Pathetic Fallacy - is this a "thing"

[marmia1234]

My sons English report came home ( disclaimers: not in UK and I have a degree in English Literature)
In one section of the test they had to match a quote to its corresponding technique. For example - simile, imagery, metaphor, personification etc. One of those techniques was "pathetic fallacy" . I am flummoxed. Is this a normal thing I just missed somehow? Once he had a stab at which one was the "pathetic fallacy he was stuffed and only got 4 right out of 7 as was a bit discombobulated. Is this a common term in the UK or US
I have googled and it appears to be a version of personification.
Why is it pathetic?
Trying to add poll but seem to be unable.
YABU - everybody knows the term "Pathetic fallacy"
YANBU - WTF nobody has heard of that

That's good to know. I'm taking my experience of the people in their thirties that I work with, which is obviously a limited number of people. I just think my children (17,20,23) seem to be better educated.

It's pathetic because pathetic means (before it became derogatory) connected with or in this case attributing feeling — pathos.

It was a big part of English at my school, I remember it coming up reading Shakespeare and Hardy in particular. It's probably a big thing in English because we have such changeable weather and our lives were deeply connected to it until modern times when we're mostly indoors more.

To be personification, the waves would have to be “crashing onto the shore” for example.
Pathetic fallacy is a form of personification, but it’s specifically about emotion. Anger is an emotion, and I have used no action in the description. Whereas above, the word “crashing”, is not emotive so it becomes personification

It implies it insofar as the verb used is generally one of emotion: wept, raged etc.

The usage is figurative: it isn’t intended to lead the reader to believe the emotion is actually being experienced by the inanimate subject.

On my degree course the 'introduction' was more about the main critical perspectives we'd be focussing our studies on and literary critics such as Barthes and Derrida. Literary terms were used in context in terms of how, for example, the Red Room in Jane Eyre was a metaphor for the womb, but there was, by this stage, an expectation that you would already have enough knowledge to understand what a metaphor was.

I don't recall the term 'pathetic fallacy' at all and in all likelihood it would be because that particular aspect of the novels studied did not contribute quite so much as other aspects to understanding Jane Eyre from a feminist perspective, or Hangover Square from a political one. I do recall in discussing 'Hangover Square' (my favourite novel from my degree course) the literal foggy weather and the fog in the character's mind, but not 'this is how the author used pathetic fallacy to communicate this idea'. Had Patrick Hamilton used fog to convey a deeper meaning in a political sense, it might have come up, but more likely in terms of metaphor. But there were other, better indicators of deeper meaning within the novel.

I have slept a lot since then, it was over 25 years ago, so it may be a term that simply slipped my mind.

I agree. I use pathetic fallacy at work, as it's relevant to my field, but before I did this job I frequently noticed and thought about weather and metaphor, emotions, and remembered passages from Shakespeare or Hardy. It's a natural part of life and enriches experience.

I agree. In the examples being given it would not be wrong to call pathetic fallacy personification, it’s just less specific. Like calling something fruit rather than watermelon. If it doesn’t have pink flesh and a green outer, it might still be fruit; it just isn’t watermelon. 🍉 But if you know it’s watermelon, it’s probably better to use that term.

How odd! I've skimmed Ruskin's essay (https://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/ruskinj/) and the pathos is that of the poet distorting his (for R) perception of reality.

In Eng Lit this has come to mean "reflecting characters' emotions by weather etc."
In (Philosophy of) Science this has come to mean "attributing emotion to inanimate objects."

What a sorry mess!

I'm nearly 50 and it was taught a lot at my school for GCSE and A level in the 80s and 90s. It might just depend on whether it was prevalent in the texts studied. Some will have contained a lot of examples of pathetic fallacy, many none at all.

There are definitely some differences in how people are defining terms on this thread.

BBC Bitesize* - not a definitive source on advanced literary criticism, obviously, but probably a good guide to how exam boards expect the terms to be used in secondary schools - says this:

Be careful: don't mix up pathetic fallacy with personification.

• Pathetic fallacy is always about giving emotions to something something non-human.
• Personification is giving any human attribute to an object. For example, 'The wind whispered through the trees.' or 'The flowers danced in the breeze.'

Of your two examples, I'd say "the storm raged" meets these definitions of both pathetic fallacy and personification: it's ascribing the human emotion of anger to something non-human.

In some instances of pathetic fallacy, the weather is definitively ascribed emotions: "clouds wept fat tears over the grey town" or, more mundanely, "it was a miserable day". Here the pathetic fallacy is inherent. Your second example of "the grey clouds filled the sky" seems a bit more nuanced. The words in themselves seem to be neither personification nor pathetic fallacy. They're just a factual statement about the weather.

