Educated: A Memoir

Buck’s Peak, the mountain that looms over Westover’s hometown, serves as a powerful symbol throughout Educated. What exactly does the mountain represent? Keep in mind the core themes of the memoir, as you reflect on these questions:

• Does Buck’s peak have a singular symbolic meaning? Or are there several?
• Consider the natural characteristics of the mountain. How does that affect the symbolism?
• Analyze moments in the text at the beginning, middle, and end of the novel when Westover describes the mountain. How does her attitude toward Buck’s Peak change over time?
• How do other characters respond to and/or interact with the mountain?

Teaching Suggestion: Buck’s Peak serves as a symbol for home for Westover, and her complicated relationship to “home.” The mountain also represents stability–for better or for worse. The mountain (like her father) remains unchanged overtime. Other characters, notably her father, are connected to the mountain; they tell stories about it that shape Westover’s understanding of both the mountain and herself. By the end of the memoir, the mountain remains unmoved, but Westover’s way of looking at it has changed. Westover’s attitude toward the mountain connects to the theme of Leaving Home and Finding One’s Place in the World and The Challenge of Memory and Story.

Differentiation Suggestion: For advanced learners, consider concluding this discussion with an analysis of how other writers have used mountains as symbols. Focusing on poetry, ask students to read: (1) “The Mountain” by Elizabeth Bishop, (2) “A Woman and Mountains” by Helen Hoyt, and (3) “Animals from Mountains” by W. S. Merwin. What are some of the commonalities between these poets’ mountains and Buck’s Peak? How do they differ? Finally, ask students if, in reading these poems, they came to any new understanding into Westover’s symbolism with Buck’s Peak.