Mothers and Daughters on the Western Frontier

Schlissel, Lillian

doi:10.2307/3346396

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The disruption of ties with family and friends was difficult and breaking networks of female friendships that formed a support base, with little prospect of forming new ones, might have caused great sadness. Bailey (1983:73) cites Lillian Schlissel (1978), who, in writing about women settlers in the American west, concludes: 'migration was a major dislocation in the emotional fabric of women's lives'.…”

Section: Heterotopias Of Displacement and Alienationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The diary of Bertha Marks as a heterotopia, as articulated in the artwork, <i>The Futility of Writing 24-Page Letters</i>

Farber

Dreyer

2012

Literator

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This article explored the conception, historical context and theoretical underpinnings of Leora Farber’s 2010 artwork entitled The Futility of Writing 24-Page Letters, which forms an extension of the work on her exhibition entitled Dis-Location/Re-Location. The Futility of Writing 24-Page Letters falls within Dis-Location/Re-Location’s thematics, but focuses on one aspect thereof, namely, how fin-de-siècle Jewish colonial women who were immigrants to southern Africa, as exemplified in the persona of Bertha Marks (1862–1934), experienced nineteenthcentury Victorian gender ideologies. Their life experiences often entailed resistance to their positions as subjects of a patriarchal social system; yet, as women, they were simultaneously complicit in upholding discriminatory colonial ideologies and in maintaining the racial,social and cultural prejudices and forms of subjugation that underpinned them. Bertha Marks is shown to have occupied a personalised heterotopia: whilst operating from within, and maintaining the racial and social prejudices of the colonial era, she was simultaneously constrained by her positioning within it. This heterotopic life experience is reflected in the diary extracts which comprise The Futility of Writing 24-Page Letters, which reveal that she occupied the conflicting positions of victim, witness, bystander, collaborator and beneficiary of colonial injustices and exploitation, and assumes varying degrees of co-responsibility and co-liability for her roles and actions

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Section: Heterotopias Of Displacement and Alienationmentioning

confidence: 99%