Words & Stuff. Mostly about Technology…
We cannot escape Euripides’ Medea . When Medea kills her children to wound her unfaithful husband, Jason, she commits the ultimate transgression against the maternal bond. Yet, the play forces us to sit in her agony. It asks: how does a son bear the knowledge that he was used by his mother as a weapon? This ghost haunts every subsequent story of maternal revenge.
Early cinema often leaned into the "Mother Martyr" trope. We cannot escape Euripides’ Medea
The 19th century codified the “angel in the house” but also produced its subversive critics. In Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield , the hero’s gentle, childlike mother, Clara, is a lamb led to slaughter by the monstrous Mr. Murdstone. David’s entire life is an attempt to recover the lost warmth of her embrace. Conversely, Edmund Gosse’s memoir Father and Son (1907) brilliantly inverts the focus: the mother is a pious, loving but weak figure whose death leaves the son alone with a tyrannical father. The son’s rebellion against religion is, at its core, a rebellion against the memory of his mother’s fragile passivity. It asks: how does a son bear the