Essay/

Mothers vs. Sons 

Thanks to mothers, men have not destroyed this wicked world. Mothers are thoughtful, serene, understanding, and the only human beings who can make men’s greedy and pretentious obsessions with power and money come down to earth. But mothers are also obstinate, stubborn, intense, silly, and the most exasperating element in men’s routine. Yet this is not a tragedy, but a generation gap people have to understand. As normal as it to see a mother patronizing her son, it is also common to notice a young man sat next to his mom, awfully annoyed, jaw-muscles visibly tightened, eyes focused beyond, and an expression that screams inside ‘I wanna kill myself!’. This is part of life, however; it is the way relationships between mothers and sons are. A way to accurately explain this common situation is by examining generation gaps in specific time and space. Generalizing in human relations is a big mistake, and a far more precise way to explain them is with particular examples. Generation gaps are the origin of problems between mothers and sons, and this can be seen both in Woody Allen’s Oedipus Wrecks, a hilarious, short story compiled in the movie New York Stories, and through the example of Julian and his mother’s relationship narrated by Flannery O’Connor in Everything That Rises Must Converge.

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Sheldon is a brainy, nervous New York lawyer who is being always irritated by his infuriating, Jewish, shrill-voiced mother, Mrs. Millstein. Having grown up during the Second World War, she teases him all the time, embarrasses him, criticizes him and patronizes him in front of his girlfriend, family and friends. Every remark from Mrs. Millstein to Sheldon, who was raised in the liberal society of the ‘60s, has a bad connotation of him: that he is getting bald, that he had red hair when young, that he does not like her apartment, that he has changed his last name to Mills, that he does not take his bread with butter, that he always wet his bed when he was a kid. Sheldon complains about her all permanently with his 15-year-long therapist, realizing he wishes she would disappear.

Since his mother also disapproves of his fiancé Lisa, he is forced to take them both –and Lisa’s children– to a magic show, where Mrs. Millstein is chosen to be part of the act. She is put in a box that has swords stuck through it and she disappears like she is supposed to, but then she never reappears. Suddenly, Sheldon’s nightmare fades away. At work, in bed, in his finances: in all aspects of life he seems to get over all his troubles. All of a sudden, however, his mother reappears in the sky over Manhattan. She starts gossiping with every random New Yorker about Sheldon, providing his personal details and embarrassing traits, convincing everyone that Lisa is no good for him. This puts a strain on his relationship with Lisa and they separate. Sheldon goes to see a physic, Treva, to try to bring his mother back to the real world. Treva's experiments do not work, but Sheldon falls for her, not realizing that it is because of her similarity to his mother. Therefore, when he introduces Treva to his mother, she approves of her and decides to come back to Earth.

In the end, Mrs. Millstein gets her own way. Her plan of marring Sheldon to the right woman, according to her judgment, is achieved. This reveals that despite generation gaps, mothers occasionally are able to dominate their sons the way the want to. In the words of Washington Post’s writer Hal Hinson, Allen’s Oedipus Wrecks “is an exploration of every man's horror of horrors. Delivered as a kind of psychoanalytic confession, the film is a surrealistic comedy about emasculation -- a modern fable about a man's struggle to wiggle out of his diapers”.

Regardless of any psychoanalytic interpretation, the difference between mother and son is both evident and droll in this story, which demonstrates one of the major outcomes of generation gaps: there is not a single aspect in which mothers and sons agree, and every single detail of life is a potential fight between them. In this case, their opinions about Judaism and relationships, the way they eat and talk, their vision of the past and their beliefs about the present; every facet of life is a maddening debate between them. Due to the fact that Sheldon and his indomitable mother were raised in dissimilar periods of history, in which moral codes and social relationships were different, their relashionship will never be peaceful.

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In spite of the Freudian background of Allen’s story, this is a witty way to understand the generation gap. Which is totally acceptable. However, it is also necessary to have a more concrete example, which is exactly what O’Connor provides in her short story. By the way, it is also important to consider that The Milstein’s conflict takes place in the cosmopolitan city of New York, whereas the one we are going to start to discuss takes place in the south of the United States, where racial beliefs were more entrenched and where the acknowledgement of changes was more difficult. That is why the second disparity I present is a more radical example of the generation gap.

