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Dr. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks.
Updated on July 25, 2018Personification is a figure of speech in which an inanimate object or abstraction is given human qualities or abilities. At times, as with this personification of the social-networking service Twitter, a writer may call attention to her use of the figurative device:
Look, some of my best friends are tweeting. . . .
But at the risk of unilaterally offending 14 million people, I need to say this: If Twitter were a person, it would be an emotionally unstable person. It would be that person we avoid at parties and whose calls we don't pick up. It would be the person whose willingness to confide in us at first seems intriguing and flattering but eventually makes us feel kind of gross because the friendship is unearned and the confidence is unjustified. The human incarnation of Twitter, in other words, is the person we all feel sorry for, the person we suspect might be a bit mentally ill, the tragic oversharer.
(Meghan Daum, "Tweeting: Inane or Insane?" Times Union of Albany, New York, April 23, 2009)
Often, however, personification is used less directly--in essays and advertisements, poems and stories--to convey an attitude, promote a product, or illustrate an idea.
Because personification involves making a comparison, it can be viewed as a special kind of simile (a direct or explicit comparison) or metaphor (an implicit comparison). In Robert Frost's poem "Birches," for example, the personification of the trees as girls (introduced by the word "like") is a type of simile:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
In the next two lines of the poem, Frost again uses personification, but this time in a metaphor comparing "Truth" to a plain-speaking woman:
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
Because people have a tendency to look at the world in human terms, it's not surprising that we often rely on personification (also known as prosopopoeia) to bring inanimate things to life.
Have any of these "people" ever appeared in your kitchen: Mr. Clean (a household cleaner), Chore Boy (a scouring pad), or Mr. Muscle (an oven cleaner)? How about Aunt Jemima (pancakes), Cap'n Crunch (cereal), Little Debbie (snack cakes), the Jolly Green Giant (vegetables), Poppin' Fresh (also known as the Pillsbury Doughboy), or Uncle Ben (rice)?
For over a century, companies have relied heavily on personification to create memorable images of their products--images that often appear in print advertisements and TV commercials for those "brands." Iain MacRury, a professor of consumer and advertising studies at the University of East London, has discussed the role played by one of the world's oldest trademarks, Bibendum, the Michelin Man:
The familiar Michelin logo is a celebrated instance of the art of "advertising personification." A person or cartoon character becomes the embodiment of a product or brand--here Michelin, manufacturers of rubber products and, notably, tires. The figure is familiar in itself and audiences routinely read this logo--depicting a cartoon "man" made of tires--as a friendly character; he personifies the product range (in particular Michelin tires) and animates both product and brand, representing a culturally recognized, practical and commercial presence--reliably there, friendly and trusted. The movement of personification is close to the heart of what all good advertising tends to try to achieve."
(Iain MacRury, Advertising. Routledge, 2009)
In fact, it's hard to imagine what advertising would be like without the figure of personification. Here's just a small sample of the countless popular slogans (or "taglines") that rely on personification to market products ranging from toilet paper to life insurance.
Like other types of metaphors, personification is much more than an ornamental device added to a text to keep readers amused. Used effectively, personification encourages us to view our surroundings from a fresh perspective. As Zoltan Kovecses notes in Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (2002), "Personification permits us to use knowledge about ourselves to comprehend other aspects of the world, such as time, death, natural forces, inanimate objects, etc."
Consider how John Steinbeck uses personification in his short story "Flight" (1938) to describe "the wild coast" south of Monterey, California:
The farm buildings huddled like the clinging aphids on the mountain skirts, crouched low to the ground as though the wind might blow them into the sea. . . .
Five-fingered ferns hung over the water and dropped spray from their fingertips. . . .
The high mountain wind coasted sighing through the pass and whistled on the edges of the big blocks of broken granite. . . .
A scar of green grass cut across the flat. And behind the flat another mountain rose, desolate with dead rocks and starving little black bushes. . . .
Gradually the sharp snaggled edge of the ridge stood out above them, rotten granite tortured and eaten by the winds of time. Pepe had dropped his reins on the horn, leaving direction to the horse. The brush grabbed at his legs in the dark until one knee of his jeans was ripped.
As Steinbeck demonstrates, an important function of personification in literature is to bring the inanimate world to life--and in this story, in particular, to show how characters may be in conflict with a hostile environment.
Now let's look at some other ways in which personification has been used to dramatize ideas and communicate experiences in prose and poetry.
It's your turn now. Without feeling that you're in competition with Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson, try your hand at creating a fresh example of personification. Simply take any inanimate object or abstraction and help us see or understand it in a new way by giving it human qualities or abilities.
