Cathy was six when seven-year-old Heathcliff came to live with her family, and the two shared a bedroom until puberty, when Heathcliff was banished from the

room by Hindley. The author takes the perspective that the sibling arrangement of Cathy and Heathcliff was fraught with incestuous longings, in addition to a profound mutual identification. An unrelenting conflict over the incest taboo may be responsible for the novel's images of vampirism, necrophilia, and the notion that the two would be united only in death.