pathetic fallacy

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A visual illustration of one of the most famous examples of the literary use of the pathetic fallacy, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Christabel, which was given by Ruskin as an example in his seminal essay Of the Pathetic Fallacy.

The pathetic fallacy or anthropomorphic fallacy is the treatment of inanimate objects as if they had human feelings, thought, or sensations.^{[citation needed]} The pathetic fallacy is a special case of the fallacy of reification. The word 'pathetic' in this use is related to 'empathy' (capability of feeling), and is not pejorative.

The pathetic fallacy is also related to the concept of personification. Personification is direct and explicit in the ascription of life and sentience to the thing in question, whereas the pathetic fallacy is much broader and more allusive.

History

The term was coined by the critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) in his 1856 work Modern Painters, in which he wrote that the aim of the pathetic fallacy was “to signify any description of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions." In the narrow sense intended by Ruskin, the pathetic fallacy is a scientific failing, since most of his defining paper^[1] concerns art, which he maintains ought to be its truthful representation of the world as it appears to our senses, not as it appears in our imaginative and fanciful reflections upon it. However, in the natural sciences, a pathetic fallacy is a serious error in scientific reasoning if taken literally.

In history

When Xerxes was crossing the Hellespont in the midst of the first Greco-Persian War, he built two bridges that were quickly destroyed. Feeling personally offended, his paranoia led him to believe that the sea was consciously acting against him as though it were an enemy. As such Herodotus quotes him as saying "You salt and bitter stream, your master lays his punishment upon you for injuring him, who never injured you. Xerxes will cross you, with or without your permission."^[2] He subsequently threw chains into the river, gave it three hundred lashes and "branded it with red-hot irons".^[3]

In literature

Literary critics after Ruskin have generally not followed him in regarding the pathetic fallacy as an artistic mistake, instead assuming that attribution of sentient, humanising traits to inanimate things is a centrally human way of understanding the world, and that it does have a useful and important role in art and literature. Indeed, to reject the use of pathetic fallacy would mean dismissing most Romantic poetry and many of Shakespeare's most memorable images. Literary critics find it useful to have a specific term for describing anthropomorphic tendencies in art and literature and so the phrase is currently used in a neutral sense. Josephine Miles in Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century: A Study of a Changing Relation Between Object and Emotion, influenced by William Wordsworth’s discussion of the practice, argues that “pathetic bestowal” is a neutral and therefore preferable label. However labeled, the practice occurs in any number of accomplished twentieth-century writers, including William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, Mary Oliver, Eavan Boland, and John Ashbery.

It is a rhetorical figure and a form of personification. In the strictest sense, delivering this fallacy should be done to render analogy.^{[citation needed]} Other reasons to deliver this fallacy are mnemonic.^{[citation needed]}

Examples

Ruskin quotes a stanza from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Maud as an "exquisite" example of pathetic fallacy:

Other examples are:

• "The stars will awaken / Though the moon sleep a full hour later"—Percy Bysshe Shelley
• "The fruitful field / Laughs with abundance"—William Cowper
• "Nature must be gladsome when I was so happy"—Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

In science

Historically, the properties and interactions of classical elements were described as if they were animate. For example, the fact that fire and smoke tend to rise was explained so that because fire belongs to the sphere of fire, located above the sphere of air, fire wants to go there. Another famous example is the phrase "Nature abhors a vacuum" (John Ruskin's translation of the well-known Medieval saying natura abhorret a vacuo, in Modern Painters), where abhor is a word describing an emotion (pathos).

A typical example of assigning feelings and emotions to the inanimate is the use of the words "want" or "try".^[4] For example, "Air hates to be crowded, and when compressed it will try to escape to an area of lower pressure." However, the processes are inanimate. The pressure exerted by gases is a consequence of the kinetic energy of the gas molecules, not because the air would "hate" being compressed or "want to" expand. Its movement towards lower pressure is because of the pure probability of the gas molecules to be distributed evenly, such that a lower-pressure zone receives a net flow of molecules, not because air "tries to" move as a feeling, thinking unit. However, use of the pathetic fallacy can be a good way to quickly explain complex scientific concepts in an easily understood form. For example, the examples above can often be found in elementary or middle school science classes.

See also

• Anthropopathy
• Animistic fallacy
• Figure of speech
• Pathos

References

• Robert A. Harris, A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices: 31. Personification, Version Date: April 6, 2005.

Further reading

• Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th edition. Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999. ISBN 015505452X.
• Crist, Eileen. Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. ISBN 1566396565.
• Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth (eds.). The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. ISBN 0801845602.