4. The Fairy Cave (Chapters 18–28)

The lives of the second-generation children, with their contrasting education and upbringing, begin to interact in adolescence, when Cathy and Linton reach the significant age of twelve or thirteen, and Hareton is six years older. The story focusses on Cathy, who echoes and develops her mother's ‘double nature’ in her attraction to her two cousins and to her two fathers — Heathcliff again playing the anti-hero, or anti-father. In the exploratory, outward moves of her adolescence, she is simultaneously discovering the history of her forbears, and her own internal constitution: forming her present and future identity in the light of the past. The strands of the narrative interweave romance and anti-romance, education and anti-education, creative and destructive parenthood: all in a way which echoes the experience of the first generation, but without its rigid black and white alternatives. The picture becomes multi-tone, the texture varied, just as its single heroine is ‘elastic as steel’, made of resilient material, at home in different worlds. Cathy's explorations of the Heights, while still based at the Grange, begin with the Fairy Cave and end with her exit from ‘her mother's window’, suggesting the search for knowledge not only of her own body but also of her mother's body, her own first home. The ‘moaning doll’ of a baby who maintained a ‘constant wail’, later examines the ‘mortal cells’ (a phrase from the poems) of her mother: the passages, the exits and entrances of her mother's wailing child-ghost. The entire second-generation story seems governed by pulsing emanations from Catherine's grave in the moor, which localises the ancestral and unconscious emotional roots grafted via Heathcliff from Earnshaw's gift of God. Edgar, Heathcliff and the second Catherine each construct their interpretations of heaven by means of their individual imaginative links with Catherine's newly-forged heaven ‘in the middle of the moor’.

The second Catherine integrates and modifies t