In literature, it’s the quiet tragedy of Gertrude and Hamlet—a mother whose remarriage fractures her son’s sense of reality. In I, Claudius , Livia embodies the possessive matriarch who rules through her son, turning love into a weapon. Meanwhile, in Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter , we see the reverse: a mother struggling not to be consumed by her own child, and the son as both witness and wound.