Mother or Monster?

In Hinduism, Mother occupies a pre-eminent role in family & society, next only to God. In fact, even when the son happens to become a sanyasin, & receives the prostrations of everyone regardless of their age, including his own father, he is expected to prostrate himself before his mother.

In contrast, in Western society, the attitudes are rather different. In Aldous Huxley's essay on "Mother", he starts by quoting the Mother's day Greeting:

Mother Dear, you're wonderful
In everything you do!
The happiness of family life
Depends so much on YOU.

He remarks on this sentiment as being popular & superficial & goes into the minority  opinion of people who are aware of Freudian thought, who know that Mother Dear can also be wonderful, possessive mother of an only son whom she babies into chronic infantility, that there are also wonderful, sweet old vampires who go on feeding, into their eighties, on the blood of an enslaved daughter. Being conversant with Hinduism, he does not miss to point out that Kali, the Eternal Mother, is also portrayed as a cannibalistic monster.

In Samuel Butler's "The Way of all Flesh", the protagonist's mother, who had played and won a game of cards with her sisters to be the one to marry his father, a clergyman, used to support her husband in oppressing her son, even resorting to emotional blackmail to get her way. No wonder he threw off the maternal yoke & left home at the earliest.

In Thackeray's "Vanity Fair', the mother pushes her son out of the room to entertain her admirers. Later the son refused to see her lifelong.

In Katharine Anne Porter's chilling short story "He", the mother boasts constantly about her love for her eldest son, born retarded. He is always referred to as only "He", symbolising the reality that he is a cipher. The mother underfeeds & overworks him saying he doesn't mind. When he gets physically irreparably injured & has to be institutionalised, drops of tears finally appear in His eyes & the hypocritical mother exclaims "Oh, what a mortal pity He was ever born!".

In Agatha Christie's novel "Appointment with Death", the mother, formerly a sadistic prison warder, continues her tyranny on her grown up children, who are economically dependent on her. She discovers a former prison inmate, now respectable, & starts to tyrannise her, threatening to expose her past. She kills her, freeing the children from the mother's tyranny.

In the last, unfortunately true story, the boy for whom "Winnie the Pooh" was written was pushed into limelight by his publicity hungry, avaricious mother. He did not see her for the last 10 years of her life, & she refused to see him even on her death-bed.