Passage 130

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.