Intrinsic
to constraining and self-regulating discourses of motherhood is the child, and
specifically, the expectations concerning mother-child relationships: these relationships
have long been a subject of enquiry from different disciplinary perspectives. In this
paper, Mallan focuses principally on the mother-daughter relationships, and to a lesser
extent, the father-daughter-relationships in two young adult novels: Girl Walking
Backwards by Bett Williams (1998) and Obsession by Julia Lawrinson (2001).