“Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man”—so Rousseau begins Emile, his book-length treatise on education. The man here is the anatomical being, that is, biological man as the compulsive reshaper of his physical world, “turn[ing] everything upside down; … disfigure[ing] everything; … lov[ing] deformity, monsters. … want[ing] nothing as nature made it, not even man” (37). Nor are fathers any better, being for Rousseau parents who would think nothing of planting a shrub—that is, a metaphorical child—“in the middle of a path” so that passers-by would kill it “by bumping into it from all sides and bending it in every direction.”

Rousseau can understand the son who does not honor his father, but never one who would disrespect his mother, the parent “who carried him in her womb, who nursed him with her milk, who for years forgot herself in favor of caring for him alone.” For Rousseau, the mother’s motive may not always be spotless; nonetheless, she “wants her child to be happy, happy now.” She is right in her thinking, Rousseau claims, even if she is mistaken about the best means to achieve her end. How different matters are for fathers, he continues, parents whose “ambition, avarice, tyranny, and false foresight, their negligence, their harsh insensitivity are a hundred times more disastrous for children than is the blind tenderness of mothers” (38).

In praising the softness of a mother’s touch, Rousseau turns to the memorable moment in the Iliad when the fearsome warrior Hector, adorned for battle, displays a rare moment of tenderness when reaching to bid his infant son Astyanax farewell. Realizing that the frightened boy has not recognized him, Hector places his helmet on the ground (“fiery in the sunlight”), while lifting up his son and kissing him, then “toss[ing] him in his arms”—that is, with Homer highlighting both Hector’s tenderness and his masculine power. For Homer, Hector’s tenderness is not an end in itself but part of the hero’s larger concern for the transmission of a warrior ethos, as seen in the prayer that he immediately offers to Zeus. In it, he wishes that his son may grow up to be like him, “first in glory among the Trojans,” a son who will bring “joy to his mother’s heart” by returning from battle “battle bearing the bloody gear of the mortal enemy he has killed in war” (211)—a son, in other words, who will be “a better man than his father,” and in so doing following the life path that we will see all the sensitive sons in this study striving so studiously to avoid.

Nor could Rousseau’s commentary on this passage be any more different from Homer’s. Hector’s son is frightened, Rousseau notes, so what is to be done? First, just what Hector does, Rousseau continues—namely, “put[ting] the helmet on the ground, and then caress[ing] the child” (63). Yet in place of the warrior’s bellicose prayer, Rousseau sees what today we call a teachable moment, suggesting that the child’s nurse have him “approach the helmet, play with the feathers,” while she might even “take the helmet and, laughing, place it on her own head”—with Rousseau coyly adding, “if … a woman’s hand dare touch the arms of Hector” (63).

The sensitive sons of this study, unlike Astyanax’s female nurse, could all have become warriors themselves, and, unlike the female nurse, handled Hector’s helmet with impunity. Such, after all, is the traditional path for a boy, as laid out by Hector—to follow in his father’s footsteps. All the sons of our study, however, will seek a different path, not just in an obvious way by pursuing careers as writers, but in a less obvious way that will be our principal concern here—namely, each in maintaining a lifelong attachment to his mother or to a feminine ideal she came to represent. The writers studied here are all sensitive sons for having spent a significant portion of their lives not just under the protection of a mother but under her spell as well, hypnotized—for some but not all, even erotically charged—by a feminine presence they first experienced in her presence.

For writers like Bernard Shaw, Flaubert, and Proust, this meant living at home with their mothers well into middle age; for others, who shared Tolstoy’s history—like Stendhal, whose mother died when he was seven, or Rousseau, whose mother died following childbirth—it meant living their entire lives, haunted by a mother’s absence. In either case, the task is to show how for a select group of literary sons this one relationship became intensely and inextricably interwoven into their emotional and artistic lives. The wellspring of these writers’ creativity, it will be argued, lies in their intimate connection to a feminine ideal that is itself inseparable from an attachment, possibly buried, traceable back to their mother, and then often less to her love for them than to their love or need for her.

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The dozen and a half male writers treated here were selected from the last three hundred years, neither at random nor in an attempt to be comprehensive, but instead for the manner in which they provide a relevant commentary on a feminine ideal, itself associated with an older or at least more imposing woman who occupied in their adult life a superior or commanding place, not unlike the role their mothers had formerly played. While one can contend that all male writers are sensitive sons, in some fashion or another shaped by their relationship to their mothers, clearly not all sensitive sons are alike.

Accordingly, Chapter 2 opens with four brief portraits, like the four sons of the Haggadah each with a particular claim on our attention. First is the rebellious son, Philip Roth, whose comic novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, portrays a struggle between a precocious child and difficult, demanding mother; next is the needy son, Marcel Proust, featured in what is perhaps the single most memorable scene in literature of a young boy’s exclusive claim on his mother’s love; third, the ambitious son, Sigmund Freud, the originator of the Oedipal theory, a bold claim about the universality of a boy’s love for his mother, even if Freud, always an elusive emotional figure, seems more concerned with the standing of fathers; and, finally, the adoring son, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century philosopher and, more important to us, the author of the first modern autobiography, his Confessions, in which we find his account of stealing a ribbon from an older woman. This one anecdote has continued to be a rich source for literary and psychoanalytic theorizing about Rousseau’s motives and about contradictions in his personality as a whole.

