Documenting disordered lives: family relations and problematic forms of social capital in Wuthering Heights

Erben, Michael (2006) Documenting disordered lives: family relations and problematic forms of social capital in Wuthering Heights. 15th Conference of BSA Auto/Biography Group, Leicester, England. 12 - 14 Jul 2006.

Abstract

Documenting Disordered Lives: family relations and problematic forms of social capital in Wuthering Heights.
The use of non-traditional data sources within sociology has seen considerable development within recent years. It will be argued in this paper that descriptions and analyses of social institutions found in fiction can be highly reflective, in Raymond Williams’ terms, of “authentic personal or family experience” . The paper posits that the disordered family life depicted in Wuthering Heights throws light upon some largely unexplained features of the concept of social capital and goes someway to refining the definitions of positive and negative forms of social capital. These issues will be explored and examined through Emily Brontë’s dissection of unresolved familial conflict in Wuthering Heights - between the natural and the cultivated, the passionate and the restrained, the violent and the peaceful, and between family members who either deny time or accept narrative. This theme is explicated by a discussion of open and closed social capital resources within the family and the structural embedding of interactional relations as a consequence of (a) rigid patterns of legal inheritance, (b) misplaced intense affect and (c) atomistic commercial practices.

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