At the beginning of the children’s confinement, Corrine tells them about her own strict upbringing, where anything remotely evocative of sex, such as going to dances, where “your body might be pressed close to that of the opposite sex,” was forbidden, and of her own impulse to rebel, which made her “worse” than she “would have been otherwise” (92). Arguably, Corrine’s incestuous relationship with her half-uncle was largely her parents’ own doing. As they denied her the opportunity to go to dances where she might meet other boys, she had to focus on the single attractive specimen in the house. Similarly confined, and subjected to grandmother’s restrictions, pubescent Cathy and Chris also face conditions that would engender an incestuous relationship between them.

At the beginning of their captivity, when they are still largely pre-pubescent, Cathy and Chris look on grandmother’s prohibition of boys and girls being in the bathroom at the same time with humor and ridicule. They decide that “it wouldn’t really hurt anyone” if Chris talks to Cathy while she bathes, and that grandmother is the “loony-bird” with mad, perverted ideas (71; 57). However, when two and a half years have passed, and Chris and Cathy have entered puberty and begin wishing for the attention of the opposite sex, the bathroom becomes a space of sexual tension.