Pathetic fallacy is a literary technique, or language device, that uses the weather to create a specific mood or an emotional atmosphere in a text.
It’s a specific type of personification because human emotions are attributed to a non-human element of nature. Personification itself is a type of metaphor as it
If you are studying for your GCSEs in English Language and English Literature, it is worth developing a strong understanding of pathetic fallacy. You will be able to use it as a complex language technique in your own writing to develop a complex structure and you’ll be able to recognise it when it’s used by writers, helping you to understand and analyse writers' intentions.
It might sound like a complicated technique but it is something that we are all familiar with from films we’ve seen and books we’ve read. On its simplest level, sunshine is used to create happiness, rain to reflect sadness and thunder to reflect madness. But we don’t need to stop there.
There are echoes of pathetic fallacy in many well-used idioms, including those where the weather is used to talk about people’s feelings and reactions.
Pathetic fallacy is used by Shakespeare, the majority of poems in exam boards' anthologies and all of the novels on the GCSE English Literature syllabus. If you would like to work on understanding how pathetic fallacy is used in the specific texts you are studying, please use the contact form to get in touch and arrange a session with me.
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