In Greek mythology, the mother-son bond is often a weapon. Medea, in Euripides’ tragedy, murders her own sons not out of madness but as the ultimate act of revenge against her unfaithful husband, Jason. Here, the son is an extension of the father—a possession to be destroyed. This introduces the terrifying archetype of the "devouring mother": a figure whose love curdles into possessive fury when betrayed.
Similarly, Clytemnestra kills her husband Agamemnon upon his return from Troy. Her son, Orestes, is then torn between filial duty (avenging his father) and the horror of matricide. Aeschylus’s The Oresteia dramatizes the moment a son must choose between the law of the father (patriarchal justice) and the blood-bond of the mother. Orestes is acquitted only when Apollo argues that the mother is merely a "nurse" to the father’s seed—a deeply misogynistic resolution, but one that underscores how literature has historically used sons to adjudicate between male and female power.
In contrast to Lawrence’s suffocating warmth, Kafka presents the mother as a ghost. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa turns into an insect, and his mother faints at the sight of him, then eventually acquiesces to his removal. She is weak, passive, and complicit in his dehumanization. Kafka’s mother-son bond is one of failed recognition: the mother cannot see the son’s suffering because it is too grotesque, too inconvenient. This anticipates the modern literature of neglect—where the wound is not too much love, but too little.
What makes the mother-son story endure? It is the only relationship that begins in complete physical unity (the womb) and must end in complete separation. Every great novel or film about a mother and son asks the same two questions:
Whether it is Hamlet’s anguish over Gertrude, or Tony Soprano’s panic attacks about his mother Livia, the answer is always the same: No. The thread never breaks. It only stretches.
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