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What Is Pathetic Fallacy

Pathetic fallacy is a literary technique where human emotions are attributed to nature, objects, or weather. It reflects the mood of characters or the overall tone of the work. For example, stormy weather could represent stormy emotions. This technique is commonly used by Victorian and Gothic writers to set the scene and create atmosphere through descriptive language.

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541 views3 pages

What Is Pathetic Fallacy

Pathetic fallacy is a literary technique where human emotions are attributed to nature, objects, or weather. It reflects the mood of characters or the overall tone of the work. For example, stormy weather could represent stormy emotions. This technique is commonly used by Victorian and Gothic writers to set the scene and create atmosphere through descriptive language.

Uploaded by

Jo Patrick
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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WHAT IS PATHETIC FALLACY?

Pathetic Fallacy is a technique for creating atmosphere in a story.


Emotions are given to setting, objects and / or weather. This often reflects the main
character(s)' mood, or the mood of the book e.g. stormy emotions are externalised in
a physical storm.

Pathetic Fallacy means literally 'fake emotions'. It is similar to personification. This


technique is used a lot by Victorian and Gothic writers.

Here are some examples to help you use it in your own writing. It's especially
useful in writing description, setting the scene and creating a mood or
atmosphere.

I've highlighted most of the mood words in purple. These are the ones you'd quote to
help you explain what mood the pathetic fallacy creates. There are also examples of
similes, semantic fields, sensory language and personification.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1861


It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of
my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the
window for a pocket-handkerchief. Now, I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges
and spare grass, like a coarser sort of spiders' webs; hanging itself from twig to twig
and blade to blade. On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House, 1853
Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes
of sootin it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might
imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely
better; splashed to their very blinkers... Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it
flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it
rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and
dirty) city ... people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog,
with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty
clouds.
The Gothic
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818
the clouds swept across [the moon] swifter than the flight of
the vulture and dimmed her rays, while the lake reflected the scene of the busy
heavens, rendered still busier by therestless waves...

The storm appeared to approach rapidly... the heavens were clouded, and I soon felt
the rain coming slowly in large drops, but its violence quickly
increased...the darkness and storm increased every minute, and the thunder burst
with a terrific crash over my head. ...vivid flashes of lightning dazzled my eyes,
illuminating the lake, making it appear like a vast sheet of fire; then for an instant
everything seemed of a pitchy darkness...

This noble war in the sky elevated my spirits...[then] I perceived in the gloom a
figure... A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to
me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs
to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon...
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1886
The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered
likecarbuncles [jewels]; and through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds,
the procession of the town's life was still rolling in through the great arteries with a
sound as of a mighty wind. But the room was gay with firelight.

It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the first fog of the season. A great
chocolate-coloured pall [funeral cloth] lowered over heaven, but the wind was
continually charging and routing [beating back] these embattled vapours; so that as
the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld a marvelous number of
degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be dark like the back-end of evening;
and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange
conflagration; and here, for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and
a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths... like a
district of some city in a nightmare. The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the
gloomiest dye
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, 1847
There was no sound through the house but the moaning wind, which shook the
windows every now and then
On the morrow one could hardly imagine that there had been three weeks of
summer: the primroses and crocuses were hidden under wintry drifts; the larks were
silent, the young leaves of the early trees smitten [struck down] and blackened.
About midnight, while we still sat up, the storm came rattling over the Heights in full
fury. There was a violent wind, as well as thunder, and either one or the other split a
tree off at the corner of the building: a huge bough fell across the roof, and knocked
down a portion of the east chimney-stack, sending a clatter of stones and soot into
the kitchen-fire. We thought a bolt had fallen in the middle of us.

This is a picture of Whitby Abbey in its dramatic setting on the edge of a cliff -
overlooking the bay where Bram Stoker first lands Dracula in England. Use the
picture to think about how weather affects landscape and write a paragraph to
describe the setting by using pathetic fallacy.

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