If you’ve ever stood at the base of a tall tower—whether it’s a rickety old church steeple in a small European village, a sleek glass skyscraper in a bustling metropolis, or even a crudely built watchtower in a fantasy novel—you might’ve felt that quiet, almost unshakable draw to look up at it. I’m in the tower business, let’s be real, and I’ve spent years driving out to job sites, fixing up old radio towers, and chatting with writers at local book clubs who mention they’re using towers in their stories. What always blows me away isn’t just how these structures hold up wires or signal, but how they hold up a whole universe of symbolic meaning, even when the author didn’t set out to do that. Towers
Let’s start with the oldest stuff. Ancient civilizations built towers way before we had cell phones or office Wi-Fi, right? The Tower of Babel in the Bible is the big one people always point to, but go a step further and look at ziggurats in Mesopotamia—those stepped, mud-brick towers that connected the earth to the sky, according to old beliefs. Back then, a tower wasn’t just a pile of bricks; it was humanity trying to reach something beyond their reach, whether that was God, better crops, or a better view of invading armies. Now fast-forward to literature, and that ancient “reach” theme sticks around, but it twists depending on who’s telling the story. Take Wuthering Heights—Emily Bronte uses that isolated, wind-scoured tower on the Yorkshire moors as more than just a setting for Heathcliff and Catherine’s secret meetings. It’s a wedge between them, a symbol of how their passion is both elevated and trapped. You can’t miss that, right? That tower isn’t just a place to sneak around; it’s a physical barrier between the moor’s freedom and the claustrophobic manor, a stand-in for all the things that keep people from each other.
I’ve worked on a lot of heritage towers over the years, too—old lighthouses and church steeples that have been around for a hundred years or more. Those show up in literature a ton, often as symbols of isolation or guidance. Think of the tower in Jane Eyre, the one Bertha Mason is locked up in. That’s such a raw, unmissable symbol of entrapment. Bertha’s not just a madwoman; she’s the secret Rochester wants to bury, and that tower is her gilded cage, a place where she’s cut off from the world, just like she’s cut off from her own humanity. On the flip side, lighthouses—there’s that iconic one in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. It’s the throughline of the whole book, right? The characters chase it, wait for it, struggle to reach it. That lighthouse isn’t just a navigational tool for sailors; it’s a symbol of the things we keep reaching for: clarity, peace, a sense of purpose. I’ve stood on lighthouses I fixed up at dawn, watching the light cut through the fog, and I swear I get that same feeling Woolf’s characters do—like there’s something solid up there, even when everything feels messy down below.
Modern towers, though? They’ve changed the game. Not the medieval stone ones, but the steel and glass skyscrapers, the cell towers that dot our suburbs, the radio towers that hold up our favorite podcasts. Those get way less credit as symbols, but they’re just as loaded. Take the Empire State Building in Sleepless in Seattle—wait, that’s a movie, but it’s based on that same kind of urban romanticism. That tower’s not just an office building; it’s a place where two lonely people can connect across a city of millions. Or think about cell towers, something I work on every single day. You don’t see them in a lot of literary stories, but when you do, they’re usually about connection—for better or worse. I remember a short story I read a couple years back, set in a tiny mountain town where the only cell signal comes from a tower on the edge of town. The protagonist, a teen stuck in a dead-end life, uses that tower to video chat with her best friend in another state, and it’s both her escape and her reminder that she feels left behind. That tower isn’t just metal and concrete; it’s the thread that ties together modern loneliness and modern connection.
Wait, let’s not sleep on the dark side of towers either. Some of the most memorable towers in lit are prisons, right? The Tower of London, which I’ve visited a couple times on slow work trips—those walls are thick, man. In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Darnay gets locked up in the Tower, and it’s a symbol of the French Revolution’s chaos, how power can lock up anyone, no matter who they are. Or the watchtowers in Game of Thrones—those are always places where secrets get kept, where guards watch for enemies, where tension simmers. That’s the thing about towers: they’re elevated, so you can see everything from up there, but no one can see you easily. That makes them perfect for both keepers of secrets and people hiding from the world. I once fixed a watchtower for a park service, and the ranger who works there told me they’ve found love notes, hidden cameras, even a few lost kids’ toys up there. It’s like the tower absorbs all those messy human moments, and that’s why writers keep coming back to it.
Here’s the angle I love as a tower supplier, by the way: towers are versatile. You can use them for almost any symbolic theme, which is why they pop up in everything from ancient myths to young adult novels to literary classics. If a writer needs to show a character reaching for something, you put them on a tower. If they need to show entrapment, lock a character in a tower. If they need to show connection, build a tower to hold a radio signal. It’s not just a building; it’s a blank canvas, basically. I’ve had indie authors reach out to me before, asking about small cell towers for a dystopian novel they’re writing, where the towers control all the media. We don’t do custom literary props, but I love when people in the book world get excited about what we do—we’re not just selling steel and antennas, we’re helping bring those symbols to life.
A lot of people ask me, why towers? Why not just a hill or a ladder or something else? Because a tower is permanent, right? It’s built to last, even when everything around it changes. Think about the ancient ziggurats I mentioned—they’re still there, thousands of years later, and stories about them are still being told. Or the radio towers I work on: I replaced a bunch of old wooden ones last year, and the new steel ones are gonna be up for decades, even as the technology they hold changes. That permanence is part of the symbol, too. A tower isn’t a temporary structure; it’s a marker, a point of reference, for the characters in a book and for the people building it, just like for the people in the stories.
Let me wrap this up. Whether it’s a 3,000-year-old ziggurat, a medieval prison tower, or a sleek modern cell tower, these structures aren’t just about holding things up. They’re about the stuff that makes stories tick: connection, isolation, ambition, fear, the things we reach for and the things that trap us. If you’re a writer, a producer, or someone who’s working on a project that could use a tower—whether it’s for a plot point, a setting, or that perfect symbolic beat—hit us up to chat. We don’t do fancy corporate pitches, we just want to build something that works for your story, no strings attached.
Fintube References:
- Abrams, M. H., & Greenblatt, S. (Eds.). (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed.). W.W. Norton & Company.
- Bachelard, G. (1958). The Poetics of Space (Maria Jolas, Trans.). Beacon Press.
- Kampen, J. K. (2001). The Symbolic Architecture of English Literature: Towers, Cathedrals, and Castles. Cambridge University Press.
- Woolf, V. (1927). To the Lighthouse. Hogarth Press.
- Bronte, E. (1847). Wuthering Heights. Thomas Cautley Newby.
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