Lifting the Veil: Revision and Double-Consciousness in Rita Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth

Criticism of Rita Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth has often centered on its being a retelling¹ of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and many critics have read it against Sophocles’ play. Although this type of reading has contributed significantly to how we read and engage Dove’s play, what I propose is that we read Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth against itself.² The play was first published in 1994 by Story Line Press, and a completely revised second edition appeared in 1996. In a 2000 interview with Robert McDowell, the publisher of Story Line Press, Dove stated that she first conceived the idea for the play in 1979 while in Jerusalem with her husband. She completed a first draft of the play in less than a month and then sent copies to New York agents, “knowing that it was everything a play couldn’t be to succeed in the commercial theater world: a historical drama, an adaptation of a Classic with too many non-mainstream characters” (qtd. in Ingersoll177). Dove’s instincts about the play seemed to be validated when the copies came back with no-thank-you notes attached. As she told McDowell, she put the copies and notes away and continued her life in poetry. Yet the play remained and, through her husband’s periodical questions about the manuscript, Dove revised the play. Once, she put the play into prose, but in 1989 put it back into verse so that “at least when [she] was dead and gone, the version scholars would find among [her] papers would be the one [she] wanted them to see” (McDowell 159). It was this version that was published in 1994.

After this first publication, Dove revised and rewrote the play, the impetus for this revising and rewriting coming in part from responses to several staged readings and a workshop of the play during the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1994. One of the most notable differences between the first edition and the revised one is the ending. In a 1996 interview with Therese Steffen, Dove explained:

people complained about the death of Augustus, and their argument was that in the original, Oedipus lives. To me, that was no argument to change the ending. It wasn’t until I began working through the play again that I realized that the tragedy of the original Oedipus is that he is a living dead man. So it doesn’t really matter whether Augustus lives or dies; either he dies and that’s it, or he lives, but in a nihilistic sense.

(172)

In a 1998 interview with Malin Pereira, Dove credits her daughter Aviva with being the catalyst for the change: “So I was fiddling with it [the play] and she [Aviva] came down (she was supposed to be in bed) and I said to her, ‘I was just messing around with this ending.’ And she said, ‘You know, I think he should live. There are things worse than death.’” (qtd. in Ingersoll 149) This change, however, is not the only change that exists in the play. Pereira notes that “Dove’s revisions flesh out the characters of Hector and Amalia, Augustus’s parents, making them much less stock figures, . . . and more fully dimensional” (207). Dove’s revisions, however, do more than flesh out the characters of Hector and Amalia. When we read the first edition of the play against the final edition, we see that Dove has revised Darker Face of the Earth to take into account W. E. B. Du Bois’ idea of double-consciousness.

In the first chapter³ of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois offers his definition of double-consciousness:

Born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world—a world which yields him [the Negro] no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of...