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Personification

  • 'personification' describes a rhetorical technique, one of many kinds of trope or metaphor; whereas 'pathetic fallacy' describes a disposition of the human mind.
  • Generally, Pathetic fallacy is confused with personification.
  • They differ in their function.
  • Pathetic fallacy is a kind of personification that gives human emotions to inanimate objects of nature for example referring to weather features reflecting a mood. Personification, on the other hand, is a broader term. It gives human attributes to abstract ideas, animate objects of nature or inanimate non-natural objects.

Taken from Act I, Scene II of “Romeo and Juliet”,

“When well-appareled April on the heel

Of limping winter treads.”

“The night has been unruly. Where we lay,

Our chimneys were blown down and, as they say,

Lamentings heard i’ th’ air, strange screams of death,

And prophesying with accents terrible

Of dire combustion and confused events

New hatched to the woeful time. The obscure bird

Clamored the livelong night. Some say the Earth

Was feverous and did shake.”

-Macbeth

“The somber clouds darkened our mood

PATHETIC FALLACY &

PERSONIFICATION

Rosario Muxica

Constanza Vallejo

Examples

Difference

Pathetic fallacy

  • Poetic practice of attributing human emotion or responses to nature, inanimate objects, or animals.
  • The practice is a form of personification that is as old as poetry, in which it has always been common to find smiling or dancing flowers, angry or cruel winds, brooding mountains, moping owls, or happy larks
  • Horror and gothic genras
  • Personification is a figure of speech where human qualities are given to animals, objects or ideas.
  • In the arts, personification means representing a non-human thing as if it were human.
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