It is Rousseau, with his keen fondness for all things feminine, frequently, with an erotic component, whose early life is the focus of Chapter 3 and who will reappear in one form or another throughout the rest of the study as a touchstone figure of our primary subclass of sensitive sons, namely the one characterized various times as adoring or worshipful, or, in other places, affectionate, doting, even submissive.

Chapter 4 looks at what might be that most perfect of such adoring sons—the adolescent page Cherubino, a beloved literary character created by the French playwright Beaumarchais, possibly using the youthful Rousseau as his model, and notably brought to the world stage by Mozart in his comic opera, The Marriage of Figaro. In this chapter, we will also meet the Danish philosopher and Mozart enthusiast Søren Kierkegaard, the first of a different sort of sensitive son, one who lacks the worshipful son’s attraction to all things feminine.

Bernard Shaw and D. H. Lawrence (the subjects of Chapters 6 and 9) are two similar sensitive sons, as are, most likely, the hard-to-fathom Goethe and Freud (Chapters 5 and 7)—all writers labeled here uneasy sons, and defined by their indifference, uncertainty, or, at times, even hostility with regard to the same feminine imagery that so enchants the adoring, worshipful son.

The two primary subclasses of sensitive sons in this study—the adoring son and the uneasy son—are brought together in Chapter 9, contrasting the near-contemporaries, F. Scott Fitzgerald and D. H. Lawrence. These two different sons are presented as kindred spirits, even fraternal twins, distinguished mainly by their different, visceral reactions to femininity: Fitzgerald’s reaction, positive and erotically charged; Lawrence’s, knotted and uncertain.

The term, the sensitive son, may be a coinage, but the underlying personality type is hardly original, most often making its appearances under two broad areas of investigation. The first area is homosexuality, an obvious concern given the depth of feeling these writers showed for their mothers and their concomitant attachment to all things feminine. However, on the surface, this is not a study of gay writers, at least in any obvious way. While half of our authors were lifelong bachelors, only three writers—Proust, covered briefly in Chapter 2, J. A. Symonds, a secondary figure in Chapter 4, and Leonardo Da Vinci, a primary figure in Chapter 7—are today recognized as gay, and, of the three, only Symonds was open about his sexuality. Nonetheless, the issue of homosexuality , along with its close pairing, bisexuality, appears throughout this study, including a discussion in Chapter 8 of Freud’s claim in “A Child Is Being Beaten” that homosexual desire plays an inescapable role in the lives of all these sensitive sons.

The second area is masochism, a late nineteenth-century coinage that from the start conflated two interrelated matters: One was a primary association with people who receive pleasure from physical pain, or from what is construed as painful or embarrassing situations; the other, a secondary association with distraught men and their erotic fascination with strong women. Chapter 8 looks at the original masochistic son, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and his groundbreaking novel, Venus in Furs, the story of a young man whose entire erotic life exists in acting out fantasies of submission to an empress or goddess, a woman whose position blends her feminine gender and beauty with masculine power and dress, including for Sacher-Masoch, the requisite furs.

Indeed, were it worth the effort, it might be possible to tease out a strain of masochistic sentiment in most of our sensitive sons, seeing the adoring son especially as a masochistic son minus an apparent interest in sexual arousal from pain. There is only one writer in this study, however, Sacher-Masoch, for whom we get the full panoply of the whips and chains associated with masochism in the popular imagination, and only one other writer, Hemingway, also briefly considered in Chapter 8, with whom we get a mention of what might be deemed a masochistic sexual practice.

The focus in Chapters 10–13 remains on a series of adoring, worshipful sons. Chapter 10 is on Stendhal and his short treatise, Love, a work that describes his love for a woman with whom, as with any good adoring son, he was never intimate and who, in turn, had shown only modest courtesy toward him. Chapter 11 deals with the midlife crises of two sensitive sons—the English essayist William Hazlitt and, once again, Rousseau, both writers who suffered irreparable damage to their reputations, although guilty of little more than prolonged, albeit reckless flirtation with inappropriate and, no surprise, mostly unresponsive women. Chapters 12 and 13 focus on two lifelong bachelors who became close friends in their old age, Flaubert and Turgenev, with the latter’s autobiographical novella, First Love, presented as the quintessential literary expression of an affectionate son’s unquenchable anguish. The study ends with one last look at Rousseau, this time in old age and asks if we should be surprised at just how little change we see over the decades in the emotional life of such an adoring son.

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As we shall see throughout this study, starting with the four mini-profiles that constitute Chapter 2, these sensitive sons can be characterized by their viewing the world with the subtlety and attention to detail associated either directly with their mothers or indirectly with a broader feminine sensibility. At the heart of each of these sons, we will find a power of esthetic contemplation, a way of organizing experience and gaining mastery of the world, not directly by re-shaping their physical environment—literally bending it to their will, as Rousseau suggests is the routine wont of men—but indirectly through language, that is, by rich, detailed verbal descriptions that we will find througho...