Pathetic Fallacy in Macbeth

"Pathetic fallacy" is a term which was coined by John Ruskin in 1856, in Modern Painters III. This term was originally used to describe paintings, as Ruskin was an art critic. Ruskin felt that the pathetic fallacy was that of having people so emotional that they assigned feelings and emotions to inanimate objects. This device can show many feelings of a person in the work of the author. Pathetic fallacy, rather than being a problem or an annoyance as it was thought of by Ruskin, shows the audience a glimmer of a character’s life.

This literary device allows the author to convey a character’s emotion much more effectively than simply stating how the character is feeling. It is comparable to how someone would use an inflection or a specific tone of voice to show their impression of the happenings around them, or anything else which the writer would want to convey to her/his audience.

In connection to Macbeth, pathetic fallacy is sometimes used in the form of metaphors, such as the idea of having a violent sea to represent a feeling of betrayal, of being tossed out into the water without a life-saving device. One such example in this play is when we meet the three witches (1.1). The atmosphere is dark and moody, and the world around the witches is dark and gloomy. This is a good example of pathetic fallacy in that the rain, dark and gloom all represent the feeling in the scene, and form a good setting for our feelings of disgust and queasiness when we read about the witches burying a human hand.