The Field of Marriage: Cultural Capital and Women’s Submissiveness in the Light of Pierre Bourdieu

Abstract

Since the dawn of history, women have always been subjected to and condemned by men’s will; their choices and power have been limited by men’s authority and domination in patriarchal societies due to their gender. This paper examines Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters and Parinoush Saniee’s The Book of Fate and demonstrates a reciprocal relationship between cultural capital and women’s subordination in the marriage field, the analysis of which will be based on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts of field, capital, and habitus. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts as well as the contextual analysis of the selected novels, the findings of this paper indicate that women’s submissiveness, present in different patriarchal societies throughout history, is the outcome of men’s use of culture as a sort of capital to retain and reproduce their power and domination in all fields, even those related to women, including the field of marriage. Keywords: Pierre Bourdieu, field, cultural capital, habitus, women’s submissiveness, Wives and Daughters, The Book of Fate