On Wuthering Heights: A “wild workshop[ing]” of Milton’s Paradise Lost

                 “My future—death and hell: existence, after losing her, would be hell.”

—Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights

    Since its publication in 1847, Emily Brontë’s first and only novel Wuthering Heights continues puzzling critics. Following her death in the subsequent year, Emily’s older sister Charlotte edited and republished Wuthering Heights complete with her own critical preface. Her addition reduced Wuthering Heights to a dismal tale that makes little room for virtue, a naïve and premature attempt of writing “spirits [of those] so lost and fallen.” “It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as the root of heath,” wrote Charlotte, “what feeling it spares—what horror it conceals[!]”

    The scholarly Brontë sisters, confined in a home riddled with book-learning, used their narrative voices to assert opinions on independence, feminism, and morality. Nevertheless, Charlotte denounces Emily’s inability to accept that “[the] esteemed virtues in the daughters of Eve, become foibles in the sons of Adam.” Wuthering Heights exchanges the normative traits of men for those in women, calls on the divine but rewards those who befriend evil, welcomes readers into a façade of innocence then forces them to reconsider Christian faith.

    I recently revisited Emily’s controversial tale. Thankfully, my stay in the unprincipled world of Wuthering Heights fell in concurrence with my reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost. As I progressed further into Wuthering Heights, I began to draw parallels between Emily’s Heathcliff and Catherine and Milton’s original pair—What a lovely surprise! This, spontaneously written, article will detail why I believe Wuthering Heights challenges Milton’s Paradise Lost vis-à-vis the polarizing characterization of Heathcliff and Catherine.

    Paradise Lost characterizes the Biblical Adam as rational, intelligent, and committed to upholding the prohibition of God. His only weakness is his love for Eve, the mother of all mankind, who was made in Adam’s image: “her resembling less [God’s] image who made both” (8.543-44). We “shall be one flesh, one heart, one soul,” Adam told the angel Raphael, him and his woman are nothing but two sides of a coin. Abundant, fruitful, and beautiful; Eve’s presence inspires goodness and awe in her spectators (Satan himself exclaims “mine eyes with grief behold...bliss” (4.358-59)). Together they cultivate the Garden of Eden, tending to its abundance and beauty till their fall from grace.

    Though Wuthering Heights refrains from addressing Paradise Lost, Emily alludes to and reimagines the Miltonic Adam and Eve. In chapter IX, Catherine tells Nelly Dean that she and Heathcliff are too similar, identical both in body and soul, and therefore incompatible as husband and wife: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” Eventually Catherine redirects her attention to Edgar Linton, a radically opposite suitor, arguing she must marry him instead. Though Catherine and Heathcliff are the same substance (“I am Heathcliff”) and their souls are metaphysically identical, they made incompatible by the premises that promote the union of Adam and Eve.

My own is thee; for what thou art is mine.

Our state cannot be severed; we are one,

One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself (9.957-59).

Although she marries Linton, Catherine represents a variety of Eve’s sequences. She responds to the temptation and the subsequent fall of mankind with an equivalent ‘fall’ from vitality and into illness. Unable to justify a union with Heathcliff on Earth she wishes to reunite with him in death, in a free afterlife: “I only wish us never to be parted!” Paradise Lost paints a different picture. Adam is initially horrified by Eve’s lapse into the serpent’s scheme, “speechless he stood and pale” (894), but ultimately decides to undergo an identical fate as he cannot live without her. He believes the temptation was successful because he permitted Eve to roam unsupervised: “leave not the faithful side... shades thee and protects” (9.265-66).

Rather than death, or aught than death more dread,

Shall separate us, linked in love so dear,

To undergo with me one guilt, one crime,

If any be, of tasting this fair Fruit (9.969-72).

In contrast, Heathcliff met Catherine’s rapidly approaching afterlife (“she was faded, sure to die”), not with despair but rather with annoyance and resentment. “Are you possessed with a devil, to talk in that manner with me,” he exclaims, “when you are dying?” The blame is not on his person, but on that of Catherine and her husband. Wuthering Heights articulates death as a release from the torments of life as life itself is “a living Death” (10.788). Heathcliff accuses Catherine of foul play and ascribes her dying state to a lucky draw, his good health to misfortune: “While you are at peace I shall write in the torments of hell?” In Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve are terrified of the “bitterness of death” (11.157).

    For Heathcliff and Catherine, the experience of life is one of alienation. Similarity to Adam and Eve, only together do the two of them feel whole. One who argues that Heathcliff’s visit to the Grange was Catherine’s coup de grâce fails to recognize that her existence is one akin to hell. Catherine tells Nelly Dean that “heaven did not seem my home,” urging that she did not belong in a place of innocence, purity, and bliss. Her distaste for all things pure is revisited by Heathcliff himself, her postmortem spokesperson: “My Soul’s bliss kills my body.” It is Heathcliff’s devilish nature and corruption of all things good (Hareton Earnshaw and his own son, Linton Heathcliff), which pulls Catherine to his side. She is unique in her reverence for Heathcliff, his own wife Isabella shames her for so dearly esteeming him and the “Monster” within. However, it was he who secured her fate, he who completed her soul, and he who released her from the shackles of life.

    Eve’s fall is often attributed to the absence of Adam during the temptation. To assert her independence, she urges Adam to let her work in solitude and conquer Satan’s trail. By doing so Eve will at once prove her devotion to God and Adam and strengthen her claim of being dependable and intelligent. In spite of her confidence, the serpent successfully manipulates Eve into consuming the fruit. The outcome of Heathcliff’s reunion with Catherine alludes to the outcome of Eve’s temptation. In Paradise Lost, the pair is punished with death. In contrast, Wuthering Heights rewards Catherine with it. For Adam, death is the end; for Heathcliff, it is just the beginning. “Oh, my life! how can I bear it?” exclaims Heathcliff.

    Despite the lavish, unyielding critiques of Charlotte and others of the time, the ‘immature’ novel eventually secured itself as Victorian Classic. Emily wrote of a seemly ‘perfect’ pair that cannot love, cannot exist without corrupting one another. Her Heathcliff and Catherine challenge the model of Adam and Eve—a seemly perfect union that paradoxically indulges in self-destruction. A modern reader will praise the contradictory—brutish yet transcendental, conservative yet nonconforming—spirit of Wuthering Heights and find it reincarnated in modern film, poetry, and art. “I cannot live without my soul!” wrote Emily, “You said I killed you— haunt me then.” 

P.S. First time writing an essay, albeit informal, just for the fun of it.