A personification can be a rhetorical figure or, on the other hand, the representation of something as if it were a person. In both meanings, the purpose is to communicate an idea based on the characteristics of the human being.
Personification as a literary device
Personification is one of the most used literary figures. She is considered a figure of thought (as the antithesis, the paradox or the oxymoron, among others). The mechanism that she presents is simple: attribute an attribute or human condition to something. In this way a comparison is produced that is of great literary expressiveness. For example, if I say that the city sleeps, I am giving the urban space a characteristic of humans. There are many examples that can illustrate the idea of a personification: a fountain of calm waters, the happy Sun in the morning, the mirror told the truth or the house had the ailments typical of age.
On the other hand, personification is used as a literary strategy intended to tell a story in which the characters are not human but are described as if they were. This is what happens with fables or with some novels (for example, in George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, the author reflects on power and the main characters are farm animals).
Personification as a symbolic element
Some abstract concepts are better understood if they are personified. Thus, the idea of death has been understood through some character (for example, the god Thanatos for the Greeks). Sometimes, when you want to describe a person, you say that they are the personification of something (for example, evil, goodness, or any virtue or defect).
In the field of marketing, the personification of a brand is used as an advertising strategy. In this sense, when a brand is described as fun, extroverted and dynamic, it is playing a “language game” with a clear symbolic sense of communication.
Mythology is a clear example of the mechanism of personification, since some forces of nature (rain, sunlight or earthquakes) are explained with a human dimension, in such a way that human passions are attributed to natural phenomena. . Something very similar is what has happened with the representation of the idea of God in some religions, in which the divinities present human features.
Photos: iStock – Anetlanda / Serafima
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