But the Victorians also gave us the first great subversion: the monstrous mother. In Dickens’ own Great Expectations , Miss Havisham is not a biological mother but an adoptive one, and her relationship with the orphaned Pip is one of calculated cruelty. She raises Estella to break men’s hearts and, in turn, molds Pip into a puppet of shame and desire. Miss Havisham represents the mother as architect of neurosis—a theme that would explode in 20th-century literature.
In auteur cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975) presents the mother as a haunting, lyrical presence. The son (the filmmaker himself) revisits his childhood through fragmented memories: his mother’s hands, her anxious wait by a fence, her aging face. Tarkovsky argues that the mother is the original filmstrip—the first set of images burned into the son’s consciousness. To make art is to develop that negative, endlessly. mom son gif updated
In the end, the mother-son bond is the first story we ever hear. And we spend the rest of our lives—as readers, as viewers, as sons—trying to retell it, understand it, and perhaps, finally, let it go. Further viewing: Psycho, The 400 Blows, The Namesake, Moonlight, Terms of Endearment. Further reading: Sons and Lovers, Beloved, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Black Boy. But the Victorians also gave us the first