Wuthering Heights

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1961

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Biographical Context: Visiting the Yorkshire Moors

“Wuthering Heights” was written in 1961, during or after Plath’s stay with her in-laws in Yorkshire. Plath’s biographers note that the poet had been visiting Yorkshire since 1956, the year she married fellow-poet and Yorkshire-native Ted Hughes. Plath was fascinated by what is known as “Brontë Country,” or the English moors. In a 1956 letter to her mother, Plath wrote, “I never thought I could like any country as well as the ocean, but these moors are really even better, with the great luminous emerald lights changing always” (Plath, Sylvia. Letters Home, 1976). The poet often went for walks around the moors during her Yorkshire trips and at one point visited Top Withens, an old, abandoned building said to have inspired the house in Emily Brontë’s novel. The poem shows the poet’s familiarity with the landscape of the moors, with each metaphor corresponding to fact, such as the ubiquity of sheep in the moors in Plath’s day. Plath also wrote other poems about the moors, including “Hardcastle Crags” (1958) and “The Great Carbuncle” (1957). Additionally, Plath often compared herself and Hughes to Cathy and Heathcliff, the romantic protagonists of Wuthering Heights.

Given these facts, the ambiguous terms in which the poet describes the moors in “Wuthering Heights” may seem strange to the reader. However, the poem is not just about the physical landscape of the moors. It’s also about the speaker’s struggles between hope and uncertainty. The scenery functions as a metaphor for the speaker’s internal landscape. At one level, the moors stand for life itself, in all its power, uncertainty, and pressures. That is why the poet wrote varyingly about the Yorkshire moors; when life became overbearing or unpredictable, the beauty of the moors is experienced as terror or absurdity.

Literary Context: The Confessional and Nature Poetry of Sylvia Plath

Plath is often called a Confessional poet, part of an influential group of American poets who wrote from personal experience in the 1950s and beyond. Confessional poetry draws on intensely personal and raw experiences like mental health, marriage, childbirth, divorce, and suicide. Poets such as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and Plath mined their personal experiences to create raw and immediate poetry. However, the term “confessional” can sometimes be misleading, since it can imply writing poured out of Plath and the others like a confession, or a stream-of-consciousness missive. As “Wuthering Heights” shows, this is far from the case: Though the poems may draw on personal material, they are deliberately structured and crafted. In Plath’s case, the “confessional” is a starting point to delve into the universal. Though the “me” of “Wuthering Heights” may refer to the poet, the alienation and despair expressed by its speaker-persona is familiar to any reader.

Excessive focus on Plath’s biographical context and the confessional nature of her poems can detract from other aspects of her writing. Recent critical readings, for instance, have noted that Plath is also a nature poet, using natural imagery in radical ways in her work. In “Wuthering Heights,” nature becomes a symbol for the speaker’s internal struggles, but this elevates, rather than dims, the power of nature. Plath uses the Romantic concept of the Sublime—the terrifying, awe-inspiring aspect of experience—to describe her speaker’s encounter with a wildly beautiful landscape. The landscape itself is evoked in detail, showing the poet’s deep engagement with nature. The contradiction in the poem of course is that the speaker is deeply affected by and interested in the region despite the ambiguous feelings it inspires. This indicates that though nature, like life, can be wild and hostile, it is worth studying and inhabiting.