The mother an old theme in art, one of the oldest.  But stereotypical?  Except for Medea?  The daughter as protagonist practically absent from the canon?  Except in the writing of women--Austen, Colette (who made myth of her mother, but was herself, apparently, a poor mother), Woolf, Plath, Cixous.

Well, what about Lear?  What about Lear?  What about Shakespeare's daughters in general? Juliet?  What about Freud?  Lear owns Lear's tragedy, not Cordelia, who is steadfastly a figure of pathos, like Iphigenia, a passive object of injustice.

So daughters should be--like the domestic, as Eavan Boland points out in her new book, A Journey with Two Maps--a theme available to women now.  Why shy away from subjects unconsecrated by millenia of canonic writing?