Lounging on the couch all day, doing nothing smart and only eating what Mommy cooks: the cartoon of the mother’s son says a lot about our idea of manhood.
A lifetime preparing for a great separation: Madame Jeanne Proust with her sons Marcel and Robert in a photograph from 1896.
Madame Jeanne Proust is elegant, an impressive lady of Parisian society. She wears silk in winter and mousseline in summer. Black beads, fox fur. She has the daily brioches for the family delivered from Bourbonneux, fruit from Auger. And Jeanne adores her son Marcel. All the more so as he has been ailing and has asthma throughout his life. As a child she called him the “little wolf” and will always call him that. She never changes his nickname.
And Marcel, who would become perhaps the most French writer? He was a mother’s son before there was even a term for it. The worst thing for him was the thought of ever being separated from his mother, he kept saying. Proust was so attached to Jeanne that psychoanalytically veiled literary studies even wanted to see the origin of his homosexuality in this attachment.
Castrating mother, incestuous mother, mother smothering her son in her love, dominating and controlling, understanding and gentle – it was a give and take: Proust could and would not leave his mother as little as she did from him. He was always thinking about her, waiting for her when she wasn’t with him, stalking her when she came home. He has found the most beautiful words for the realm that mother and mother’s son seem to inhabit almost entirely alone.
A scent of wax and rosewood
“Our whole life had been nothing more than an exercise in teaching me to do without her the day she left me,” Marcel Proust once wrote, “since childhood, when she refused to come back ten times to say good night to me before going out in the evening; when I saw the train pick her up when she left me in the country, or when I called her later in Fontainebleau, on the very summer she had gone to Saint-Cloud, every hour on every possible pretext.» Proust keeps replaying the separation from his mother inwardly, but it doesn’t calm him down. Fear and emptiness remain.
Achilles, Romain Gary, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Anthony Perkins in “Psycho”: Film and literature are full of enchanted mothers and their sons. In James Joyce’s «Ulysses» Stephen sees his dead mother: «Quietly, in a dream, she had come to him after her death, her emaciated body in its loose brown grave clothes exuding a scent of wax and rosewood, her breath that bent over him, mute, reproachful, a faint scent of damp ashes. He saw the sea over the threadbare edge of his cuffs, greeted as a great dear mother.»
The mother as delusion: Anthony Perkins in the role of the murderer Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960).
The fearful, loving worship of the mother is as old as mankind. It was only in Western industrial societies that the caricature of the mama’s boy came into being: the middle-aged lout lying limp on the couch, who doesn’t get a wife, but doesn’t want one either, because he owns the Hotel Mama. The mother who obligingly serves him plates of the best food while he adores her, insults, adores her again.
Pasta at Mom’s
The mother’s son was present for a long time, as a joke figure and cliché. In mafia films, the wannabe who only eats pasta at Mama’s. Today it hardly exists anymore. He has disappeared from films, and from literature too, with the exception of Martin Walser’s novel “Mother’s Son”. It’s hard to say why. Perhaps it has to do with the increasing dissolution of fixed family structures. With the fact that the patchwork family has taken the place of the nuclear family with a working father and a mother who takes care of the children. Perhaps close family ties that produce the mother’s son are becoming less and less possible.
Where is it best? With mom, of course, especially when she’s cooking pasta. This is also the case in mafia families. Film still from «Goodfellas» (1993).
The caricature of the mother’s son emerged in the 19th century, during which notions of masculinity multiplied. In the middle-class, meritocratic world of work, maleness and masculinity were no longer God-given but had to be earned through ambition and rivalry. Gainful employment outside the home became the guiding principle of male existence. The woman became responsible for secure domesticity.
It is true that the model of Western masculinity was consolidated in this way – the white, educated, working and emotionally controlling (heterosexual) middle-class man. But social life and new places of social life such as cabarets, gentlemen’s clubs, boarding schools, smoking rooms or factories brought forth new figures. For example the drunkard collapsing under pressure to succeed, the gambler, the eternal suitor, the proletarian, the dandy.
The Law of the Father
New types of men also emerged with the wars. The veteran who cries on the bed in a fine-ribbed undershirt has become a literary figure. In the film comedies of the 1950s, widowed, tenderly clumsy single fathers like Heinz Erhardt or Heinz Rühmann stood for the emergence of a new form of masculinity. Finally, the hippie thwarted the cigar-smoking office clerk, and the sexual revolution of the 1960s proclaimed the end of the patriarch.
The mother’s son, like the gambler, the drunkard, the hysteric, is a type of dysfunctional man, a cliché of masculinity created out of the middle of bourgeois society. He is there where the father is not, but should be, and where only the mother remains. For Sigmund Freud, the mother was the “first other”. By virtue of her love and her upbringing, she ascribes intention and meaning to the unorganized, wriggling expressions of the child; she is the first unconditional authority for the child, only then comes the father.
The law of the father, known from psychoanalysis, which pronounces the prohibition of castration and incest and thus interrupts the close bond between the child and the mother, is suspended in the case of the mother’s son. For him, the mother remains the first and the last, everlasting other, the eternal representative of the unsuccessfully broken off oedipal phase.
Angel without wings
According to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, a child initially identifies with its mother and feels as one with her body. Then the father enters this constellation and forbids further identification of the child with the mother. He pronounces the “ban on incest”. The child must submit to the law of the father and henceforth desire something else. It enters the symbolic order of society, replacing the beloved mother with other objects of desire.
The mother and the son who are destined for great things, perhaps also for great misfortune: Oedipus and Jocaste in an illustrated manuscript of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” from the 15th century.
Alongside the caricature is a positive, faith-infused image of the mother’s son – and perhaps there is only superficial tension between the two. Mothers influence their children, especially their sons, with words or deeds, the meaning of which is often unclear and which only have an impact later in the child’s life. They can do good there, trigger great achievements and creations, but they can also cause harm.
«You are guided. You are an angel without wings, »Fini says to her son Percy in Martin Walser’s «Muttersohn». Even as a child she explained to him that no man was involved in his conception. Percy was chosen, a “mother’s son” in the truest sense of the word. And Percy? Makes a career, becomes a nurse in the Scherblingen psychiatric hospital, a former monastery. He is known for his fearlessness. He becomes a famous speaker, soon appears on television. But fatherlessness is nagging at him, and a journalist asks him if he wants to compete with Jesus of Nazareth. A psychiatric institution and piety, broken Oedipus, lonely Jesus: Martin Walser’s mother’s son lives at the interface between delusion and belief.
The mother’s son, who lives beyond the prohibition of incest, fear of castration and the law of the father – this distinguishes him from other types of masculinity connoted as ridiculous – is one of the most powerful archetypes of mankind. Behind it stands the mother’s son Jesus Christ, with whose birth and death not only the image of the suffering and adoring mother arose, but also that of the fatherless son adoring his mother. The son who snuggles up to his mother, worships her and, following his example, monks dreamed of being a mother’s son themselves and lying on the breast of Maria lactans, the nursing Mother of God.