3. A Moral Teething (Chapters 10–17)

In the complicated central section of the book, the ‘prophecy’ of ‘fearful catastrophe’ foreshadowed in Catherine's told and untold dreams, is fulfilled. It is a multiple catastrophe, involving a change of state in all the protagonists, brought about through the double action of Isabella's ‘romance’ with Heathcliff, and Catherine's pregnancy and progress towards death. The stories of the two ‘rivals’ for Heathcliff, parallel one another in significance like masque and antimasque. Simultaneous in time, their narration is interleaved, with Grange and Heights viewpoints penetrating one another through Isabella Linton's narratives from her new home at the Heights, and Heathcliff's secret haunting of the Grange. Together the twin stories weave a tapestry of meaning around the central figure of Heathcliff and the process he terms his ‘moral teething’. The image of his ‘teething’ on Isabella and on Hindley, is echoed by the implicit imagery of birth and labour resulting in the ‘unwelcomed infant’ the second Catherine; it indicates a major adjustment being made in the underlying fabric of the Linton-Earnshaw emotional network. Heathcliff's ‘labour of Hercules’ on the persons ‘belonging’ to Catherine, is a kind of anti-romance about a knight winning his spurs, a degraded hero performing the impossible. Instead of spurs, a ‘tooth’ is evolved, with the emergence of the first headstone outside the traditional burial places of the Lintons and Earnshaws. The ancient rocky bone-structure shows through the mould, and a new dimension of action is created, a tension between bone and spirit, establishing new lines of power between different levels of existence. Simultaneously, Isabella's hostaged ‘soul’ escapes from its ‘purgatorial’ prison at the Heights; Catherine's soul escapes from its ‘shattered prison’; and the second Catherine is born from the same confines of her mother's body. Nelly looks back on this painful process, shot with imagery of blood, bone and weapons, as a ‘dismal