Notable as important nineteenth-century novels by women, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights treat women very differently.
Shelley produced a “masculine” text in which the fates of subordinate female
characters seem entirely dependent on the actions of male heroes or anti-heroes. Bronte produced
a more realistic narrative, portraying a world where men battle for the favors of apparently high-spirited,
independent women. Nevertheless, these two novels are alike in several crucial
ways. Many readers are convinced that the compelling mysteries of each plot
conceal elaborate structures of allusion and fierce, though shadowy, moral
ambitions that seem to indicate metaphysical intentions, though efforts by
critics to articulate these intentions have generated much controversy. Both
novelists use a storytelling method that emphasizes ironic disjunctions between
different perspectives on the same events as well as ironic tensions that
inhere in the relationship between surface drama and concealed authorial
intention, a method I call an evidentiary narrative technique.
No comments:
Post a Comment