You're so like your mother in some ways. Your face is the dead image of hers. And look at your hair. You won't meet hair like yours and hers again in a month of Sundays. I only know of one other woman who had it. You'll think it strange when I tell you. It was my mother.

Brant makes this strange compliment, or rather confession, to Lavinia in Act I of "Homecoming." It situates him square in the Oedipal drama that structures the trilogy. Brant loves those who substitute for his mother, the defiant Marie Brantôme. The point of fixation of his fantasies is the Mannon women's lustrous hair. This fixation becomes a recurrent motif the Mannon men, similarly locating them in the incestuous Mother-Son relation.