Mama's boy

Momism was a idea that gained currency in postwar America. It held that a mother who was either overly affectionate or emotionally distant could stunt her children's social and psychosexual growth, sons above all. The most feared result was homosexuality, at a time when sexual nonconformity was watched and punished closely. Van den Oever examines four works that give shape to this idea: Grace Zaring Stone's The Grotto, Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer, Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint.

Rather than treating these texts as isolated achievements, the book reads them as evidence of a particular moment in American culture. Each chapter offers a fresh interpretation of a canonical work while tracing how anxieties about mothers, sons, and sexuality circulated through the period's stories and screens.

The study speaks to readers of American literary and film history, gender studies, and queer studies. It also proposes new ways of reading these familiar texts today.