Pathetic fallacy

Weather or landscape that mirrors the mood of a scene or a character.

What it is

Pathetic fallacy is when the natural world reflects human emotion: storms during conflict, fog around confusion, sunshine as something resolves.

"Pathetic" here means "relating to feeling", not "feeble". It is a specific kind of personification.

Where it applies

English Literature above all — it is heavily used in nineteenth-century novels and in Shakespeare — and English Language descriptive writing.

How it works

The reader is primed for what is coming. A storm before a murder does not describe the weather; it tells you the world is disordered, and in a Jacobean play a disordered natural world signals a disordered moral one.

That is why it is so useful in Macbeth: the night Duncan is killed, horses eat each other and an owl kills a falcon. Nature is reporting the crime.

How to use it in your work

Do not just spot it. Say what state the weather is describing, and whose. Then, if you can, say what a contemporary audience would have read into it — Jacobean audiences took disorder in nature as evidence that the natural order had been broken, which turns a rainy night into a political statement.

Watch for its absence too. A violent scene in bright sunshine is a deliberate refusal of pathetic fallacy and is worth noticing.

Where to get help

Your teacher and your set-text notes. The Macbeth song covers where it appears in that play.