Recommended Reading
Pathetic Fallacy
You may not know it, but you have probably been deceived into thinking that pathetic fallacy, as a literary technique, simply means using the weather to represent the mood of the character in the text, the typical examples being cloudy and stormy weather representing depressed or anxious states, or a beautiful and sunny day representing a hopeful start. Many of the Romantic texts you will be reading will use pathetic fallacy, a characteristic of that genre being the use of nature to channel high emotion.
However, pathetic fallacy is more than that, as you can see in its definition:
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noun
(Literary & Literary Critical Terms) (in literature) the presentation of inanimate objects in nature as possessing human feelings.
Collins English Dictionary
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Let's look at the etymology:
Pathetic: Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle French or Late Latin; Middle French pathetique, from Late Latin patheticus, from Greek pathētikos capable of feeling, pathetic, from paschein (aor. pathein) to experience, suffer — from ‘pathos’
Fallacy: Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural fal·la·cies
Etymology: Latin fallacia, from fallac-, fallax deceitful, from fallere to deceive
(Marriam-Webster dictionary)
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So, it is a 'deception of suffering', actually more a personification of the inanimate objects themselves to show emotion - something we know they cannot do, but which we allow the writer to 'deceive' us into believing (suspension of disbelief, just as when you're watching a film: you know it's not real, but that's not going to stop you enjoying it!)
The original coining is from Ruskin in his 'Of The Pathetic Fallacy’, (from 'Modern Painters', volume iii, pt. 4, 1856), where he regards it as a simple technique, an 'error of poetry' “to signify any description of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions": the
difference between the ordinary, proper, and true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy ; false appearances, I say, as being entirely unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only imputed to it by us.
For instance —
The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould
Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold.
This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads that it is anything else than a plain crocus?
He thinks the feature is overused, and is different from mere personification. He goes on to explain using two versions of the same poem: The Odyssey:
…take an instance in Homer and Pope. Without the knowledge of Ulysses, Elpenor, his youngest follower, has fallen from an upper chamber in the Circean palace, and has been left dead, unmissed by his leader, or companions, in the haste of their departure. They cross the sea to the Cimmerian land; and Ulysses summons the shades from Tartarus. The first which appears is that of the lost Elpenor. Ulysses, amazed, and in exactly the spirit of bitter and terrified lightness which is seen in Hamlet, addresses the spirit with the simple, startled words:—
Elpenor ! How camest thou under the shadowy darkness? Hast thou come faster on foot than I in my black ship?
Which Pope renders thus:—
0, say, what angry power Elpenor led
To glide in shades, and wander with the dead?
How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined,
Outfly the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind?
I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here, either in the nimbleness of the sail, or the laziness of the wind! And yet how is it that these conceits are so painful now, when they have been pleasant to us in the other instances?
§ 7. For a very simple reason. They are not a pathetic fallacy at all, for they are put into the mouth of the wrong passion — a passion which never could possibly have spoken them — agonized curiosity. Ulysses wants to know the facts of the matter; and the very last thing his mind could do at the moment would be to pause, or suggest in anywise what was not a fact. The delay in the first three lines, and conceit in the last, jar upon us instantly, like the most frightful discord in music. No poet of true imaginative power could possibly have written the passage.
Thus the sail and the wind have only been personified, not been made a pathetic fallacy due to the incorrect ascribing of the human feeling to the inanimate object; this can create an effect of beauty, but is not realistic: it does not reveal the poet, writer, or, here, the protagonist’s, feeling.
He continues by explaining that there are four ‘types’ of person who attempt to use pathetic fallacy:
So, then, we have the three ranks: the man who perceives rightly, because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose, because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, or a fairy's shield, or a forsaken maiden. And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than itself—a little flower, apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the associations and passions may be, that crowd around it. And, in general, these three classes may be rated in comparative order, as the men who are not poets at all, and the poets of the second order, and the poets of the first; only however great a man may be, there are always some subjects which ought to throw him off his balance; some, by which his poor human capacity of thought should be conquered, and brought into the inaccurate and vague state of perception, so that the language of the highest inspiration becomes broken, obscure, and wild in metaphor, resembling that of the weaker man, overborne by weaker things.
§ 9. And thus, in full, there are four classes: the men who feel nothing, and therefore see truly; the men who feel strongly, think weakly, and see untruly (second order of poets); the men who feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly (first order of poets); and the men who, strong as human creatures can be, are yet submitted to influences stronger than they, and see in a sort untruly, because what they see is inconceivably above them. This last is the usual condition of prophetic inspiration.
