Notable as important nineteenth-century
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 (anti-hero: n.平凡的主角). Bronte produced a more realistic narrative, portraying a world where men battle for (battle for: v.为...斗争) 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.
17. The primary purpose of the passage is to
(A) defend a controversial interpretation of two novels
(B) explain the source of widely recognized responses to two novels
(C) delineate broad differences between two novels
(D) compare and contrast two novels(D)
(E) criticize and evaluate two novels
18. According the passage, Frankenstein differs from Wuthering Heights in its
(A) use of multiple narrators
(B) method of disguising the author’s real purposes
(C) portrayal of men as determiners of the novel’s action
(D) creation of a realistic story(C)
(E) controversial effect on readers
19. Which of the following narrative strategies best exemplifies the “evidentiary narrative technique” mentioned in line 24?
(A) Telling a story in such a way that the author’s real intentions are discernible only through interpretations of allusions to a world outside that of the story
(B) Telling a story in such a way that the reader is aware as events unfold of the author’s underlying purposes and the ways these purposes conflict with the drama of the plot
(C) Telling a story in a way that both directs attention to the incongruities among the points of view of several characters and hints that the plot has a significance other than that suggested by its mere events
(D) Telling a story as a mystery in which the reader must deduce, from the conflicting evidence presented by several narrators, the moral and philosophical significance of character and event(C)
(E) Telling a story from the author’s point of view in a way that implies both the author’s and the reader’s ironic distance from the dramatic unfolding of events
20. According to the passage, the plots of Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein are notable for their elements of
(A) drama and secrecy
(B) heroism and tension
(C) realism and ambition
(D) mystery and irony(D)
(E) morality and metaphysics
