Re: Mourning Becomes John Brown

>Subject: Mourning Becomes John Brown
>From: "jmc" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 

>I went to see the National Theatre's superb new production of Eugene
>O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra tonight, and was struck by the
>similarities between a couple of the speeches and Dylan's civil war song
>John Brown.
>
>Mourning Becomes Electra is also set just after the American civil war. The
>son of the family returns from war, and gives a vivid description of killing
>his enemies on the battlefield:
>    "I had a queer feeling that war meant murdering the same man over and
>over, and that in the end I would discover     the man was myself! Their
>faces keep coming back in dreams - and they change to father's face - or to
>mine..."
>
>Later, when he kills his mother's lover, the theme returns:
>    "Do you remember me telling you how the faces of the men I killed came
>back and changed to father's face and         finally became my own. He
>looks like me too! Maybe I've committed suicide."
>
>I am not suggesting that Mourning Becomes Electra is a source for John Brown
>(although that isn't beyond possibility) but it is heartening to know that 2
>great American artists have the same insight, and that both of them chose to
>set this insight at the time of the American civil war.


What evidence is there to suggest that "John Brown" is set in the Civil War?

After all, the first line of the song is "John Brown went off to war to fight
on a foreign shore."  I doubt that American soldiers during the Civil War
thought of themselves as fighting on a "foreign shore" as they moved through
one or another American state.

Given the song's echoes of Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun," World War I
has always seemed a far likelier setting to me.