 81).

There is another important issue that can be invoked when judging the actions of the two protagonists. It is very interesting to note that both of them were the victims of their parents' rejection as infants; the theme of family ties - or more precisely, the lack of - is central to both plays. While Oedipus was sentenced to death by his own parents who sent him to a shepherd who was to kill him, Augustus was rejected by his mother's husband, Louis, who makes it clear upon the infant's birth that he does not want to be father to an illegitimate son: "Get rid of it! Destroy the bastard!" The absence of loving family situations can be used as an explanation of their violent tempers. Psychiatrist James Lieberman, of George Washington University's school of Medicine, argues that Sophocles' play concentrates on themes that have to do with familial love and altruism, rather than the hostility and fear that were attributed to it by Freud in his famous theory, which draws its name from the play, the Oedipal complex (Bower: 248). Lieberman points out that in order for a connection to have significance there must be a human relationship. Laios was Oedipus' biological father, but they had no relationship to give this connection meaning. Lieberman points out that "Oedipus really loved his (adoptive) father" and that this relationship defines the moral of the play, which is that "honest, loving family ties are the best defense against dire prophecy the greatest security in an uncertain world" (Bower: 248). The play supports Lieberman's theory. Oedipus' love for his adopted parents is what motivates him to leave his home city. He exercised free will in an effort to protect his parents from the fate warned by the Oracle.

In the essay "The Guilt of Oedipus," P.H. Vellacot argues that Oedipus is quite aware of his transgressions and is therefore guilty. Vellacot encourages the audience to "read between the lines" of the play and deduce what is truly going on. Although his theory is more or less based on the assertion that Oedipus has full conscious awareness of many details of the story that are not fully revealed until the end of the play, one can agree with Vellacot's simple assertion:

So now, if he was to avoid heinous pollution, he must make for himself two unbreakable rules: never to kill an older man; and never to marry an older woman." (1120). This edict seems simple enough to follow and would guarantee his innocence. Unfortunately, Oedipus lets his anger overpower any hope for rational actions when he slays a middle-aged man with graying hairs. As Vellacot points out, this offense by Oedipus was not a rigid fate decreed by the God's; Oedipus knows that he is not a helpless pawn, but is guilty of murder and only realizes the gravity of his acts in the end, when he asks be to sent into exile: "blind, though now he sees - and poor, though now he's rich - he'll use a stick to guide his steps into another land." (Sophocles line 454). Considering the fact that Rita Dove's play closely follows its ancient model, it is safe to apply this theory to the Darker Face of the Earth, and to conclude that Augustus could have avoided the tragic ending had he controlled his anger and selfishness.

The settings of the two plays are important only in the sense that they generate additional meanings to the plot. In the case of Oedipus Rex, the fact that the plot is set in ancient Greece, in the city of Thebes, is relevant because it ads a mythological reference which is crucial to understanding the play itself. The gods play an important part: they demand justice and threaten the inhabitants of Thebes. Moreover, ancient Greece was dominated by a set of moral rules which is different from the modern one, but nonetheless, one which condemned the murder of innocent men. Similarly, the Darker Face of the Earth is set in the 1800s in pre-civil war South which ads… READ MORE

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