Wuthering Heights

Analysis of the works of the Confessional poets, such as Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, sometimes disproportionately relies on biographical context; this tendency is even more pronounced in the case of Plath, with her deeply personal subject matter and history of clinical depression. However, though Plath’s poems draw from her experiences, they are works of artifice and craft. Plath uses the intensely personal to deliberately dive into the universal, making her themes identifiable. In “Wuthering Heights,” the biographical context of the poet having depression and an increasingly fraught marriage is transformed into the experience of the universal isolated self. The speaker of the poem is the only human in the landscape, which immediately establishes their loneliness. The landscape is described in terms of how it frames and menaces the speaker, as seen in the first line itself: “The horizons ring me like faggots” (Line 1, emphasis added). Instead of being a part of the landscape, the speaker’s self is in opposition to the horizon, the moor, and the sheep. Throughout the poem, the speaker uses multiples where one would suffice, such as “horizons” (Line 1), “distances” (Line 6), and “solitudes” (Line 29). The sheep, the “grasstops” (Line 10), the wheel ruts all exist in multitudes. The effect this creates is of the speaker’s solitary self being besieged by many hostile forces.

These hostile forces are social and personal pressures experienced by many. What is evident is that the speaker feels they do not belong in the landscape. At the same time, the speaker is out on a lonely walk, which indicates they may be seeking respite from human company. Thus, they feel out of place in the world of both humanity and nature; they simply do not fit in. Different elements of the landscape symbolize particular difficulties for the speaker. The horizons, which once promised peace but are now unstable, could represent changed personal circumstances, while the wind represents the force of fate. The sheep are other people, wolfish under their kind, grandmotherly costumes, judging and belittling the speaker. The sky is a heavy weight reminiscent of the speaker’s altered mental state.

Most of these elements are described as strong and uncompromising, in opposition to the self’s vulnerability. Even the unstable horizons don’t die but “dissolve and dissolve” (Line 8), finding a new life (in the sense that the horizons recede as the speaker approaches them). The strong wind “pours by like destiny” (Line 12), and even the heather tempts the speaker to sink to their death. Absurd as they appear, the sheep are powerful enough to make the speaker feel like they are “being mailed into space” (Line 23) or oblivion. The sheep’s bleats are described as “hard, marbly baas” (Line 27), suggesting invincibility. Plath uses these instances to point to a small, victimized, and fragile self eroded by the pressures of living. Significantly, the one element the speaker identifies with is the grass “beating its head distractedly” (Line 39). Like the speaker, the grass is “too delicate / For a life in such company” (Lines 40-41). The word “company,” with its associations of human society, indicates that what the speaker fears after all is not the natural landscape they are describing but the pressures imposed by people and their institutions. The darkness that terrifies the grass may not be the coming of the night after all, but the houses, the lights of which offer little relief. The self feels belittled and oppressed by institutions: the female self by patriarchy, the American self by English parochialism (represented by the sheep), the impoverished self by materialism (the houses gleaming with “small change” [Line 45]).