Most critics read Wuthering Heights as a canonical English romantic love story. However, some critics, such as Wion, assert that this romantic love is modeled on a primal maternal bond. The central figure, Catherine, lost her mother in her early childhood, and seeks a maternal figure to nurture and care for her. She looks to Nelly Dean for the understanding and comfort that a mother might give. It might be odd to think of the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff as a displaced version of the symbiotic relationship between a mother and a child (they are rebellious and resistant). However, the conflict they experience originates from the ambivalent feelings of oneness and separation that a child experiences in its relationship with its mother. Heathcliff is the whole world to Catherine, as the mother is the whole world to the symbiotic child; the boundary between Catherine and her world is ambiguous and problematic. In one telling scene, Catherine sees herself through the mirror; she blurs inner and outer self and loses her identity. At the beginning of this scene, Catherine stares at the mirror and asks, "Is that Catherine Linton?" She knows that what she sees is only her reflection: Catherine is like a child in Lacan`s mirror stage, in which she cannot separate herself from others. Catherine wants to remain in her childhood, and being a child is her daughter Cathy`s way of "being myself." Catherine`s wish to be a child means her reiection of an adult role (motherhood). Dying as she gives birth, she is released to become the ghostly child who appears to Lockwood. The other becomes a child: The child becomes a mother. More than her mother, Cathy represents a successful passage through the difficult rites of adolescence; the search for self, and the sharing of self with others. Cathy mothers Hareton and her own father. Catherine`s desire for maternal love is unfulfilled; her daughter demonstrates active maternal love toward men. Emily Bronte¨ emphasizes the power of maternal influence and the influence of female community through the depiction of the second-generation Cathy in Wuthering Heights.