I suppose the key thing in your example is that the grey clouds occur when the character is unhappy. When the writer and/or reader notice this correspondence between the "miserable" weather and the emotional tone in the story, this is the pathetic fallacy. But you can't always definitively identify pathetic fallacy from the words alone: maybe the weather is a necessary part of the plot, because rainy conditions will lead to a character being washed away in a flood. Or maybe it's just how it is: the weather is a bit dreich because the story's set in the west of Scotland.

Presumably this sort of pathetic fallacy, like symbolism identified in literature more generally, is often not put there intentionally by the writer but arises in the mind of readers. It isn't a writing technique as such, but something that may arise naturally and resonate with readers. In a survey circulated to 150 writers in 1963 asking about the use of symbolism in literature.** I've enjoyed reading the example responses I've come across:

• Norman Mailer: "the best symbols in a novel are those you become aware of only after you finish the work".
• Saul Bellow: "Symbol-hunting is absurd, but it is encouraged by teachers of lit."
• Ray Bradbury: "Each story is a Rorschach Test ... and if people find beasties and bed-bugs in my ink-splotches, I cannot prevent it ... Still, I wish people, quasi-intellectuals, did not try so hard to find the man under the old maid's bed. More often than not, as we know, he simply isn't there."*

• From https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zhtjqp3 ** See, e.g., https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-symbolism-survey/ * Not sure why he went for this symbol of a "man under the old maid's bed". Psychoanalysts would probably speculate, if they could tear themselves away from their ink blots!

There is the hope that you will have acquired basic close reading skills and a familiarity with literary terms from A-Level, absolutely, but those introductory courses which, yes, often include literary theory too, are designed to make sure incoming first years all have a similar base level of skills and knowledge before Christmas. (I was the classic first year who’d never heard any literary terms said out loud, and said ‘eppytome’ for ‘epitome’ in my first tutorial and blushed for weeks…)

Can't recall where I heard this first, but "a mispronounced word is wonderful, as it's a sign that your reading has outpaced your teaching."

I remember jokes about Ruskin's pathetic phallus (since he coined the term). Just me? (English Higher class, early 80s)

Many a true word... have a read of this!
https://artuk.org/discover/stories/millais-ruskin-and-effie-the-secret-lives-of-two-scandalous-victorian-marriages

What kind of teacher/lecturer would teach Wuthering Heights without referencing pathetic fallacy?!

Yeah we learnt this in GCSE English Lit. In A Level even more so as we studied the Gothic genre...so it's a wisely used well known term.

It's taught in primary school these days.

Yes, this. The ‘fallacy’ is linking the feelings with the weather or landscape etc, eg glowering clouds, hostile rocks. I remember as a gloomy teenager, revelling (gloomily) in a poem that included “It’s raining in Paris, just as it’s raining in my heart”.

I'm not saying that the student should name the technique for marks.
But I am saying that students are made way more aware of the mark scheme and how to apply it in the exam . So its possible to go into the exam without any genuine appreciation of the book or play that has been studied and get a good grade.

It is not necessary to use the term “pathetic fallacy” when discussing Emily Brontë’s use of the weather to reflect her characters’ emotional state.

It's not that I was not taught this technique, but it was referred to as symbolism, imagery, metaphor etc. Of course it was studied. We did the Victorians, Shakespeare ( King Lear is a perfect example), 20th century, Austen, Restoration drama, Hardy and many others. This was Exeter University in 1988. I just don't recall that term being used. I'm not saying anyone is wrong, but I am pretty sure my honours degree is still valid without having used those two exact words.

You can't study King Lear without writing about the symbolism of the storm scene.

Is this an AI post? You have just explained what I already said, in much greater depth (unnecessarily?)

Exactly.

I'm 46 now. Somewhat distressingly many of the students I've taught are in their 30s. Including some born in 1988! They were all taught pathetic fallacy.
It didn't suddenly disappear/reappear, it's just some people either weren't taught it or haven't remembered it.
There's lots that I was taught that I can't remember.

Not AI, honestly. I set out to disagree with you as I thought pathetic fallacy had to be a device intentionally used by an author and inherent in the words they used ascribing emotions to the weather. But as I wrote I realised you were right and I was wrong, as the fallacy could be in the mind of the reader whether the writer meant it to be there or not, hence the digression into symbolism more generally and whether it comes from writers or from readers.

I don't think further discussion was entirely unwarranted. There seem to be lots of people on here who think pathetic fallacy is always related to weather. Your post seemed in danger of giving the opposite idea, that any discussion of weather is pathetic fallacy. Neither of these is true.

TL;DR: basically I just got a bit carried away!