Ruskin seems to be suggesting that to use pathetic fallacy at all (or at least to try to) is not to give a true perception of the world, and rather to be affected by sentimentality. However, this can also be seen as a useful way of viewing the world – a type of metaphor if you will, transporting our understanding, expressing the inexpressible. In a section of Frankenstein, Chapter 2 of Volume 2, pathetic fallacy is present in opening paragraphs; the description of the mountains where Frankenstein is attaining sublimity, and thus ascribing personifying adjectives of greatness to the landscape around him:
I spent the following day roaming through the valley. I stood beside the sources of the Arveiron, which take their rise in a glacier, that with slow pace is advancing down from the summit of the hills, to barricade the valley. The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy wall of the glacier overhung me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial Nature was broken only by the brawling waves, or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the avalanche, or the cracking reverberated along the mountains of the accumulated ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands. These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling; and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillised it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded for the last month. I retired to rest at night; my slumbers, as it were, waited on and ministered to by the assemblance of grand shapes which I had contemplated during the day. They congregated round me; the unstained snowy mountain-top, the glittering pinnacle, the pine woods, and ragged bare ravine; the eagle, soaring amidst the clouds--they all gathered round me, and bade me be at peace.
Where had they fled when the next morning I awoke? All of soul-inspiriting fled with sleep, and dark melancholy clouded every thought. The rain was pouring in torrents, and thick mists hid the summits of the mountains, so that I even saw not the faces of those mighty friends.
In this extract, Frankenstein is attributing human characteristics to his surroundings to suggest how he is (sentimentally) affected by them, and thus attributes their loss (in the second paragraph) to him in the next morning to the torrential “rain” that has begun, thereby linking the weather to his mood; our more basic understanding of pathetic fallacy. Note that he is still personifying the landscape as his “friends”, and is lifted by them, stating next “Still I would penetrate their misty veil, and seek them in their cloudy retreats. What were rain and storm to me?”
This argument is also explained and well summarised in an article on The Victorian Web; The Use of the Pathetic Fallacy in Pickwick and Jane Eyre:
In the passage from Jane Eyre in which Jane describes the scene around her and contrasting that view with her previous surroundings, she comments that "The chamber looked such a bright little place to me... that my spirits rose at the view. Externals have a great effect on the young: I thought a fairer era of life was beginning for me" (Brontë, 105). Thus Jane indicates that her outside surroundings create a sense of hope, they cause her interior to mirror her exterior. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, characters increasingly focused on emotions, imagination, and direct, personal experience of the world. Readers increasingly valued characters who expressed how they saw the external world from their own personal perspectives. This new approach stemmed from the sentimentalist school of ethics. The idea that sympathy, "the imaginative understanding of the natures of others, and the power of putting ourselves in their place, is the faculty on which virtue depends." is at the heart of a technique that John Ruskin called the pathetic fallacy. Ruskin, a nineteenth-century essayist and critic, proposed that the role of art, or writing, is to present things "'as they appear to mankind'...The truth conveyed by the pathetic fallacy is phenomenological truth, the truth of experience, the truth as it appears to the experiencing subject" (Landow, "Ruskin's Pathetic Fallacy"). More specifically, Ruskin presented the idea that "considered in relation to the interior state of the speaker the pathetic (or emotional) fallacy tells the truth, for by presenting the world as experienced by a man under the influence of powerful emotion, this device can tell us much about the inner life of another" (Landow). Thus when Jane observes of her room
" The chamber looked such a bright little place to me as the sun shone in between the gay blue chintz window curtains, showing papered walls and a carpeted floor, so unlike the bare planks and stained plaster of Lowood, that my spirits rose at the view," (Brontë, 105-06)
she is presenting her exterior world as an expression of the "powerful emotion," hope, that has been cultivated within.
Thus the pathetic fallacy, although the very name means to deceive us into thinking something else shares our emotions and responses, is somewhat a reflection of them in the inanimate, using traits of personification. It's still reflecting the mood of the characters within the text, but not as simply as you might have thought: the inanimate objects and weather formations used are sharing that mood.
References:
- ‘The Use of the Pathetic Fallacy in Pickwick and Jane Eyre’, Cortney Lollar '97, The Victorian Web
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pickwick/pathetic.html
- 'Of The Pathetic Fallacy’, John Ruskin (from 'Modern Painters', volume iii, pt. 4, 1856),
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/ruskinj/
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (revised 3rd edition, Penguin 2003)
