格物致知

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 antiheroes. 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 intensions, though efforts by critics to articulate these intensions have generated much controversy. Both novelists use a storytelling method that emphasizes the 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 called an evidentiary narrative technique.

文学史：英国雪莱的《科学怪人》和布朗蒂的《呼啸山庄》之比较

玛丽雪莱的《科学怪人》和埃米莉布朗蒂的《呼啸山庄》，都是19世纪女性作家所写的重要小说，但是这两本小说对妇女的描写却是很不相同。雪莱展现一个“男性的”主题，在这个主题中，从属的女性角色的命运似乎完全依赖于男性主角或男性反主角的行动。而布朗蒂则展现一个更加写实的世界，描绘一个男士们竞相争取高傲独立女性的欢心的世界。虽然如此，这两部小说在一些关键的方面是相像的。许多读者确信，每个情节中那具有强烈吸引力的神秘性把精巧的影射结构和朦胧而强劲的似乎表达哲学意图的、道德上的勃勃雄心掩盖了起来，虽然评论家阐明这些意图的努力产生了许多争议。两位小说家都使用这样的讲故事的方法，这种方法既强调表面的戏剧性场面和隐含的作者意图之间的关系中所固有的那种具有讽刺意义的张力，又强调对相同事件持不同观点的令人啼笑皆非的分歧。这种方法，我称之为提供证据的叙事技巧。