Ryan Newcomb
Midterm Paper
Professor Wexler
Film as Literature
Blame Mom
As far back as we can remember mothers have been the main form of a Childs upbringing. This in my opinion is what I am going to argue is the birth of an ego. Mothers hold high standards for their sons mainly more than their daughters and this is why they form such an ego. The mother regards the son much higher than any other boy and often times much higher than the father like figure. This nourishment of the ego makes it large and in a child can cause severe harm in later adulthood. I will offer several texts in which the overbearing love of the mother is what drives the enlargement of the ego in multiple men.
In Portnoys Complaint we saw that the Jewish mother saw her son as a real fine man, even at a younger age he was the man of the house more so than the husband. The mother cared after the child and made sure that he grew up to be a fine man and not do things like eat French fries. When a child is put under this weight of love than he thinks himself truly greater than any other guy, he sees this in his father. The father is the only other man that is looking for attention from mother, and when mother pays more attention to the son than the father it sends an image to the child that he is valued and hence more important than the husband. When this love is placed deeply within the child at an early age, the man can grow up to be quite the egotist.
In This Side of Paradise, the son continually talked about his mother and how she was so loving and wonderful to him, though he was not Jewish and it was not really his customs, she was the reason for his ego in adulthood. I can tell this by when he mentions the mother in such a high esteem, we all love our mothers but putting her up on a pedestal and telling others that he would be nothing without her is something that I find quite creepy. Yes I love my mother but that isn’t the point. The point is that I don’t have an ego and people in the tales that we have studied in class do, I just found a correlation between overbearing mothers and ego whores. This Side of Paradise is a prime example of an ego. Amory sees himself above other not only because his family’s’ riches but also because he just plain thinks that he is better than others in all ways shapes and forms. This ego in him is not such a healthy thing in the eyes of most people, not his rich friends, and comes from a single prime source. Before he knew money, before he knew power, he knew love. He knew the love from his mother and knew that if his mom paid so much more attention to him than his dad than he might be special as well. The mothers love is what gave birth to the love of the finer things and thinking that he deserved them. Ego is a powerful thing and can harm one’s self and others.
Finding the birth of a person’s ego is not an easy task to accomplish, but I am here to state that having an over loving mother will help the process of an enlarged ego along. Let me make myself perfectly clear that I am not saying that egos only come from over loving mothers, and I am also not saying that any loving mother can cause this damage. I am saying that a mother with an over obsession with the son can possibly be the reasons for a son having an enlarged ego. An enlarged ego means that the person sees himself over others in the sense that he is better than them in all ways. He might have more power, he might have more money, he might have more women, the cause does not matter, the point is that he is better than all others. When a child is young he does not know much past what his mother tells him. We all know the phrases and games we grew up with and what mother taught us was right and wrong. Right and wrong was taught to us by our mothers and if our mother thinks that it is right for us to think highly of ourselves, higher than others, than it is right in the mind of the youth.