2-41).
             The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff is sometimes described as infantile. Some critics claim that the shape of their relation is strongly influenced by their childhood.
             F. H. Langman, for example, asserts that the love of the two main protagonists has its beginnings in their childhood, when they both were isolated and they both needed acceptance which was provided only by their relationship. Therefore, it was already then when they started to identify with each other and later they continue to belong to each other which makes "them feel vital bond with existence" (78). In other words, only by being together can they exist (75-78).
             Similar considerations are included in Eric P. Levy's essay on Wuthering Heights, but his conclusion seems to go in a slightly different direction. According to him, the love between Catherine and Heathcliff is based on rejection which took place already in their childhood. When they were children they were persecuted by Hindley and this somehow brought them together. While in their adulthood, they have nobody to "reject" them, so, they must inflict pain on each other. That is why Catherine decides not to marry Heathcliff and he accuses her of killing him.
             Levy also describes Emily Brontë's characters as Overloved (this group includes Isabella and Edgar) and Underloved (Catherine, Heathcliff and Lockwood). For the latter group love is strongly associated with loneliness, the state of emotions that they experienced in their childhood. Thus, they fantasized about the sheer feeling of love in their imagination, about the safe kind of love, because in such a way they could not be rejected. When they grow up they reject love in their real life in order to experience loneliness that makes them fantasize, because in that way they make real the paradox of their fulfilment, "the wish that love remain no more than wishing" (Levy 2). As a conseq...