pathetic fallacy

American  

noun

1. the endowment of nature, inanimate objects, etc., with human traits and feelings, as in the smiling skies; the angry sea.

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pathetic fallacy British  

noun

1. (in literature) the presentation of inanimate objects in nature as possessing human feelings

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Etymology

Origin of pathetic fallacy

Coined by John Ruskin in Modern Painters Vol. III, Part IV (1856)

Example Sentences

With pathetic fallacy worthy of Shakespeare, rain and wind lashed the island of Manhattan as I clutched my voice recorder from the back seat of my taxi heading uptown.

From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 25, 2019

In 1856, in the third volume of “Modern Painters,” Ruskin criticized writers for attributing human emotions to the natural world, a tendency that he famously termed the pathetic fallacy.

From The New Yorker • Nov. 23, 2015

In literature there’s a thing called the pathetic fallacy, a conceit whereby characters take on the traits of their surrounding environment.

From The Guardian • Jul. 9, 2015

A classic drear of English rain would seem to have a nice pathetic fallacy to it, but a small meteorological catastrophe could also be thematically appropriate.

From Slate • Nov. 28, 2011

My fingers tightened on Susan's, while the much-interrogated stars hung above us in their mysterious orbits and—— But no, that is the pathetic fallacy.

From The Book of Susan A Novel by Dodd, Lee Wilson