While in Allen’s Oedipus Wrecks Sheldon is a totally different person from his mother because he grew up in a totally different context, the years after 1968, which is the same temporal difference between Julian and his mother. Everything That Rises Must Converge was written in 1969 and, from the start, it demonstrates that its main point is about the disparity between two generations, about two incompatible personalities, about the generation gap. The ‘60s was the decade when the counter-culture and social revolution took place, giving birth to movements in favor of civil rights or gay rights and against the war and discrimination; among others. Overall, especially in the south, the ‘60s changed a lot of moral paradigms that had repressed people and had discriminated against minorities, especially the black community.

Julian’s mother was born before these changes and Julian is growing up while they are happening. And that is why we can begin qualifying her as a shameless racist who clashes with her liberal son over every single event or topic. The plot of the story is just an excuse O’Connor uses to illustrate this disparity, since it is an everyday, ordinary story: the story of Julian taking his mother to an specialized gym for old, overweight people in the city, and encountering a reality she doesn’t accept on the way there. So more that the actual plot, the importance of the story is its setting, the social and cultural conditions to which it refers.

Specially, O’Connor is talking about a discrepancy regarding the role of blacks in society, about which she says, “It’s ridiculous. It’s simply not realistic. They should rise, yes, but on their side of the fence”, and Julian responds, “we have mixed feelings.”(4) In addition, they have different opinions about cultural and moral values, of which Julian says, “true culture is in the mind”, and she replies, “it’s in the heart, and in and in how you do things and how you do things is because of who you are.” (5) And no sooner has she insulted a black person, than she is pontificating about ‘Us’ Vs. ‘The others’: “It must be the afternoon sun. I see we have the bus for ourselves”. (7) Nevertheless, the enlightening fragment is when O’Connor writes in her own voice, not only about dissimilar feelings, but also about certain bitterness that Julian’s mother feels:

“What she meant when she said she had won was that she had brought him up successfully and had sent him to college and that he had turned out so well-good looking (her teeth had gone unfilled so that his could be straightened), intelligent (he realized he was too intelligent to be a success), and with a future ahead of him (there was of course no future a head of him).” (9)

 

The life she wanted to give her son, an educated life, made him, ironically, completely different from her: aware of social inequalities, of discrimination’s injustice, and of dogmatism’s problems. Which is why he condemns his mother’s behavior. However, that is not the only aspect O’Connor wants to show; she also suggests that people’s moral values should not be judged, because they are part of the people’s mental structure, one that has been shaped throughout years and years of interaction with a particular society. Julian’s mother was not going to change her mind because the world had changed. On the cotrary, she would criticize the new world based on her conceptions and moral values, which were too deep-rooted to change suddenly.

That impossibility of mind-changing is what Julian realizes when his mother falls down, while she is exasperatedly escaping from an unpleasant situation –a black woman refusing alms– in which she has seen that the world has really changed and that there is nothing she can do. After all, they both learn their lesson: Julian learns that his mother has a different morality he could not judge or pretend to change, and his mother learns that she can not judge the world in which she lives, because its values have changed.

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These two examples of generation gaps are very good to see that the clash between mothers and sons is inevitable; as inevitable, in fact, as the clash between different cultures we see every day in the news. One of the most problematic realities nowadays in the world is the collision between different cultural mentalities. The conflicts between Israelis and Muslims, Muslims and Americans or Europeans and Africans have become issues that threaten the world peace and have to be understood. As a mater of fact, we are not talking about simple differences of opinions, but about a disparity in mentalities that inherently clash and create deep conflict.

Society shapes the way people think. Since the characteristics of each society are not the same, neither are people’s thoughts. That is what happens in cultural clashes, just like in generation gaps. Mothers and sons were raised in different generations, and that is always going to make them clash. However, the lesson O’Connor suggests is quite revealing: the generation gap can be solved with understanding and tolerance. Differences in cultural attitudes will never be eliminated, but they could be accepted. It is not that we cannot live with diversity. Variety is not the problem. We just have to understand it and tolerate it. Narrowness is the problem.