Pathetic fallacy

John Ruskin at Glenfinlas, Scotland (1853–54), by John Everett Millais.^[1]

The phrase pathetic fallacy is a literary term for the attribution of human emotion and conduct to things found in nature that are not human. It is a kind of personification that occurs in poetic descriptions, when, for example, clouds seem sullen, when leaves dance, or when rocks seem indifferent. The English cultural critic John Ruskin coined the term in the third volume of his work Modern Painters (1856).^[2][3][4]

History of the phrase

The meanings of the component terms have changed significantly since Ruskin's coinage.^[5] Ruskin's original definition is "emotional falseness", or the falseness that occurs to one's perceptions when influenced by violent or heightened emotion. For example, when a person is unhinged by grief, the clouds might seem darker than they are, or perhaps mournful or uncaring.^[6][7] The word "fallacy" in modern usage refers primarily to an example of flawed reasoning, but for Ruskin and writers of the 19th century and earlier, fallacy could be used to mean simply a "falseness".^[8] Similarly, the word "pathetic" simply meant for Ruskin "emotional" or "pertaining to emotion."^[9]

Ruskin coined the term pathetic fallacy to help explain his theory of the role of truth in art. For him, "nothing [can] be good or useful, ... which [is] untrue."^[6] And yet, he notes, good poetry often includes "falsehoods" such as the ascription of emotion to inanimate objects. To resolve this apparent paradox, he posits that usages of pathetic fallacy succeed when the perceptual error in question is due to a heightened emotional state: "so long as we see that the feeling is true, we pardon, or are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy."^[6] However, in his view, the greatest poets exercise extreme restraint in this regard. He praises the author of a French ballad: "there is not, from beginning to end of it, a single poetical expression, except in one stanza. ... [I]n the very presence of death, for an instant, his own emotions conquer him. He records no longer the facts only, but the facts as they seem to him."^[6]

While Ruskin's essay plainly praises and disparages use of the pathetic fallacy in various contexts, his phrase has been remembered as a "pejorative",^[10] used to criticize the sentimentality that was common to the poetry of the late 18th century, especially among poets like Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. Wordsworth supported this use of personification based on emotion by claiming that "objects ... derive their influence not from properties inherent in them . . . but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by these objects."^[11] However Tennyson, in his own poetry, began to refine and diminish such expressions, and introduced an emphasis on what might be called a more scientific comparison of objects in terms of sense perception. The old order was beginning to be replaced by the new just as Ruskin addressed the matter, and the use of the pathetic fallacy markedly began to disappear^{[citation needed]}. As a critic, Ruskin proved influential and is credited with having helped to refine poetic expression.^[10]

Examples

Ruskin's first example is these lines of a poem:

They rowed her in across the rolling foam—
The cruel, crawling foam . . .

Ruskin then points out that "the foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief"—these lines work for Ruskin "not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they faithfully describe sorrow."^[12]

The following, a stanza from the poem "Maud" (1855) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, demonstrates what John Ruskin, in Modern Painters, said was an "exquisite" instance of the use of the pathetic fallacy:^[12]

There has fallen a splendid tear
  From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
  She is coming, my life, my fate.
The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near;"
  And the white rose weeps, "She is late;"
The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear;"
  And the lily whispers, "I wait." (Part 1, XXII, 10)

Science

A pathetic fallacy such as "Nature abhors a vacuum" may help explain a scientific concept, though some caution against using pathetic fallacies in science writing for not being strictly accurate.^[13][14]

See also

• Animism
• Anthropocentrism
• Anthropomorphism
• Figure of speech
• Hypallage
• List of narrative techniques
• Morgan's Canon
• Personification

References

1. Grieve, Alastair. "Ruskin and Millais at Glenfinlas", The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 138, No. 1117, pp. 228–234, April 1996. JSTOR 886970
2. The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy 2nd ed., (2005). Thomas Mautner, Editor. p. 455.
3. Abrams, M.H.; Harpham, G.G. (2011) [1971]. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. p. 269. ISBN 9780495898023. LCCN 2010941195.
4. The New Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed., (1988), vol. 9, p. 197.
5. Fowler, H.W. (1994) [1926]. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Wordsworth Collection. Wordsworth Editions. p. 425. ISBN 9781853263187.
6. Ruskin, John (1856). "XII: Of the Pathetic Fallacy". Modern Painters. Vol. iii, pt. 4.
7. Hurwit, Jeffrey M. (1982). "Palm Trees and the Pathetic Fallacy in Archaic Greek Poetry and Art". The Classical Journal. 77 (3). The Classical Association of the Middle West and South: 193–199. JSTOR 3296969.
8. "Fallacy". The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. 1st ed. 1909.
9. "Pathetic". The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. 1st ed. 1909.
10. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Alex Preminger, Ed., Princeton University Press, 1974 ISBN 0-691-01317-9
11. Wordsworth, William. Knight, William Angus, editor. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. 4. W Paterson (1883) pp. 199
12. Ruskin, J., "Of the Pathetic Fallacy", Modern Painters vol. III part 4. (1856) [1]
13. Pager-McClymont, K. (2022). Linking Emotions to Surroundings: A Stylistic Model of Pathetic Fallacy. Language and Literature, 31(3), 428-454. doi:10.1177/09639470221106021
14.  Hansen, Wallace R. Suggestions to Authors of the Reports of the United States Geological Survey. U.S. Government Printing Office. University of Minnesota. (1991). p. 154. ISBN 9780160285660.

Further reading

• Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed., Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999. ISBN 0-15-505452-X.
• Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth (eds.). The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-8018-4560-2.
• Ruskin, J., "Of the Pathetic Fallacy", Modern Painters Vol. III (1856).