Honors Program
Honors in English
Date of Award
5-2025
Thesis Professor(s)
Matthew Holtmeier, Shawna Lichtenwalner
Thesis Professor Department
Literature and Language
Thesis Reader(s)
Matthew Holtmeier, Shawna Lichtenwalner
Abstract
This project claims the weather and nature in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People” is weird fiction and displays an eerie subversion of John Ruskin’s literary philosophy, “The Pathetic Fallacy.” By analyzing these texts through the lens of the weird fiction genre, the signifiers of the genre make the weather in these stories extend past common literary tropes. Ruskin’s work calls attention to the literary trope of assigning weather in literature emotion, yet Algernon Blackwood and Shirley Jackson intentionally deviate from the pathetic fallacy and make the weather in their stories weird and eerie by both breaking its connection with humanity and intentionally removing human emotion from the weather and natural settings. Examining these two pieces of literature demonstrates the ability of an author to subvert the pathetic fallacy and challenge literary conventions to create their work. Blackwood diverts from the pathetic fallacy by portraying weather and nature in “The Willows” as an indecipherable and external weird entity to accentuate humankind’s hubris by challenging the misconceptions of the protagonists. Jackson presents a weird story by manipulating the pathetic fallacy, making characters who notice absence and seek its presence, and presenting no discernible enemy in her story. Both stories display a hubristic relationship between humankind and nature but subvert this connection by introducing weird writing techniques like cosmic horror which produces an eeriness that pervades throughout these stories. This research gives insight on how authors subvert the pathetic fallacy, employ weird fiction techniques to challenge literary conventions, and use their work to challenge readers’ perceptions about the roles of nature in fiction.
Publisher
East Tennessee State University
Document Type
Honors Thesis - Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Leonard, Avery L., "Weird Weather Against the Pathetic Fallacy" (2025). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 831. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/831
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.
