Page 16 - GALIET ETERNITY´S LOVE´S Epitaph: Bronte IV

responsible for their actions and for the consequences arising from those actions. As such, the term evil (or the negative forces) simply is as a form of cause and effect rather than a guilty prohibition fleshed with ‘thou shall not’. Yet, if we are to follow our natures at the injury or expense of others as posited by Mill’s On Liberty4 (as the case of Hindley, Heathcliff, Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff, etc.), we can deduce that for Bronte each one of her characters reacts according to his or her nature in proportion to the given injury.
Bronte seems to be espousing a Nature versus Utilitarian philosophy of morality and thus we might see her empathizing with Nietzsche rather than Mill. If this is the case (which I think it is) we face in Bronte’s characters, the meta-beauty of being even when they choose to dwell in the tunnels of self-destruction although Nietzsche prefers positivism rather than negativism. Heathcliff, as master and as a key example of Nietzsche’s master-slave morality, creates his own moral and socio-economic microcosm in Wuthering Heights. As master, he chooses to externalize his pain: he can indeed afford to exercise his ‘other,’ his ‘wolfish’ and ‘vampirish’ nature for “only that which hurts incessantly is remembered.”5 Therefore, Heathcliff no longer seeks internalization for he is what he is: a whole being without the need to internalize himself and divide himself into a physical-being and a soul-being. Nietzsche says, “man had to seek new ... and
4 Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Edited by Elizabeth Rappaport. Cambridge: USA. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1998
5 Nietzche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Cambridge: USA. Hacket Publishing Company, Inc. 1998
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